- We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now.
- This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field.
Appreciate the more reasonable comments!
I think AI will take over many jobs, firstly in the arrangement of characters and words into stock text, or coding. But art, not just pictures, is something that will take longer and may never happen. Design is very similar.
Good art makes you feel something, and you need the human experience to feel that before you can make that and make other people feel that.
Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes?
HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
This is the place I see AI discussed the most. Admittedly the opinions here are mixed. A lot of people do have negative feelings but there are also a ton of pro-AI comments. There Are huge 600 comment threads about a new model release, weird rants about “Gastown”, constant “Launch HNs” for model wrappers, and people saying writing code by hand is archaic.
This is one of the most pro-AI places I spend time. The other websites I frequent are much more anti-AI and my experience in real life is that most people don’t like what AI is doing to the world (even if they grudgingly find it useful at work.)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923079 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921461 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926590
1. Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model [https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/]
2. High-Bandwidth Flash offers efficient storage for model weights [https://spectrum.ieee.org/high-bandwidth-flash]
3. Grok Build is open source [https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build]
4. Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf] [https://www.siegelendowment.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/f...]
5. An Interactive Map of AI [https://artifipedia.com/map]
I would only say the discussion on #3 is particularly negative and as others mentioned Grok has a lot of its own baggage: Elon Musk, recently uploading home directories without asking, making sexual imagery of minors, etc. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/grok-ai-g...)
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So a little less than half of the top 10 stories are about AI and only 1 is negative but that one potentially has other factors at play.
Contrast this to how the general public feels about AI:
"A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. What’s more, a plurality of voters view AI negatively ... Just 26% of voters say they have positive feelings about AI, compared with 46% who hold negative views. In fact, the only topics with a lower net positive rating than AI in the NBC News survey were the Democratic Party and Iran."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majority...
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Given all that, I would say HN has a more pro-AI bias than the general population. Do you disagree?
Companies will see it as a way to make more for less, they will lay off many people, not realising, as Henry Ford did, that to make money you need to pay your workers, so they can buy products.
What the end state will be is very unclear right now, could be bladerunner, could be star trek, could be 1984. Could be terminator.
We will just have to wait and see.
It's a profound moment for sure, but let's ask ourselves: could the creative works of early last century have predicted our world? Would people in the 1930s say "2030, it could be like Metropolis, could be like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, could be like Flash Gordon"? No.
The real future might be nothing like any of the sci-fi movies we're so used to representing potential AI-based futures.
One thing I've been trying to remind myself about is that humans have explored only a very narrow slice of possibilities within the known universe. AI's ability to crawl the search space is going to uncover way more slices, (which yes, could lead to various outcomes like the movies listed), but more likely to be some hybrid/blend of outcomes (or entirely new outcomes) that we haven't imagined yet at all.
"May you live in interesting times" and all that
My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity.
Not interesting? Let the damn thing die on /new.
More generally, the AI discussions that HN regulars actually want to have are going to be limited to the business plans, press releases about new models, and the (very) occasional higher quality project that couldn't have been done without a big lift from an LLM.
Anyone genuinely wanting to discuss the truth from a philosophical or scientific perspective is never going to penetrate the profound ignorance on much of the business side (mostly startups and aging leadership), so why bother? Business is at least what everyone has in common here.
In what world are you living? 90% of the front page is AI.
In case it helps the authentic human connection: I too wrote this with my human hands and did not use AI.
It’s the new web dev, imo.
This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before.
Sorry, not sorry.
We crossed that threshold at least a year ago.
The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?"
I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.
LLMs are a tool. The brush is a tool, the pencil is a tool. The way we write already is defined by tools. This very comment is remarkably defined by its medium, I can't control its font size! Or the font at all, for that matter, nor the color, hell I can't even control how and where this comment is read! This means I'm generally going to write it in English, a whole different language from my native one! How is that for "defining"???
None of this is new, it's all dictated by human experience in the very same way that the output of a LLM gets dictated by human experience. That's the way memes (as in, anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme?) work.
LLMs don't understand, they just output based on some parameters. We've been here before.
My patience has worn out. I've tolerated the anti-AI sentiment for years, but at this point it's beyond grating.
I've heard all the arguments, I've been called all the names. The anti-AI crowd is frequently uncivil, and that just gets to glide by. I'm tired of it.
I don't go flagging every anti AI voice here, regardless of how hateful or cruel it is.
And I’m sure you won’t have a problem sleeping at night with the constant noise of fans and generators and maybe lose your hearing!
Oh that’s right, you’re not a disadvantaged person living in a poor neighborhood, so you’ll never have to worry about that!
Was that civil enough for you?
I myself am relatively cautious about AI, mostly due to ethical concerns, yet I often open AI related threads to be informed and hear differing perspectives and arguments.
A Hacker News without open conversations and opposing views is a Hacker News that has lost its way and, at least imo, lost its value.
> This is what I originally started programming for, and it's the best thing that's ever happened to our industry.
I didn't, and your reply just reinforces my belief that it is bringing in NFT-style "influencer" dudebros who only want to hear positivity and shut out any criticism so that the bubble just keeps bubbling.
> I want a healthy, happy community
Oxymoronic. Is that what you really want? Or do you want something that appears healthy after you've sanitized and quelled any semblance of criticism that doesn't align with the "positivity" (or rather, the sycophancy you are probably drowning in, given your championing of AI)?
> I want a healthy, happy community sharing about the new tools and models
So you cry about imaginary internet points? Might as well just check yourself in at the nearest psych ward.
>I am sick and tired of anti-AI dogma.
"Anti-AI dogma" does not exist on HN. I see more posts in favor of using AI then against them, and most people on HN I would bet are pro-AI. If you want to see a stark contrast, go read a r/ExperiencedDevs post related to AI.
>I want a healthy, happy community sharing about the new tools and models. Not constantly dumping and complaining
Why are you surprised people dislike ongoing upheaval of their career field(s) and/or the constant FUD coming from the companies driving that change? Genuinely, are you incapable of reasoning about why this would be unpopular? Or you just being dense?
I assume it's the latter.
Also, be the fucking change you want to see in the world. If you want a space free from people sharing their thoughts, go vibe code your own website where you censor anyone who would dare question whether technological progress could have side effects.
Hell, if you do so, maybe you'll take some of the other self-victimizing AI users with you.
Fwiw people are downvoting you not because you’re pro AI, but because people perceive a lot of your comments as being borderline fanatical about it.
Sounds like you want to be in a cult, buddy!
The Greek/Latin A is the symbol inverted — those are not legs.
<a>Info<span class="hide_on_mobile">rmation</span></a>
Which while absolutely correct does not at all address your question.
As always, I don't really care what tools a creative uses to manifest their idea in the world, I care how good the product is.
AI, just like the coding language you choose is a TOOL. Tools can be wielded expertly or crudely. At the end of the day your customer doesn't care who you are they care about your product.
My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious.
That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool.
Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is.
Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
I use LLMs daily to piece together technical reports and smooth out rough drafts. It saves me hours of time / week.
I also use it to augment my technical work, because I don't want to be out of a job one day with no marketable skills, except driving an agent harness.
There is a percentage of the population that thinks LLMs are actually intelligent and truly can't tell the difference.
I think others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.
Fuck, doesn't everyone? The future we were promised is one where machines did all the work leaving humans free to pursue a richer existence, whether that's creative pastimes or just laying on a beach.
Instead of democratizing the future, essentially every technological advance since the printing press has served only to increase the concentration of wealth and power at the top.
I can't imagine actually wanting to work if you didn't have to.
I can tell you that while I use AI, it's basically a compressed version of stackoverflow to me. I don't bother with agents because I simply don't have that much code to write. The nature of code didn't change. Less code is better code, and it's a strong smell when people claim that they needed an agent to save time.
When I do have a new project, there's an extremely high chance that I can reuse existing code from another project that already has passing tests, or I am experienced enough to know what exactly needs to be done. I can probably finish my part within the sprint or faster. The agent can only introduce risk to the project timeline or code quality.
This isn't me being arrogant or "anti-AI". The hard part of software development has always been collecting consistent requirements from various stakeholders. I'm pro-AI in the sense that, when used correctly, it helps junior devs learn and otherwise shines a spotlight where the real bottlenecks are (project management and delays).
They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).
Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.
Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.
Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".
I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.
Ironically due to an overloaded inbox these days, I've been using a LLM as the world's most inefficient e-mail filter.
It does a decent job at this, and gives at least a nice starting point in the morning for a prioritized hitlist to power through. Gets most things pretty accurate, but I only use it to sense "importance" and not much else.
Certainly not life changing, just a nice to have.
I've had far more real gains with home IT projects. Tons of home automation integrations and "silly" projects I've been wanting to get done for a decade but never really had the energy to want to deal with. These sorts of things also allowed me some time/excuse to play around with agents to see what the fuss was about.
I now have the world's most complex garden irrigation/sensor setup complete with automated watering and grafana panels! I could have tied everything from the hardware through software together myself, but I just was not interested in installing the 856th Ubuntu VM in my life, configuring InfluxDB from scratch, etc.
I can see the future potential due to the above, but I also see how it went off the rails easily and also produced some laughably inefficient/unmaintable stuff like Flux queries which toss what should be variables as statics directly into the grafana panels, etc. Add a single new sensor to a group and you'll be re-writing the panel queries. Just horrible ground level design only maintainable via brute force. But when you just tell it to add the thing and it does... I can see why many feel it's a superpower.
I still design and build systems almost all myself. If a snippet comes out of an LLM I'm keen to use it's filtered through my brain as well. Polished and transformed to align with my vision. After all, I'm on the hook for supporting it and bringing it to my team.
I'm sure most of us are just sick of the mania around this and choose to avoid interacting with content relating to it.
It's very useful. But irresponsible to use without recognizing and respecting its limitations.
I have > 10yoe, fwiw.
As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
Such juvenile behavior can only be attributed to the general unease and defensiveness demonstrated by members of the AI cult in the face of criticism:
“Your blasphemy against our god has been duly punished… you must pray for his forgiveness.”
"Hey OP this is amazing work, I have never seen better self promotion. Its fantastic to see people following the well worn path of submitting absolutely threadbare nonsense articles to Hacker News for blog clicks. Its an amazing strategy with a wide community and a great deal of support, including among hackernews moderators. I hope you continue to follow this strategy, and we as your readers will continue to tolerate the burden of extremely lowered signal to noise ratio. All the best."
Please use AI (or anything) to fix your site.
No expensive tokens needed, no agents needed, no outsourcing their work to some calculator. The problem was solved even faster than an LLM would have, and they maintained full control and understanding of their systems while solving the problem. It's almost like human expertise is great.
And you know, the whole "maybe ask AI thing" is exactly what everyone is making fun of. Any engineer worth their salt should be able to look at a system crashing under heavy load and come up with a few proper solutions to the problem that don't involve "ask ChatGPT", but people have completely replaced their thinking with this "I'll just ask the calculator" laziness. It's sad, pathetic to see really.
Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
Later: The villain cat has the catchphrases 'Purrrfect' and 'You must be kitten me'. The snake character makes lotsss of sss noissesss.
There seems to be this idea that using AI is the same thing as walking away and not touching it. Like that you would just say to the computer, do the thing and then not look at it, read it or edit it in any way. What's the world where you're describing where you wouldn't select and edit and refine? You know, with software as an example, how that works with AI is that you spend all day opting it and refining it and you do it over and over and over and you're guiding it and you're shaping it. So it's not like the computer does it. You're still there. I mean, you're making a typeface. You're not chiseling something into stone. You're making a program of sorts that will make shapes. And I don't know why there would be any world where you would just walk away from your first prompt and call it done.
The first few months of any new typeface involve switching between physical and digital drawings frequently, trying to make sure no single tool has too much influence over the shape.
AI might be just another tool, but its grain is super unpredictable. Refining AI-generated sketches is more complicated, and ultimately the skills it requires can only be developed through firsthand practice of analogue techniques. I literally studied stonecarving (along with calligraphy, brush lettering, etc.) in order to be able to make better digital fonts.
The idea that AI is different, in kind, than any of the many other tools that you use is silly to me -- at no point is it desirable for you to throw out your brain. As you say, every tool has a different sort of "grain", which is neither good nor bad but does in fact influence the final product.
Where you lose me is why would you implicitly throw out your process? What about this tool gives the idea that you should not keep the parts of the process that is valuable, on paper etc? AI probably would do better fiddling with the beziers or whatever, what would be the reason that it's ipso facto a bad idea? Who is saying that?
I'm not sure basically what the other side of your argument was supposed to be.