That lends some credence to the “AI is a tool” position I hear in some forums, though I do think there are real harms from the vast scale of AI deployment.
I'm also chatting with my logs and triaging things like 10x faster in multiple open terminal sessions while I post on HN right now. So I'm also certain there are some use cases where not using AI will soon be professional negligence!
Using computers created an unambiguous productivity boost. Same cannot be said for all types of software engineering with AI; that's why we keep having this debate. The results are mixed.
The deregulation since the 70s created oligarchs and encouraged lack of moral scruples. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055
It's a coincidence that it occurred with the rise of the Internet (computers existed before) and AI. These coincidences happened in the past with other technologies.
So the OP has a valid position to boycott AI, just like in 1870s they should have boycotted trains or in 1910s the oil industry.
I came here to say "Yes, and my grandfather thinks the internet is the 'mark of the beast.'" I'm not really sure what makes this persons opinion more noteworthy (in the wikipedia sense) than my grandfathers.
I suppose it's popular here because a lot of people who will be forced to learn new skills if AI takes their job hang out here, but hearing that buggy-whip manufacturers hate those new-fangled automobiles isn't' really newsworthy.
Computers have produced untold exabytes of spam. Hit pieces, security vulnerabilities and data leaks, creation and distribution of CSAM… Copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale, massive increase in water and electricity consumption. etc.
Then you must blame cars and airplanes as mass murdering tools as well.
Exactly, you can't throw away the entire tool because some people use it poorly. You know, like AI.
The workers who strike in a factory don't do that because they think the thing being produced is being socially useless. They do it because they demand social change.
My theory is that China is spending a fortune convincing westerners AI is a moral issue using sock puppets so they can win an arms race that will literally decide the future of humankind and separate the haves from the have-nots.
They saw how well it worked for the Russians with our politics and are now using the same playbook to ensure we hamstring ourselves while they continue unbothered.
Tsk. Maybe that’s what you were going for.
I'm neither agreeing with or disagreeing with the author's stance. But this tension crosses the line of "I have an opinion" to "I have an opinion that impacts my livelihood".
And I'm witnessing a lot of it.
If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.
Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.
It already is for quite a few. We have something that's very useful and gaining improvements as time goes on. Probably not fast/good enough for some companies with wild expectations, but there's no doubt that this thing is here to stay.
Saying "I became a farmer/owner/operator by getting close to the soil and using a manual soil tiller to learn about the soil. Using a tractor means there are no entry-level agriculture jobs anymore" would've been just as valid 200 years ago. So why is it different this time?
Difference 1: The tools themselves only exist due to rampant exploitation of vast intellectual resources that were created, catalogued, and published with the intent to help people learn, not machines. And this was frequently done against the explicit expressed wishes of the holders and creators of those resources.
Difference 2: The tools do not work deterministically. Every run of a prompt is effectively pulling a lever on a slot machine. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. However just like a good slot machine, the developers behind them have put a number of little touches and "features" that change nothing about the underlying machinery and instead explicitly target psychological weak points to build trust and confidence in said tools.
Difference 3: The tools do not work reliably. Agents are a complete shitshow but even if you strictly work in the confines of a chat bot, it will occasionally just make shit up, in our industry that means: code that does not compile and run. Hallucination has been a consistent issue since day 1 of this tech and probably the most impactful to user experience overall, and despite these facts it hasn't been solved in the subsequent 3 years whatsoever. It is by every account I've read, an intractable problem because these are machines that are fundamentally designed to make approximate representations of final products that look plausible, not that function correctly. That is a big distinction and it matters.
Difference 4: Saturation. Despite your assertion above, there was virtually no drive to prevent the ascent of tractors. Tractors were in high demand basically as soon as they were available, barring some ups and downs as the technology was fully built out and proven. The advent of motor vehicles as a whole completely redesigned our cities and to a great degree, society itself. Horses are still around today but as a hobby for monied people. Despite all of the above, Silicon Valley is simply tripping over itself, pouring literally billions of dollars into these things, and putting them in every product category whether it makes sense or not. This engenders a lack of trust, not just for the ethics of the tool itself, but whether OpenAI and company actually think this is good, or weather it simply must be good or the entire show is going to come crashing down around them. Instead of a product vision, where a company is setting out to solve specific problems with well made solutions, we have a few companies who feel distinctly desperate, trying to get their product in front of as many eyes as humanly possible, irrespective of it's ability to add any value at all to what those eyes are looking at.
We didn't have every company and every government in the world spending trillions of dollars to completely reorganize society and technology around tractors, and to force them into every possible aspect of our lives whether people want them or not, to the point that tractors are all but existentially necessary to maintain our technological civilization.
We didn't have billionaires with deeply entrenched political interests believing in a cult of neo-fascist "tractor accelerationism."
We didn't have people forming parasocial relationships with tractors so deep and profound that they superceded their relationships with real people, and subsumed their own identities. Tractors didn't gaslight people into insanity and suicide. There's no such thing as "tractor psychosis." No one committed murder to pacify the Tractor Basilisk.
Tractors didn't flood every form of media with misinformation and slop that in a decade's time will make subjective reality and history utterly indecipherable from its own gibberish.
No one believed that tractors would lead to a perfect post-scarcity utopia... somehow. But only when everyone submits to tractors and the new world order that tractors will create and accepts that tractors are the new reality and that they just have to learn to live with that, regardless of any harm they might do.
No one forgot how to farm because they used tractors. There was no mass loss of farming knowledge or "deskilling," or degradation of cognitive or social abilities that came with using tractors.
There was no one complaining about how utterly meaningless farming had become now that tractors came along, but they themselves had become so addicted to tractor-maxxing that they couldn't simply stop.
And on top of that, no one wanted to replace farmers entirely with tractors, just because tractors didn't need to be paid. And then the plumbers. And the architects. And the cooks. And the doctors. And eventually the judges, police and politicians.
LLMs are very obviously not the tractors of the information age. If they were, Hacker News wouldn't be consumed by them. People wouldn't talk about them with the same awe and passion usually reserved for religion.
However behind it all most token usage is driven by automating TPS reports and writing code [1]. In that dominant token usage context, the LLM is clearly just a boring old tractor.
Yes, some people are falling in love with their tractor because of an existing technology that has opened us up to that possibility, but that doesn't change the fact that the tractor is mostly being used to till the farm and that our algorithm driven media environment no longer allows coverage of that because its too boring.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/economic-index-june-2026-...
There are a few caveats to this that everyone seems to leap over, one very important one is that the a priori control of production, land, and natural resources is not egalitarian, and there's no reason to really believe it would become egalitarian even if people could in theory produce everything they wanted/needed for themselves.
But even barring that, we live in a world with finite natural resources. And that by itself should be a serious concern for anyone who sees this as a possibility. I get that optimists also seem to believe that technology we don't have like dyson spheres, asteroid mining, intergalactic travel, etc. will solve any resource scarcity concerns, but that is not a given, and developing any of those things would still rely on our planets natural resources to even bootstrap.
We live in a world that can't even coordinate the safe development of models or nuclear anti-proliferation, and already experiences rampant injustice surrounding use of our planets natural resources, which does not bode well for the future.
And even if we did end up in a world where these problems were solved, advanced models posed no threat to our existence, etc. they would not be solved instantaneously, and would likely cause catastrophic changes to society and massive amounts of suffering. We can solve scarcity of basic needs and access to medical care, decarbonization, etc. today. Without the use of AI. We do not need to go through years of suffering because tech execs want their play things.
I also dislike the future that would result in. Heck, I want to go back to pre-iPhone.
Seriously? One sixth of the U.S. population is food-insecure. You don't think that basic income would fix that?
Food insecurity could be fixed now if it wasn't a politically divisive issue. There's no reason to believe UBI won't be even more divisive.
But I don't see how we are forcing people to be low class with UBI (as opposed to having them unemployed or doing precarious work that doesn't pay even the basic needs).
So while it may solve the problem for people who are food insecure, it will create a problem for those who were better off with good paying jobs. You can't just reduce 95%+ of the population to simply meeting basic needs and not facing serious societal discontent.
I was lucky enough to be thrust through this in 2023 by DALLE-2, but the body of the normal distribution is just starting to pass the rubicon, month by month, day by day... Lowkey agonizing watch so many people go through something so relatable, only to turn to primal, nationalistic urges and downright epistemic denialism.
The culture is robust already, too -- I have no illusion that the obvious arrival in ASI will change much of anything, just like evolution didn't end up killing the church like some feared. They'll simply fold that into the interwoven chitin of cherry-picked facts and party lines, accumulated over their years in the echo chamber. Any headline that seems like it should obviously pierce the veil instead gets used to reinforce it (e.g. "Oh they claim AI solved a math problem, now?? They must really be getting desparate to hide the hoax if they're willing to go that far!")
This forum bans politics and I really don't want to start a whole thing, but I guess I'll just float the anecdote that I learned about this theory of Echo Chambers in am baby epistemology course, where the example given was the MAGA movement. Take that as you will.
I don't think you need to be skeptical of the tech to think that. The question there is: given the moral character of the people in charge of big companies, what do you think will happen if they can replace all labor with cheap machines? If AI can do the thinking they had to pay humans for, and robots can do the menial tasks they had to pay humans for, they don't need the common man for anything. People like you and I are at very real risk of being in a permanent underclass if these AI dreams come to fruition.
I don't make as much money as others though. I should totally write python and join some fintech
Programmers now: "Oh no, holy shit, what am I going to do as the market forces us to be a bunch of fucking gremlins. Too bad I threw away the power of collective bargaining"
It seems people keep forgetting why unions formed in the first place. Given a chance a company of any size will fully optimize for its own profit regardless of how awful the side effects are to individuals, the environment, and society at large.
Instead, I think that doctors and lawyers have it right: they effectively have the authority to decide who's allowed to practice the profession, so ChatGPT can't write you prescriptions or defend you in court.
This is a side effect of capital accumulation. There's no one to buy the products (as low/middle class gets squeezed) so no reason to invest. Instead, oligarchs hold money in assets and compete over control, ultimately with violence.
If you must interact with it, then you must, but you shouldn't.
All of HN should take note.
Obviously I relate to the anxiety that made this man put up at least 3 mentions of how much he hates AI per page site-wide and to finish this draft before the actual site, but I can't help but see it as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
It's a shame cause this is an origami-themed freelance web developer who believes strongly in labeling natural vs. artificial prose, which couldn't be more up my alley if he tried! Shame the world is like this.
Just for clarity, in case anyone else doesn't see it -- I'll just take one paragraph:
Criticism of AI has led to harassment.
AI has been used to publish hit pieces.
Generative AI is used openly to generate sexual abuse material.
AI chatbots have encouraged vulnerable people to commit suicide.
For example: where's the "Social Policy", given that social media is a proven threat in this sense?
*EDIT:* And it's the guy who tried to make his own text editor after lamenting that Zed wasn't enough like Sublime?? Well, I guess it's nice to know I have an inverse doppleganger out there...
We do, but craft workers in the industrial revolution did lose their jobs, and at the pace AI is developing I don't see any reason to believe that professional workers will not eventually have their jobs threatened.
> Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word?
No, I don't think we are. And let me be clear: I was very skeptical about this until recently. I think the models are objectively capable of doing a lot of the job of software engineers now, and increasingly engineers are being pressured to not only use them, but to take themselves out of the loop. There is a reason the conversation of "should we read the code" has been raised in public discourse and engineering talks now. That should concern everyone.
> From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
I am not seeing that: https://metr.org/time-horizons/
And I think if things continue as they have, we are eventually going to see the price of software decline and widespread layoffs soon to follow.
If someone is telling you to not be in the loop, they are not aware of the capability ceiling of agents and llms. Progress appears to be slowing the last few months, people are not finding Opus 5 to be that much better than 4.8, less wow effect these days.
To assume that Ai will lead to mass layoffs is to predict an uncertain future. I'm not worried about it this after years of using these LLMs and agents. There was a capability point reached late last year, the improvements since are minor by comparison. I've had sufficient interactions with others at work (using Ai on code I wrote) to know they are not up to the task. Their attention is too narrow, their fixes locally optimal. They still make stuff up all the time just to be pleasing.
1. AI models produce consistent output, so it looks the same everywhere, which makes you look like a hustler if you use it for copywriting or design.
2. Customers who are fine with this can use Lovable for $20/month, so it's loser's game to chase those customers.
Guy thinks this is his niche. Everyone will go "that's neat" and move on with life.
There was another post on here recently by a translator, whose profession is translating documents, declaring that they won't use AI in their work and anyone who does is a noob and it is no threat to what they do...and it just was amazing stuff. Of course HN pandered to it with lots of "oh yeah that's right you show 'em", but surely we all realize how fantastically silly that was. A web developer / designer who refuses to use AI is rapidly going to be very unemployed, though they might try the purist "no AI here!" angle niche for a tiny delay of that inevitable.
Please don't propagate the "LLMs are artificial intelligence" PR bullsh*t.
Your problem is thinking that "artificial intelligence" has to be whatever you think "intelligence" is. This is as true as "artificial grass" needing to be a type of grass. It's a constructed imitation that solves some of the problems that we normally use grass for. It can be green and spiky, soft to play sports on and pleasant in appearance, but it still is in no way grass, and has no relationship to grass. It is something that fits its category as a tool in some circumstances. An artificial leg is not a leg, it is a piece of metal or plastic with a hinge in it. An artificial heart is not a heart, it is a pump. They are both limited replacements for another thing in some useful circumstances.
Artificial grass, legs, or hearts don't become actual grass, legs or hearts even if they perform better in all use cases that we have for the actual item. They only become "grass," "legs," and "hearts" once we find the distinction to be largely useless and begin to omit it.
I doubt you'll find many who agree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.
The best example of this is security in open source software which maintainers have no choice but to use AI to protect themselves before an attacker can use AI to find and build exploits for security vulnerabilities faster than they can patch it.
In some sectors such as banking, crypto, defense and government, this is extremely critical. It will soon be the same with AI companies who have the AI model and someone could use AI to breach them with the goal of leaking the proprietary model.
So to them, policies like this, are actually a downgrade that they cannot afford to do.
The criticality of a web designer is quite vanishingly low with not that much money on the line. That's why his former customers are going for a $20 Lovable subscription instead of his web designer services.
It is fair to say he has been disrupted.
> You think there's no competition in that space and no incentive to churn things out fast with AI?
There is little to no money in being a human web designer (without AI) in 2026. He is taking a stance in never using AI which he is being out-competed by ultra-low cost AI subscriptions like Lovable, Bolt.new, and the others.
He has no choice but to adapt.
The problem is that it is the market that believes it is now "easy" and it does not care about these policies.
Unless the author believes he can compete for customers without using AI against the AI subscription services for 1/100th of the price per month of a human web designer.