← Back to context

Comment by vendiddy

7 hours ago

I love coding but I also love AI.

I don't know if I'm a minority but I'd like to think there are a lot of folks like me out there.

You can compare it to someone who is writing assembly code and now they've been introduced to C. They were happy writing assembly but now they're thrilled they can write things more quickly.

Sure, AI could lead us to write buggier code. Sure, AI could make us dumber because we just have AI write things we don't understand. But neither has to be the case.

With better tools, we'll be able to do more ambitious things.

I think there are a lot of us, but the people who dislike AI are much more vocal in online conversations about it.

(The hype merchant, LinkedIn influencer, Twitter thread crowd are super noisy but tend to stick to their own echo chambers, it's rare to have them engage in a forum like Hacker News directly.)

> I don't know if I'm a minority

No, there's plenty of top-class engineers who love coding with AI. e.g. Antirez.

I love AI as a concept.

I hate the reality of our current AI, which is benefitting corporations over workers, being used for surveillance and censorship (nevermind direct social control via misinformation bots), and is copying the work of millions without compensating them in order to do it.

And the push for coders to use it to increase their output, will likely just end up meaning expectations of more LoC and more features faster, for the same pay.

But FOSS, self-hosted LLMs? Awesome!

  • How is using Claude over Llama benefitting corporations over workers? I work with AI every day and sum total of my token spend across all providers is less than a single NVidia H100 card I'd have to buy (from a pretty big corporation!), at the very least, for comparable purpose?

    How are self-hosted LLMs not copying the work of millions without compensating them for it?

    How is the push for more productivity through better technology somehow bad?

    I am pro FOSS but can't understand this comment.