I guess I'll say it unhedged (since nobody else has yet): I agree with the author. I don't 100% align with his particular assignment of threats and externalities to AI, but I think overall it sucks and I don't want to use it. I think he's in a space that's getting overwhelmed by AI and AI output and I salute him putting his money where his mouth is. I wish him luck.
Yep. I think that AI tech has turned out to be pretty much the worst thing the tech industry has ever created. It is a huge net negative for the entire world, and even for the very profession which created it.
I feel like you could replace “AI” with “computers” across much of TFA and it would read like something from a few decades ago (ignoring the web development specifics…)
That lends some credence to the “AI is a tool” position I hear in some forums, though I do think there are real harms from the vast scale of AI deployment.
Yeah. I buy that there are some use cases where AI is a trap, or not as good as people.
I'm also chatting with my logs and triaging things like 10x faster in multiple open terminal sessions while I post on HN right now. So I'm also certain there are some use cases where not using AI will soon be professional negligence!
Not if he can also deliver equally good or better results, which I suspect he will. Not everyone needs it to do a good job, and for others, it could be a net negative.
Using computers created an unambiguous productivity boost. Same cannot be said for all types of software engineering with AI; that's why we keep having this debate. The results are mixed.
It's a coincidence that it occurred with the rise of the Internet (computers existed before) and AI. These coincidences happened in the past with other technologies.
So the OP has a valid position to boycott AI, just like in 1870s they should have boycotted trains or in 1910s the oil industry.
People think reducing some argument to “use tech” or “use computers” is a slam dunk nowadays. But see what a beautiful mess of adtech, antisocial and predatory social media, massive privacy breaches over trivialities (both in professional conduct and what the service was about) with no accountability, surveillance tech, revenge porn, scams, robber tech barons... and with that in mind do we really have anything to gloat to the naysayers from “a few decades ago”? ;)
> I do not currently use AI for professional work.
I came here to say "Yes, and my grandfather thinks the internet is the 'mark of the beast.'" I'm not really sure what makes this persons opinion more noteworthy (in the wikipedia sense) than my grandfathers.
I suppose it's popular here because a lot of people who will be forced to learn new skills if AI takes their job hang out here, but hearing that buggy-whip manufacturers hate those new-fangled automobiles isn't' really newsworthy.
> I feel like you could replace “AI” with “computers” across much of TFA and it would read like something from a few decades ago
No you can't. Here is a quick sample
Computer crawlers routinely scrape websites using underhanded tactics like residential proxies and falsified user agents. The damage to open source infrastructure is overwhelming both servers and maintainers alike. Denial of service (DDoS) has forced deployment of defensive software and intrusive CAPTCHAs. The number of known computer bots grows monthly. These bots blatantly ignore the long established robots.txt industry standard.
Computer slop is spammed on social networks resulting in a new threat of misinformation and scams. Computer search prioritises misinformed overviews over real sources.
Computers have produced untold exabytes of spam. Hit pieces, security vulnerabilities and data leaks, creation and distribution of CSAM… Copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale, massive increase in water and electricity consumption. etc.
> Computers have produced untold exabytes of spam. Hit pieces, security vulnerabilities and data leaks[...] massive increase in water and electricity consumption. etc.
Then you must blame cars and airplanes as mass murdering tools as well.
The workers who strike in a factory don't do that because they think the thing being produced is being socially useless. They do it because they demand social change.
We usually don’t. We look at the harm/benefits ratio and if way too big, we usually ban them. Guns, various chemicals, explosives,… is not allowed for any random cases. I’m not calling for regulation but you can understand why someone prefer not to associate themselves with it.
It's a tough predicament when the industry you're in is moving towards violating your personal preferences and ethics.
I'm neither agreeing with or disagreeing with the author's stance. But this tension crosses the line of "I have an opinion" to "I have an opinion that impacts my livelihood".
I was probably close to where the author was a couple months ago, and now am even more on the "doomer" side of things. But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.
Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.
It already is for quite a few. We have something that's very useful and gaining improvements as time goes on. Probably not fast/good enough for some companies with wild expectations, but there's no doubt that this thing is here to stay.
The question for optimists is, if AI succeeds in it's promise, what sort of society do they envision being the result? For one thing, I don't think everyone except the extremely wealthy being on basic income is ideal or better than what we have now.
The question for doomers is why is this time different? Why aren't LLM's just the tractors of the Information Age?
Saying "I became a farmer/owner/operator by getting close to the soil and using a manual soil tiller to learn about the soil. Using a tractor means there are no entry-level agriculture jobs anymore" would've been just as valid 200 years ago. So why is it different this time?
> The question for doomers is why is this time different?
Difference 1: The tools themselves only exist due to rampant exploitation of vast intellectual resources that were created, catalogued, and published with the intent to help people learn, not machines.
Difference 2: The tools do not work deterministically. Every run of a prompt is effectively pulling a lever on a slot machine. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. However just like a good slot machine, the developers behind them have put a number of little touches and "features" that change nothing about the underlying machinery and instead explicitly target psychological weak points to build trust and confidence in said tools.
Difference 3: The tools do not work reliably. Agents are a complete shitshow but even if you strictly work in the confines of a chat bot, it will occasionally just make shit up, in our industry that means: code that does not compile and run. Hallucination has been a consistent issue since day 1 of this tech and probably the most impactful to user experience overall, and despite these facts it hasn't been solved in the subsequent 3 years whatsoever. It is by every account I've read, an intractable problem because these are machines that are fundamentally designed to make approximate representations of final products that look plausible, not that function correctly. That is a big distinction and it matters.
Difference 4: Saturation. Despite your assertion above, there was virtually no drive to prevent the ascent of tractors. Tractors were in high demand basically as soon as they were available, barring some ups and downs as the technology was fully built out and proven. The advent of motor vehicles as a whole completely redesigned our cities and to a great degree, society itself. Horses are still around today but as a hobby for monied people. Despite all of the above, Silicon Valley is simply tripping over itself, pouring literally billions of dollars into these things, and putting them in every product category whether it makes sense or not. This engenders a lack of trust, not just for the ethics of the tool itself, but whether OpenAI and company actually think this is good, or weather it simply must be good or the entire show is going to come crashing down around them. Instead of a product vision, where a company is setting out to solve specific problems with well made solutions, we have a few companies who feel distinctly desperate, trying to get their product in front of as many eyes as humanly possible, irrespective of it's ability to add any value at all.
>Why aren't LLM's just the tractors of the Information Age?
We didn't have every company and every government in the world spending trillions of dollars to completely reorganize society and technology around tractors, and to force them into every possible aspect of our lives whether people want them or not, to the point that tractors are all but existentially necessary to maintain our technological civilization.
We didn't have billionaires with deeply entrenched political interests believing in a cult of neo-fascist "tractor accelerationism."
We didn't have people forming parasocial relationships with tractors so deep and profound that they superceded their relationships with real people, and subsumed their own identities. Tractors didn't gaslight people into insanity and suicide. There's no such thing as "tractor psychosis." No one committed murder to pacify the Tractor Basilisk.
Tractors didn't flood every form of media with misinformation and slop that in a decade's time will make subjective reality and history utterly indecipherable from its own gibberish.
No one believed that tractors would lead to a perfect post-scarcity utopia... somehow. But only when everyone submits to tractors and the new world order that tractors will create and accepts that tractors are the new reality and that they just have to learn to live with that, regardless of any harm they might do.
No one forgot how to farm because they used tractors. There was no mass loss of farming knowledge or "deskilling," or degradation of cognitive or social abilities that came with using tractors.
There was no one complaining about how utterly meaningless farming had become now that tractors came along, but they themselves had become so addicted to tractor-maxxing that they couldn't simply stop.
And on top of that, no one wanted to replace farmers entirely with tractors, just because tractors didn't need to be paid. And then the plumbers. And the architects. And the cooks. And the doctors. And eventually the judges, police and politicians.
LLMs are very obviously not the tractors of the information age. If they were, Hacker News wouldn't be consumed by them. People wouldn't talk about them with the same awe and passion usually reserved for religion.
Not if. When AI becomes ubiquitous (like electricity and vehicles have), even the concept of income will disappear. Things will just be available for people to satisfy their needs, because scarcity (primarily caused by bad resource distribution) will essentially disappear.
No, it's very much "if". AI can't even do the things it is claimed to be good at today. It is a wash, or a small gain, for engineers of any reasonable competence. The idea that it's going to replace people is not remotely guaranteed based on current capabilities.
Yeah I'd actually call myself a "pessimist" personally, I think AI seems to be advancing at a rate where we should be concerned about that. I used to be of the mind that dooming was entirely about marketing/hype, but I don't believe that any more. The models are really good, the huggingface hack was extremely concerning, and when their executives post things like this, I believe them (even if I don't like them): https://x.com/deanwball/status/2094788634729660906
By putting almost everyone else on basic income because they're jobs were automated? How much would that need to be? Even if it's enough for basic needs, you're relegating most of the population to a low class status with limited options for improving their situation.
Food insecurity could be fixed now if it wasn't a politically divisive issue. There's no reason to believe UBI won't be even more divisive.
I don't understand what you're saying. I agree that food insecurity could be fixed; it's a redistribution problem. UBI is a way to fix it.
But I don't see how we are forcing people to be low class with UBI (as opposed to having them unemployed or doing precarious work that doesn't pay even the basic needs).
The problem with UBI is that it's presuming the economic system mostly remains as it is (supply and demand -> buying and selling), but the suppliers will merely keep increasing their prices to maintain status quo. Unless costs are also heavily regulated, which is tangential to the implementation of UBI. In the end the only thing UBI does is delay the inevitable crash of the economic system. Maybe.
Basic income sounds like welfare dressed up, where is the dignity of work, where is the independence from dependence? You shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you, sounds like less freedom to me, which is why I think the oligarchy is the one the earnest proposers of the idea
You should ask the billionaires about "dignity of work", they are the welfare queens. And also about "independence" on the people who work for them. What you're saying is just classist prejudice.
Absolutely. Actually truly taking aboard the belief that your 401K is now 100% up in the air, much less your career, much less your childrens' whole lives... it's tough.
I was lucky enough to be thrust through this in 2023 by DALLE-2, but the body of the normal distribution is just starting to pass the rubicon, month by month, day by day... Lowkey agonizing watch so many people go through something so relatable, only to turn to primal, nationalistic urges and downright epistemic denialism.
The culture is robust already, too -- I have no illusion that the obvious arrival in ASI will change much of anything, just like evolution didn't end up killing the church like some feared. They'll simply fold that into the interwoven chitin of cherry-picked facts and party lines, accumulated over their years in the echo chamber. Any headline that seems like it should obviously pierce the veil instead gets used to reinforce it (e.g. "Oh they claim AI solved a math problem, now?? They must really be getting desparate to hide the hoax if they're willing to go that far!")
This forum bans politics and I really don't want to start a whole thing, but I guess I'll just float the anecdote that I learned about this theory of Echo Chambers in am baby epistemology course, where the example given was the MAGA movement. Take that as you will.
> But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
I don't think you need to be skeptical of the tech to think that. The question there is: given the moral character of the people in charge of big companies, what do you think will happen if they can replace all labor with cheap machines? If AI can do the thinking they had to pay humans for, and robots can do the menial tasks they had to pay humans for, they don't need the common man for anything. People like you and I are at very real risk of being in a permanent underclass if these AI dreams come to fruition.
Oh agreed, I'm mostly explaining why someone who was a skeptic would make the calculation that they can afford to opt-out of using AI (and why you might weigh on the side of opting out even if you didn't think using LLMs had a morally unsavory valence).
Programmers then: "We don't need unions, it's a bunch of communism that keeps me from making as much money as possible"
Programmers now: "Oh no, holy shit, what am I going to do as the market forces us to be a bunch of fucking gremlins. Too bad I threw away the power of collective bargaining"
It seems people keep forgetting why unions formed in the first place. Given a chance a company of any size will fully optimize for its own profit regardless of how awful the side effects are to individuals, the environment, and society at large.
I don't think there are successful examples of unions being able to fight major technological shifts in the long haul. At best, they can force the management to accept a suicide pact - we're all slowly going down together. That may be preferable to sudden layoffs, but it's still not great, as evidenced by the troubles of the US auto industry.
Instead, I think that doctors and lawyers have it right: they effectively have the authority to decide who's allowed to practice the profession, so ChatGPT can't write you prescriptions or defend you in court.
Yeah. But, unlike China, the West doesn't seem to want to invest very much into real-world engineering. Except maybe military for forever wars, which is ethically way worse.
This is a side effect of capital accumulation. There's no one to buy the products (as low/middle class gets squeezed) so no reason to invest. Instead, oligarchs hold money in assets and compete over control, ultimately with violence.
I love the pro-union sentiment, but I don't think we need to treat "programmers" so monolothically, and we definitely should act like its too late. Now is the perfect moment to unionize!
See West Virginia coal mining in the early 20th century. Resulted in a lot of violent conflict as desperate workers were getting squeezed for every penny and owned little of their own, often working in company towns.
For someone who doesn't like doing cryptocurrency, advertising, gig economy bullshit or a host of other things, this is not a new problem. But yeah, it sucks.
not really. I don't work for FAANG because they're evil (plus im unqualified). I choose to mostly work for ethical companies. Locally declined to interview at the casino gambling company, the local buy now pay later usurers as an app, for elsevier. I left jobs when they offshored teams. I left jobs when they mandated unproven vaccines.
I don't make as much money as others though. I should totally write python and join some fintech
Nah. AI is anything that can often solve inexactly specified problems, often through the use of a combination of probabilities and deductions.
Your problem is thinking that "artificial intelligence" has to be whatever you think "intelligence" is. This is as true as "artificial grass" needing to be a type of grass. It's a constructed imitation that solves some of the problems that we normally use grass for. It can be green and spiky, soft to play sports on and pleasant in appearance, but it still is in no way grass, and has no relationship to grass. It is something that fits its category as a tool in some circumstances. An artificial leg is not a leg, it is a piece of metal or plastic with a hinge in it. An artificial heart is not a heart, it is a pump. They are both limited replacements for another thing in some useful circumstances.
Artificial grass, legs, or hearts don't become actual grass, legs or hearts even if they perform better in all use cases that we have for the actual item. They only become "grass," "legs," and "hearts" once we find the distinction to be largely useless and begin to omit it.
There are very serious mathematicians who refuse to use AI because they rightfully are concerned about the skill loss and harm overall. If anything it makes more sense for a mathematician to avoid AI than a software engineer though personally I think software engineers should use it sparingly as well.
It is backwards in every scenario, and it is basically tilting at windmills. There is a lot of that around, thinking it is making a difference.
Guy thinks this is his niche. Everyone will go "that's neat" and move on with life.
There was another post on here recently by a translator, whose profession is translating documents, declaring that they won't use AI in their work and anyone who does is a noob and it is no threat to what they do...and it just was amazing stuff. Of course HN pandered to it with lots of "oh yeah that's right you show 'em", but surely we all realize how fantastically silly that was. A web developer / designer who refuses to use AI is rapidly going to be very unemployed, though they might try the purist "no AI here!" angle niche for a tiny delay of that inevitable.
There are many ways to use Ai in programming without having it write code. Code reviews are a place where they are extremely helpful and are becoming company policy. It actually improves code quality and that's before we get to the security side of things. Adversaries will absolutely be running Ai, so you ought to know what those Ai are finding yourself before others do.
Not using world-changing technology because some people are using it harmfully is wild. Expanding it to people just making art (/entertainment...) that you don't like is just confusing.
Obviously I relate to the anxiety that made this man put up at least 3 mentions of how much he hates AI per page site-wide and to finish this draft before the actual site, but I can't help but see it as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
It's a shame cause this is an origami-themed freelance web developer who believes strongly in labeling natural vs. artificial prose, which couldn't be more up my alley if he tried! Shame the world is like this.
Just for clarity, in case anyone else doesn't see it -- I'll just take one paragraph:
Criticism of AI has led to harassment.
Perceived support of AI has led to molotovs and bullet-riddled doors.
AI has been used to publish hit pieces.
Computers have been used to publish hit pieces.
Generative AI is used openly to generate sexual abuse material.
Ditto, just with a much more serious crime. This one is actually a lot easier now and we need new laws for sure, but plugging your ears to the future will not speed those laws up in any way, no matter how indirect.
AI chatbots have encouraged vulnerable people to commit suicide.
Again, a serious, new twist on existing problems with suicide prevention. But A) it's far from a foregone conclusion that it's a net negative on suicide rates given that there's tons of positive anecdotes too, B) refusing to use claude code is not going to help devise legal, social, and technological solutions to that problem, and C) this is so clearly post-hoc reasoning.
For example: where's the "Social Policy", given that social media is a proven threat in this sense?
*EDIT:* And it's the guy who tried to make his own text editor after lamenting that Zed wasn't enough like Sublime?? Well, I guess it's nice to know I have an inverse doppleganger out there...
Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it? Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word? From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
> Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it?
We do, but craft workers in the industrial revolution did lose their jobs, and at the pace AI is developing I don't see any reason to believe that professional workers will not eventually have their jobs threatened.
> Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word?
No, I don't think we are. And let me be clear: I was very skeptical about this until recently. I think the models are objectively capable of doing a lot of the job of software engineers now, and increasingly engineers are being pressured to not only use them, but to take themselves out of the loop. There is a reason the conversation of "should we read the code" has been raised in public discourse and engineering talks now. That should concern everyone.
> From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
Such stances are very easy to make when there is no financial incentive or no competition with any meaningful money on the line. But as soon as there is competition, they don't care about "AI policies" if it is the means to make a lot of money.
The best example of this is security in open source software which maintainers have no choice but to use AI to protect themselves before an attacker can use AI to find and build exploits for security vulnerabilities faster than they can patch it.
In some sectors such as banking, crypto, defense and government, this is extremely critical. It will soon be the same with AI companies who have the AI model and someone could use AI to breach them with the goal of leaking the proprietary model.
So to them, policies like this, are actually a downgrade that they cannot afford to do.
I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about? This guy appears to be a web designer. You think there's no competition in that space and no incentive to churn things out fast with AI? Agree or disagree but if he's honest his money is very much where his mouth is.
> I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about? This guy appears to be a web designer.
The criticality of a web designer is quite vanishingly low with not that much money on the line. That's why his former customers are going for a $20 Lovable subscription instead of his web designer services.
It is fair to say he has been disrupted.
> You think there's no competition in that space and no incentive to churn things out fast with AI?
There is little to no money in being a human web designer (without AI) in 2026. He is taking a stance in never using AI which he is being out-competed by ultra-low cost AI subscriptions like Lovable, Bolt.new, and the others.
I… yes. That’s a reasonable interpretation of the current state of the world even if I reject the “no choice” framing. But you’re the one calling his stance “easy”?
The problem is that it is the market that believes it is now "easy" and it does not care about these policies.
Unless the author believes he can compete for customers without using AI against the AI subscription services for 1/100th of the price per month of a human web designer.
I guess I'll say it unhedged (since nobody else has yet): I agree with the author. I don't 100% align with his particular assignment of threats and externalities to AI, but I think overall it sucks and I don't want to use it. I think he's in a space that's getting overwhelmed by AI and AI output and I salute him putting his money where his mouth is. I wish him luck.
Yep. I think that AI tech has turned out to be pretty much the worst thing the tech industry has ever created. It is a huge net negative for the entire world, and even for the very profession which created it.
I feel like you could replace “AI” with “computers” across much of TFA and it would read like something from a few decades ago (ignoring the web development specifics…)
That lends some credence to the “AI is a tool” position I hear in some forums, though I do think there are real harms from the vast scale of AI deployment.
Yeah. I buy that there are some use cases where AI is a trap, or not as good as people.
I'm also chatting with my logs and triaging things like 10x faster in multiple open terminal sessions while I post on HN right now. So I'm also certain there are some use cases where not using AI will soon be professional negligence!
Not if he can also deliver equally good or better results, which I suspect he will. Not everyone needs it to do a good job, and for others, it could be a net negative.
Using computers created an unambiguous productivity boost. Same cannot be said for all types of software engineering with AI; that's why we keep having this debate. The results are mixed.
There are people with literally thousands of hours spent in WoW or Counter Strike. I don’t think you can talk about anything in absolutes can you?
I personally have thousands of hours in _both_ WoW and Counter Strike, and yet ...
No, you cannot say the same about computers, because the technology is almost never the problem. The problem is cultural.
The deregulation since the 70s created oligarchs and encouraged lack of moral scruples. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055
It's a coincidence that it occurred with the rise of the Internet (computers existed before) and AI. These coincidences happened in the past with other technologies.
So the OP has a valid position to boycott AI, just like in 1870s they should have boycotted trains or in 1910s the oil industry.
People think reducing some argument to “use tech” or “use computers” is a slam dunk nowadays. But see what a beautiful mess of adtech, antisocial and predatory social media, massive privacy breaches over trivialities (both in professional conduct and what the service was about) with no accountability, surveillance tech, revenge porn, scams, robber tech barons... and with that in mind do we really have anything to gloat to the naysayers from “a few decades ago”? ;)
Tsk. Maybe that’s what you were going for.
> I do not currently use AI for professional work.
I came here to say "Yes, and my grandfather thinks the internet is the 'mark of the beast.'" I'm not really sure what makes this persons opinion more noteworthy (in the wikipedia sense) than my grandfathers.
I suppose it's popular here because a lot of people who will be forced to learn new skills if AI takes their job hang out here, but hearing that buggy-whip manufacturers hate those new-fangled automobiles isn't' really newsworthy.
> I feel like you could replace “AI” with “computers” across much of TFA and it would read like something from a few decades ago
No you can't. Here is a quick sample
It's very much nonsense.Yes, not literally s/AI/computers/.
Computers have produced untold exabytes of spam. Hit pieces, security vulnerabilities and data leaks, creation and distribution of CSAM… Copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale, massive increase in water and electricity consumption. etc.
> Computers have produced untold exabytes of spam. Hit pieces, security vulnerabilities and data leaks[...] massive increase in water and electricity consumption. etc.
Then you must blame cars and airplanes as mass murdering tools as well.
> Then you must blame cars and airplanes as mass murdering tools as well.
Exactly, you can't throw away the entire tool because some people use it poorly. You know, like AI.
Of course you can! It's called boycott.
The workers who strike in a factory don't do that because they think the thing being produced is being socially useless. They do it because they demand social change.
We usually don’t. We look at the harm/benefits ratio and if way too big, we usually ban them. Guns, various chemicals, explosives,… is not allowed for any random cases. I’m not calling for regulation but you can understand why someone prefer not to associate themselves with it.
I’m not expressing judgement either way, I just think it’s interesting to observe the parallels (yes cars, planes, guns too)
It's a tough predicament when the industry you're in is moving towards violating your personal preferences and ethics.
I'm neither agreeing with or disagreeing with the author's stance. But this tension crosses the line of "I have an opinion" to "I have an opinion that impacts my livelihood".
And I'm witnessing a lot of it.
I was probably close to where the author was a couple months ago, and now am even more on the "doomer" side of things. But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.
Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.
> If it doesn't pan out
It already is for quite a few. We have something that's very useful and gaining improvements as time goes on. Probably not fast/good enough for some companies with wild expectations, but there's no doubt that this thing is here to stay.
The chasm is wide between skeptics and optimists. It's as interesting psychologically as it is technically.
The question for optimists is, if AI succeeds in it's promise, what sort of society do they envision being the result? For one thing, I don't think everyone except the extremely wealthy being on basic income is ideal or better than what we have now.
The question for doomers is why is this time different? Why aren't LLM's just the tractors of the Information Age?
Saying "I became a farmer/owner/operator by getting close to the soil and using a manual soil tiller to learn about the soil. Using a tractor means there are no entry-level agriculture jobs anymore" would've been just as valid 200 years ago. So why is it different this time?
> The question for doomers is why is this time different?
Difference 1: The tools themselves only exist due to rampant exploitation of vast intellectual resources that were created, catalogued, and published with the intent to help people learn, not machines.
Difference 2: The tools do not work deterministically. Every run of a prompt is effectively pulling a lever on a slot machine. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. However just like a good slot machine, the developers behind them have put a number of little touches and "features" that change nothing about the underlying machinery and instead explicitly target psychological weak points to build trust and confidence in said tools.
Difference 3: The tools do not work reliably. Agents are a complete shitshow but even if you strictly work in the confines of a chat bot, it will occasionally just make shit up, in our industry that means: code that does not compile and run. Hallucination has been a consistent issue since day 1 of this tech and probably the most impactful to user experience overall, and despite these facts it hasn't been solved in the subsequent 3 years whatsoever. It is by every account I've read, an intractable problem because these are machines that are fundamentally designed to make approximate representations of final products that look plausible, not that function correctly. That is a big distinction and it matters.
Difference 4: Saturation. Despite your assertion above, there was virtually no drive to prevent the ascent of tractors. Tractors were in high demand basically as soon as they were available, barring some ups and downs as the technology was fully built out and proven. The advent of motor vehicles as a whole completely redesigned our cities and to a great degree, society itself. Horses are still around today but as a hobby for monied people. Despite all of the above, Silicon Valley is simply tripping over itself, pouring literally billions of dollars into these things, and putting them in every product category whether it makes sense or not. This engenders a lack of trust, not just for the ethics of the tool itself, but whether OpenAI and company actually think this is good, or weather it simply must be good or the entire show is going to come crashing down around them. Instead of a product vision, where a company is setting out to solve specific problems with well made solutions, we have a few companies who feel distinctly desperate, trying to get their product in front of as many eyes as humanly possible, irrespective of it's ability to add any value at all.
>Why aren't LLM's just the tractors of the Information Age?
We didn't have every company and every government in the world spending trillions of dollars to completely reorganize society and technology around tractors, and to force them into every possible aspect of our lives whether people want them or not, to the point that tractors are all but existentially necessary to maintain our technological civilization.
We didn't have billionaires with deeply entrenched political interests believing in a cult of neo-fascist "tractor accelerationism."
We didn't have people forming parasocial relationships with tractors so deep and profound that they superceded their relationships with real people, and subsumed their own identities. Tractors didn't gaslight people into insanity and suicide. There's no such thing as "tractor psychosis." No one committed murder to pacify the Tractor Basilisk.
Tractors didn't flood every form of media with misinformation and slop that in a decade's time will make subjective reality and history utterly indecipherable from its own gibberish.
No one believed that tractors would lead to a perfect post-scarcity utopia... somehow. But only when everyone submits to tractors and the new world order that tractors will create and accepts that tractors are the new reality and that they just have to learn to live with that, regardless of any harm they might do.
No one forgot how to farm because they used tractors. There was no mass loss of farming knowledge or "deskilling," or degradation of cognitive or social abilities that came with using tractors.
There was no one complaining about how utterly meaningless farming had become now that tractors came along, but they themselves had become so addicted to tractor-maxxing that they couldn't simply stop.
And on top of that, no one wanted to replace farmers entirely with tractors, just because tractors didn't need to be paid. And then the plumbers. And the architects. And the cooks. And the doctors. And eventually the judges, police and politicians.
LLMs are very obviously not the tractors of the information age. If they were, Hacker News wouldn't be consumed by them. People wouldn't talk about them with the same awe and passion usually reserved for religion.
Not if. When AI becomes ubiquitous (like electricity and vehicles have), even the concept of income will disappear. Things will just be available for people to satisfy their needs, because scarcity (primarily caused by bad resource distribution) will essentially disappear.
No, it's very much "if". AI can't even do the things it is claimed to be good at today. It is a wash, or a small gain, for engineers of any reasonable competence. The idea that it's going to replace people is not remotely guaranteed based on current capabilities.
I consider myself an AI optimist. From what I've seen, I think there's a lot of headroom for it to expand it's disruption.
I also dislike the future that would result in. Heck, I want to go back to pre-iPhone.
Yeah I'd actually call myself a "pessimist" personally, I think AI seems to be advancing at a rate where we should be concerned about that. I used to be of the mind that dooming was entirely about marketing/hype, but I don't believe that any more. The models are really good, the huggingface hack was extremely concerning, and when their executives post things like this, I believe them (even if I don't like them): https://x.com/deanwball/status/2094788634729660906
"I don't think everyone except the extremely wealthy being on basic income is ideal or better than what we have now"
Seriously? One sixth of the U.S. population is food-insecure. You don't think that basic income would fix that?
By putting almost everyone else on basic income because they're jobs were automated? How much would that need to be? Even if it's enough for basic needs, you're relegating most of the population to a low class status with limited options for improving their situation.
Food insecurity could be fixed now if it wasn't a politically divisive issue. There's no reason to believe UBI won't be even more divisive.
I don't understand what you're saying. I agree that food insecurity could be fixed; it's a redistribution problem. UBI is a way to fix it.
But I don't see how we are forcing people to be low class with UBI (as opposed to having them unemployed or doing precarious work that doesn't pay even the basic needs).
The problem with UBI is that it's presuming the economic system mostly remains as it is (supply and demand -> buying and selling), but the suppliers will merely keep increasing their prices to maintain status quo. Unless costs are also heavily regulated, which is tangential to the implementation of UBI. In the end the only thing UBI does is delay the inevitable crash of the economic system. Maybe.
Basic income sounds like welfare dressed up, where is the dignity of work, where is the independence from dependence? You shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you, sounds like less freedom to me, which is why I think the oligarchy is the one the earnest proposers of the idea
You should ask the billionaires about "dignity of work", they are the welfare queens. And also about "independence" on the people who work for them. What you're saying is just classist prejudice.
It really is, it's fascinating.
Absolutely. Actually truly taking aboard the belief that your 401K is now 100% up in the air, much less your career, much less your childrens' whole lives... it's tough.
I was lucky enough to be thrust through this in 2023 by DALLE-2, but the body of the normal distribution is just starting to pass the rubicon, month by month, day by day... Lowkey agonizing watch so many people go through something so relatable, only to turn to primal, nationalistic urges and downright epistemic denialism.
The culture is robust already, too -- I have no illusion that the obvious arrival in ASI will change much of anything, just like evolution didn't end up killing the church like some feared. They'll simply fold that into the interwoven chitin of cherry-picked facts and party lines, accumulated over their years in the echo chamber. Any headline that seems like it should obviously pierce the veil instead gets used to reinforce it (e.g. "Oh they claim AI solved a math problem, now?? They must really be getting desparate to hide the hoax if they're willing to go that far!")
This forum bans politics and I really don't want to start a whole thing, but I guess I'll just float the anecdote that I learned about this theory of Echo Chambers in am baby epistemology course, where the example given was the MAGA movement. Take that as you will.
> But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
I don't think you need to be skeptical of the tech to think that. The question there is: given the moral character of the people in charge of big companies, what do you think will happen if they can replace all labor with cheap machines? If AI can do the thinking they had to pay humans for, and robots can do the menial tasks they had to pay humans for, they don't need the common man for anything. People like you and I are at very real risk of being in a permanent underclass if these AI dreams come to fruition.
Oh agreed, I'm mostly explaining why someone who was a skeptic would make the calculation that they can afford to opt-out of using AI (and why you might weigh on the side of opting out even if you didn't think using LLMs had a morally unsavory valence).
Programmers then: "We don't need unions, it's a bunch of communism that keeps me from making as much money as possible"
Programmers now: "Oh no, holy shit, what am I going to do as the market forces us to be a bunch of fucking gremlins. Too bad I threw away the power of collective bargaining"
It seems people keep forgetting why unions formed in the first place. Given a chance a company of any size will fully optimize for its own profit regardless of how awful the side effects are to individuals, the environment, and society at large.
I don't think there are successful examples of unions being able to fight major technological shifts in the long haul. At best, they can force the management to accept a suicide pact - we're all slowly going down together. That may be preferable to sudden layoffs, but it's still not great, as evidenced by the troubles of the US auto industry.
Instead, I think that doctors and lawyers have it right: they effectively have the authority to decide who's allowed to practice the profession, so ChatGPT can't write you prescriptions or defend you in court.
Other engineering specialties are typically protected under law in many states as well.
If the problems are solved, wouldn't you rather all those programmers use their productive systems-oriented brains on other problems?
Yeah. But, unlike China, the West doesn't seem to want to invest very much into real-world engineering. Except maybe military for forever wars, which is ethically way worse.
This is a side effect of capital accumulation. There's no one to buy the products (as low/middle class gets squeezed) so no reason to invest. Instead, oligarchs hold money in assets and compete over control, ultimately with violence.
I was about to say, it's not just IT industry, it's capitalism leading to this.
I love the pro-union sentiment, but I don't think we need to treat "programmers" so monolothically, and we definitely should act like its too late. Now is the perfect moment to unionize!
See West Virginia coal mining in the early 20th century. Resulted in a lot of violent conflict as desperate workers were getting squeezed for every penny and owned little of their own, often working in company towns.
For someone who doesn't like doing cryptocurrency, advertising, gig economy bullshit or a host of other things, this is not a new problem. But yeah, it sucks.
not really. I don't work for FAANG because they're evil (plus im unqualified). I choose to mostly work for ethical companies. Locally declined to interview at the casino gambling company, the local buy now pay later usurers as an app, for elsevier. I left jobs when they offshored teams. I left jobs when they mandated unproven vaccines.
I don't make as much money as others though. I should totally write python and join some fintech
This is the correct take. Using AI is unethical and results in degradation of skill and talent.
If you must interact with it, then you must, but you shouldn't.
All of HN should take note.
I love this guy. I don't want to use this stuff either. It produces a subpar product and way lower quality than I would ever output.
I read that as dbus-hell and got confused.
> I use the acronym “AI” to refer to trends in generative AI and large language models.
Please don't propagate the "LLMs are artificial intelligence" PR bullsh*t.
Nah. AI is anything that can often solve inexactly specified problems, often through the use of a combination of probabilities and deductions.
Your problem is thinking that "artificial intelligence" has to be whatever you think "intelligence" is. This is as true as "artificial grass" needing to be a type of grass. It's a constructed imitation that solves some of the problems that we normally use grass for. It can be green and spiky, soft to play sports on and pleasant in appearance, but it still is in no way grass, and has no relationship to grass. It is something that fits its category as a tool in some circumstances. An artificial leg is not a leg, it is a piece of metal or plastic with a hinge in it. An artificial heart is not a heart, it is a pump. They are both limited replacements for another thing in some useful circumstances.
Artificial grass, legs, or hearts don't become actual grass, legs or hearts even if they perform better in all use cases that we have for the actual item. They only become "grass," "legs," and "hearts" once we find the distinction to be largely useless and begin to omit it.
Previously:
January 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743095
Now imagine he were a mathematician instead of a software engineer. The post sounds rather backwards in this scenario.
Alas, he is not, and two things are true for him:
1. AI models produce consistent output, so it looks the same everywhere, which makes you look like a hustler if you use it for copywriting or design.
2. Customers who are fine with this can use Lovable for $20/month, so it's loser's game to chase those customers.
There are very serious mathematicians who refuse to use AI because they rightfully are concerned about the skill loss and harm overall. If anything it makes more sense for a mathematician to avoid AI than a software engineer though personally I think software engineers should use it sparingly as well.
It is backwards in every scenario, and it is basically tilting at windmills. There is a lot of that around, thinking it is making a difference.
Guy thinks this is his niche. Everyone will go "that's neat" and move on with life.
There was another post on here recently by a translator, whose profession is translating documents, declaring that they won't use AI in their work and anyone who does is a noob and it is no threat to what they do...and it just was amazing stuff. Of course HN pandered to it with lots of "oh yeah that's right you show 'em", but surely we all realize how fantastically silly that was. A web developer / designer who refuses to use AI is rapidly going to be very unemployed, though they might try the purist "no AI here!" angle niche for a tiny delay of that inevitable.
There are many ways to use Ai in programming without having it write code. Code reviews are a place where they are extremely helpful and are becoming company policy. It actually improves code quality and that's before we get to the security side of things. Adversaries will absolutely be running Ai, so you ought to know what those Ai are finding yourself before others do.
Not using world-changing technology because some people are using it harmfully is wild. Expanding it to people just making art (/entertainment...) that you don't like is just confusing.
Obviously I relate to the anxiety that made this man put up at least 3 mentions of how much he hates AI per page site-wide and to finish this draft before the actual site, but I can't help but see it as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
It's a shame cause this is an origami-themed freelance web developer who believes strongly in labeling natural vs. artificial prose, which couldn't be more up my alley if he tried! Shame the world is like this.
Just for clarity, in case anyone else doesn't see it -- I'll just take one paragraph:
Perceived support of AI has led to molotovs and bullet-riddled doors. Computers have been used to publish hit pieces. Ditto, just with a much more serious crime. This one is actually a lot easier now and we need new laws for sure, but plugging your ears to the future will not speed those laws up in any way, no matter how indirect. Again, a serious, new twist on existing problems with suicide prevention. But A) it's far from a foregone conclusion that it's a net negative on suicide rates given that there's tons of positive anecdotes too, B) refusing to use claude code is not going to help devise legal, social, and technological solutions to that problem, and C) this is so clearly post-hoc reasoning.For example: where's the "Social Policy", given that social media is a proven threat in this sense?
*EDIT:* And it's the guy who tried to make his own text editor after lamenting that Zed wasn't enough like Sublime?? Well, I guess it's nice to know I have an inverse doppleganger out there...
If this technology really is world-changing, you aren't going to be using it for long anyways.
Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it? Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word? From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
> Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it?
We do, but craft workers in the industrial revolution did lose their jobs, and at the pace AI is developing I don't see any reason to believe that professional workers will not eventually have their jobs threatened.
> Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word?
No, I don't think we are. And let me be clear: I was very skeptical about this until recently. I think the models are objectively capable of doing a lot of the job of software engineers now, and increasingly engineers are being pressured to not only use them, but to take themselves out of the loop. There is a reason the conversation of "should we read the code" has been raised in public discourse and engineering talks now. That should concern everyone.
> From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
I am not seeing that: https://metr.org/time-horizons/
And I think if things continue as they have, we are eventually going to see the price of software decline and widespread layoffs soon to follow.
Such stances are very easy to make when there is no financial incentive or no competition with any meaningful money on the line. But as soon as there is competition, they don't care about "AI policies" if it is the means to make a lot of money.
The best example of this is security in open source software which maintainers have no choice but to use AI to protect themselves before an attacker can use AI to find and build exploits for security vulnerabilities faster than they can patch it.
In some sectors such as banking, crypto, defense and government, this is extremely critical. It will soon be the same with AI companies who have the AI model and someone could use AI to breach them with the goal of leaking the proprietary model.
So to them, policies like this, are actually a downgrade that they cannot afford to do.
I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about? This guy appears to be a web designer. You think there's no competition in that space and no incentive to churn things out fast with AI? Agree or disagree but if he's honest his money is very much where his mouth is.
> I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about? This guy appears to be a web designer.
The criticality of a web designer is quite vanishingly low with not that much money on the line. That's why his former customers are going for a $20 Lovable subscription instead of his web designer services.
It is fair to say he has been disrupted.
> You think there's no competition in that space and no incentive to churn things out fast with AI?
There is little to no money in being a human web designer (without AI) in 2026. He is taking a stance in never using AI which he is being out-competed by ultra-low cost AI subscriptions like Lovable, Bolt.new, and the others.
He has no choice but to adapt.
I… yes. That’s a reasonable interpretation of the current state of the world even if I reject the “no choice” framing. But you’re the one calling his stance “easy”?
> But you’re the one calling his stance “easy”?
The problem is that it is the market that believes it is now "easy" and it does not care about these policies.
Unless the author believes he can compete for customers without using AI against the AI subscription services for 1/100th of the price per month of a human web designer.