Comment by p4bl0
2 days ago
Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.
I hang around a few developer-centric communities, and my gut feeling is that HN is by far the most pro-AI. It's somewhat rare to find people all-in on "developers just got replaced by AI, pick a different career field guys" anywhere but here. Maybe there are just more developer-adjacent types on HN.
I do find it somewhat amusing to read the commentary here and ponder why some of these people are wildly enthusiastic about making software development a dead field but simultaneously don't think it's also going to put them out of work. Programmers may be a lucrative target, but LLMs are "good enough" at many other knowledge disciplines too.
I think generally, extremist views tend to echo further than nuanced ones. This goes for any major topic really: whether it's politics, religion, arts, etc.
The AI discussion on HN is exhilarated by the fact that it can have a tangible impact on people's lives on this forum. You add to this the possibility of a minority extracting an unfathomable amount of wealth from the hype train and we lose all hope for a moderate discussion.
My own views on this are rather boring. After having tried various models, I've reached the conclusion that it adds minor benefits to my workflows, but I don't have to lose sleep from Claude reaching singularity anytime soon..
I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time.
I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix.
Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.
For me, one of the big improvements is the ability to legitimately work via text message. That probably sounds dystopian in a bunch of ways to some people. But there are times that I want to work, but couldn't, previously.
Now I can work from wherever, whenever, by speaking into my headphones, and have it persist. Sure, I want to be in front of a screen to do final syntax review, but I don't mind planning out architecture and guiding an LLM towards a cohesive result while going for a walk or jog. That's just not a workflow that would have been viable 3 years ago.
I find it somewhat encouraging to hear that the devoted AI shills have not managed to generate the artificial consensus / synthetic consent that they seem to have been intending to.