Agree. Although I see much more opposition to this idea on Reddit than on HN, the feeling I get is that people are desperately trying to undermine the idea of AI performing development tasks because they're afraid of it taking their livelihood away. This is unfortunate, because whether people resist or not in the end the pragmatism and economics will win out, so developers should be embracing this.
> the feeling I get is that people are desperately trying to undermine the idea of AI performing development tasks because they're afraid of it taking their livelihood away.
Your blind spot¹ is having preconceived of a negative reason for why people have a certain opinion and then judging them for the thing you disagree with in your head instead of their real reason.
It’s the same rhetoric applied by the cryptocurrency shills who can’t get past the notion that people who are opposed to cryptocurrencies do it exclusively because they “missed their chance”. Those people are utterly incapable of (and utterly uninterested in) understanding another human being. The notion that not every person in the world is a greedy bastard whose only interest in life is to get ahead at the expense of others is alien bananas to them.
Those AI discussions on HN are rife with reasonings both pro and against. Next time you see an argument against, really read the reason the person gave and try to understand why that different person has a different point of view. Ask a question if you need to. Don’t assume they have some hidden reason they’re not telling you.
¹ I suspect this has phenomenon has another name, but I don’t know what it is. It’s not a straw man because I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.
You’re doing this to me right now, no? You don’t know how I’ve come to this conclusion.
I understand your point though. I’m not referring to those who are against AI for whatever reason, because there are lots of reasons why people are against AI that are reasonable.
I’m referring to those (mostly on Reddit) who talk badly about the quality of AI, those who use it, and businesses embracing it. It’s totally fine to think AI produces crappy work, but it’s the vitriol against anyone who suggests otherwise that makes me think it comes from somewhere deeper.
I'll believe it when I see it. Using any of the AI tools so far to help me program are worse than garbage. They produce code that looks like it works but has subtle hard-to-find bugs it in. Also, AI researchers have been saying we will all be out of a job for 75 years now.
I can get good, but not great code out of it. It mostly works, but then I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it does and why... and what it doesn't do.
for example i'm dangerous with node.js and mongo, but don't know enough to easily slap out some code. so if i want to do some linked-lists / mongo documents in documents, i can get there with a little bit of searching and sanity checking.
when i asked ChatGPT for the answer it put out something that looked mostly right, but 1) didn't work, and 2) wasn't clear why it made these choices.
i spent more time trying to un-fuck that code than if i had just stumbled through it from scratch -- and i would have had a better understanding of what was happening from the jump.
