Comment by antonvs

I agree with your basic point, but it’s not just an age thing. There are plenty of older people enthusiastically using AI for software development now. Just as an example, Steve Yegge, who vibe-coded the Beads and Gas Town AI projects, is around 57. I’m a bit older than him, and I’m working with Claude, Gemini, and Codex on a daily basis, having great fun and learning tons.

What we seem to be seeing with AI is that the prospect of completely changing the way you work is threatening for a lot of people, and of course so is the prospect of losing your job. When people are faced with something threatening, a common reaction is to criticize it in every possible way - you can’t admit anything about it is good because that risks encouraging the threat. It’s not exactly rational, but it’s what people often do.

HN has never been exempt from that, it’s just that AI is a big change that brings out this instinct in many more people.