Why is everybody all the time in favour of AI on HN? This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term.

> Why is everybody all the time in favour of AI on HN?

Many reasons:

1. The people on HN tend to think they're very clever, but they're often not as clever as they think they are. That has a lot of wide-ranging implications, from classic "engineer's disease" thinking to stuff a lot dumber.

2. I wouldn't be surprised at some unexpectedly large amount of AstroTurfing, especially considering the sheer amount money is flowing into the AI space. My understanding is HN has some influential people reading it, and is influential on a certain fraction of the wider group of software developers.

3. I think there's a certain amount of defensiveness from AI enthusiasts. They've enthusiastically adopted AI to a certain degree, so critique/skepticism of their choice is felt as a personal criticism.

4. HN is a pedantic place (see 1), so "everybody all the time in favour of AI" will be interpreted literally as false, when it really should be interpreted as "why is there so much pro-AI activity."

There's a few major flaws or logical fallacies or whatnot in your comment:

1. "everybody all the time in favor of AI" - this is not true (objectively)

2. "This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term." - this cannot be considered "objectively" a good change because quality is subjective. Second, it makes the assumption that human written code is always (objectively) better than LLM generated, which is also not true.

But this is a software engineering project - the code is only part of the whole project / product, and the (subjective) quality of the code is only part of that. LLMs could write perfect code by whatever quality metrics they use, but if a reviewer is overwhelmed by a morbillion other perfect code contributions from LLMs it's moot.

> Why is everybody all the time in favour of AI on HN?

It is useful?, it works most of the time?

> This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term.

It depends?, sure, banning hit-and-run massive AI generated PRs will help.

These were problems before AI too, people just want to get their name on things without putting in effort.

This also bans possibly high quality PRs that fix things or add something new.

Either way, we'll see, anyone can still fork and if it's a better project then that will win over

AI assistance doesn't necessarily imply lower code quality. It can help with improving it in a lot of ways. Full vibe-coding without careful review is what results in low quality code. I think a lot of projects are having trouble getting to the sweet spot, though: if they allow LLM-assisted contributions then no matter how much they write to try make sure the result is high quality they're going to be inundated with far more low-quality contributions and have to work harder to filter through and reject them than if they just have a blanket ban which then makes it a lot easier to reject everything. The linked discussion is specifically with a view that not all LLM assisted contributions are bad but that they need to stem the flow for now and figure out how to open up afterwards.

Calling your own opinion objective is not a good practice. This is very much something you can have different opinions on.

Will it? Plenty of open source projects have bugs unfixed for decades because it's too tedious to fix by hand and would take five minutes with AI these days. I've also found that good LLMs can be more diligent in updating comments, tests, etc.

>it will improve the quality of the code

That does not mean the product becomes more useful. I could rewrite Windows 1-to-1 with better code quality and no one would care because it still provides the exact same features. Unless "better code" means "better features", better code is useless.

Are you asking why most people from Big Tech, very likely working on AI-adjacent products, have a very strong pro-AI bias?

I don't think this is necessarily true at all. Objectively is very long stretch before we observe whether this the right approach or not. AI can increase the code quality the issue as i see is not this and it's neither mentioned in what I read about their decision, it's mainly the issue of not being able to keep up when the bar for creating have decreased significantly and the capacity to curate and evaluate is still the same. This is case where the system is overwhelmed so you start controlling the input to keep the desired output the same.

Typically something is "objectively" the case if there is indisputable evidence for it (of which you provided none).

> This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term.

Can you explain why you think that?

QGIS is written in C++. Does that affect your answer to this question at all?

Because a crazy amount of money is at it, mixed with a good portion of genuine psychosis and a little bit of FOMO.

Will it? With proper guidance llms produce much better code and find more bugs than I ever could. For example I have never been bothered to fix python typing for my project and left it hanging for years. But with llms and one prompt later I fixed it all at once.

I am not, but I just lurk here - I think that so called 'AI' is at best some clever use of math, and data science. Some of the underlying techniques are well worth a persons time when used sparingly. Classify these under the term machine learning. Peoples simpering & enthusiastic dash to offload tasks to this trendy 'AI' craze is infuriating. Its support here is unsurprising given the sites demographics.

> This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term.

I think humans will be saying this long, long after it's not true anymore. I'm not sure it is right now, for 80+% of developers and projects.

But I love this muddying of the waters. The more uncertainty and misinformation it is, the easier it is for people to make mistakes, and for edges to be had.

It's like poker. Everyone thinks they're a good player. About 5% of players (my estimation) would admit they're not very good. The luck & complexity fools the rest of 'em. They have no idea you can be operating several levels deeper than they are, playing in a dimension they cannot yet see.

Anyway, not a perfect analogy. But I think your idea was true, isn't true now, and I hope people & projects keep banning AI contributions anyway.

I don't think that's accurate about the mood on HN, but a lot of us have been coding almost entirely with frontier models for a long time now.

I haven't written a line of code myself since March. I've shipped over 100,000 lines since then. And coding isn't even what I spend the majority of my effort on.

It really works. I just had Opus 5.5 write a distributed load testing service on Friday and it's been using what it wrote to iterate and diagnose problems over the weekend.

I'm in favor of AI, but if I was a maintainer for an open source repo, I would also favor banning AI contributions. At least for the wild, maybe people who have built a reputation in the community could stay. I think AI can write quality code. What I doubt is if the average contribution will involve quality code or even human input.

For me, it is the way AI has kept suggestions to either open issues with maintainers or make PRs to fix an "issue" it found. I know it hasn't researched the issue in depth enough to be talking with the confidence it has, and I know I am in no position to be bothering someone else unless I want to spend considerable time investing to make sure the issue is exactly what the AI is claiming, it isn't a known issue, and it is justified to bother the maintainer with it. But there are far too many who will see that option and just tell the AI to do it.

It isn't that I'm against AI. It is that opening a PR or filing an issue use to have significant enough gatekeeping that most low effort low quality work simply wouldn't pass it, but that has now changed. So a new gate is needed to ensure those who aren't willing to put their own time into the work before asking for the time of others, and banning AI is one of the better options I've seen.

This also doesn't even end AI interacting with the project, just changes it. If you have some unique use case that AI finds, you can download it locally, have the AI make the change just for you, and have AI keep updating when necessary. Each user gets the customization they want while maintainers are protected from low effort low quality spam.

I expected Venture Capital Reddit to be pro-AI, that's where the money is, after all. I don't know if it's all clout or if everyone just pretends to go with the flow not to risk like they're falling behind, but this isn't exactly a place for conservative software practices.

The utter disbelief people on HN show when they find out a lot of people hate or despise generative AI is much stranger.

> Why is everybody all the time in favour of AI on HN?

The opinions regarding AI are quite diverse here, most people are, I think moderately pro-AI, the top comment "A ban is a bit harsh but I understand the reasoning" summarizes it well, but many are in favor of banning AI contributions to open source projects too. The extreme slop cannons and Butlerian Jihadists are usually not well received.

Because this is a startup/tech community and people generally look forward to exploring new ideas and tech?

Why are all of these mathematicians in favor of graphing calculators?

> Why is everybody all the time in favour of AI on HN?

Funny to see this while in other threads someone else will ask why HN hates AI so much.

In favor? There's a whole spectrum between "complete ban" and "slop all the way", IMO.

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Dude maybe if it was ChatGPT 2.0.. AI has come a long way.

AI already writes better quality code than humans. And you disagree I doubt you will contest that long term it won't be true.

First, just check out the comments on any "I'm tired of reading slop" submission to refute your first point, the circle jerk is real.

Second, while I sympathize with not wanting to be inundated with low effort PRs, putting a ban on AI assisted contributions in response is myopic virtue signalling.