Hacker News is a community of many disparate voices and opinions, at every level of skill and coming from many perspectives, demographics and corners of the globe. In this entry I’m talking about the average HN user, which I will label Joe HackerNews. The aggregation that decides what comments and submissions rise to the top, and ensure that others are pummelled to transparent or flagged away.
Use the site enough and you can clearly see trends and group-think come and go. It has been interesting watching the evolution of AI discussions on the site.
There are the oft cited five stages of grief that people move through when confronted with a shock or loss. It’s a controversial simplification device, and like a Barnum effect we make reality fit the stages when often it’s much more nuanced and non-linear.
Whatever. This is a football 🏈🦉 Sunday before-first-coffee post, so I’m running with it. Lots of pushups left to do.
Denial: “AI will never understand the code I work with, or the complex domain I work in. That’s only a tool for shitty web apps and juniors that don’t know what they’re doing!”
Anger: “AI stole all of our comments, blog posts and github repos. Do you think we can sue and shut them down?”
Bargaining: “Okay I installed CoPilot and read a tutorial on how backpropagation works. Pretty much up to date. I’m AI augmented and ready for the next century. Should I vibe code the next $10B SaaS unicorn?”
Depression: “It’s over. The field is ruined. Our educations and experience are worthless. The end is nigh.” ⬅️ WE ARE HERE
Acceptance: To be seen how this unfolds.
The denial phase was intolerable, people desperately trying to convince everyone that they are a unique snowflake and work in an advanced unique domain with unique needs, where there’s no way the thinking machine has relevance for them. You still see this sort of person occasionally — “only bad developers get value out of AI, but not me because I’m a great developer” — and generally it’s just delusion with a side of denial.
Just as weird are the “AI has peaked” sorts. At every stage they’ve announced that this is it, AI can’t get any better and now we just wait until the big ponzi-scheme that is the AI market collapses and the ruse will be over. And then it keeps getting better again, and again, and again, even with unknown outsiders on a tight budget popping in with crazy models that make last year’s SOTA look like garbage.
Anger was a conflicted one where the same people who celebrate that information should be free, everything should be open source, every API public, and so on, lamented that algorithmic use was made of that. It’s especially weird when developers complain about other developers looking to automate their jobs away, because this is literally what most software development is: In some way we’re making a machine do something a human could do. Our entire profession is allowing people to do more with less.
Even if you just make a library and post it on github…aren’t you taking away the jobs of every business that would have had to employ developers to make that functionality from scratch, you monster?
Bargaining saw about a thousand “Introduction to tokens” submissions being voted to the top, followed by waves of basic neural network explanations. And to be clear, I’m not being patronizing in noting this, but you could see the collective move to the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join em” stage, perhaps not realizing how outrageously high the entry stakes are now.
Joe HackerNews is now at depression. Posts like this one lamenting the loss of the craft are topping the front page. The comments across almost all AI discussions are veering to positively grim, and have a very “end game” feel to them.
This isn’t the first time the community felt such a threat. Around the turn of the century every board was sure that all software jobs were going to India. The release of GUI builders like Visual Basic were going to put software devs out of work, making building apps into simple work, and even apps like Microsoft Access had forms and flows and could run as an application built by a layman.
Before that CASE tools were going to automate it into some middle-management drag and drop.
I very much have skin in this game. Aside from my own professional operations, one of my sons is in the middle of computer science program, just starting some coop placements. Another is still in high school and makes good money developing for the Roblox community. A daughter does creative works, including 3D modelling for games, and obviously she can feel the pressure on her field. My other son is still selecting his career, considering the medical field, and even there, like almost everywhere, AI is ominous.
It is something I think about constantly, and it can feel overwhelming and like there is no clear path to prepare for the future.
I have notes that I’ll use for a much longer piece on AI that I’ll get to at some point, and this microblog piece was not meant to be particularly illuminating or useful. Just some lazy morning thoughts.
If there is one take away that I would offer up: You can’t argue reality away. Posting comments saying AI is trash, slop, can’t write good code, etc, doesn’t change the path that we are on the tiniest iota. You can’t argue a different reality into existence, and it’s just wasted words trying to do so, even if you find a community that will start chanting in unison to manifest their hopes.
AI is already surprisingly good, and it’s rapidly getting better.