Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

问：为什么 Hacker News 社区如此反感 AI？

Genuine question. Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines. 这是一个真诚的提问。在过去的六个月里，我每天查看 HN 的“最佳”RSS 订阅时，总能看到关于 AI 如何“编写糟糕代码”、“引入 Bug”、“制造技术债”或类似内容的帖子。

I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end? Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works. I say this as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft as a software engineer. 说这话可能会得罪不少人，但大家是否意识到代码仅仅是达成目标的手段？用户并不关心代码是 AI 写的还是手工写的，也不关心你用了什么框架。他们只关心产品是否好用。我以一个磨练了 20 多年软件工程技艺的工程师身份说出这番话。

Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace. At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code. 面对现实吧：当我手动发布产品 1.0 版本时，AI 辅助的版本可能已经快了 10 倍。到那时，现实世界的反馈已经足够多，足以识别出主要问题，而像 Claude Code 这样的工具能以惊人的速度修复并发布 2.0 版本。在某些时候，执行速度比代码的优雅程度更重要。

dang: It’s simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it’s anti-A. This is an invariant. You can see from this megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI. Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other. As for why the community is divided, there’s always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. dang： 这很简单，就是分歧。在每一次 A 对 B 的争论中，A 阵营认为 HN 反对 A，而 B 阵营认为 HN 反对 B。这是一个不变的规律。从目前首页上的这个大型讨论帖可以看出，HN 绝非反 AI。有时只需要一个合适的初始条件（例如标题），就能引出其中一方的观点。至于为什么社区会有分歧，人们总是倾向于寻找 HN 特有的解释，但整个社会对 AI 本身就存在分歧。这无疑是唯一需要的解释。

0ffh: Thoughtful comment, and I’d like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are “divided” on the question as well. I can speak from myself as an example: I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes especially obvious once projects go much beyond “private toy” size. 0ffh： 很有见地的评论，我想补充一个角度：虽然说社区存在分歧很有意义，但我认为个人在这一问题上也是“分裂”的。以我自己为例：我对机器学习及其带来的进步持极其开放的态度。但另一方面，我非常清楚目前的 LLM 经常写出糟糕的代码，一旦项目规模超过“个人玩具”级别，这一点就尤为明显。

thierrydamiba: There’s also the uncomfortable reality that a lot of people spent a lot of time learning how to do things that anyone can prompt now… We tend to ignore that reality but it hangs above all these discussions like a dirty cloud. thierrydamiba： 还有一个令人不安的现实：许多人花费了大量时间学习的技能，现在任何人通过提示词（Prompt）都能做到……我们倾向于忽视这个现实，但它像一片阴云一样笼罩在所有这些讨论之上。

rootusrootus: That does not seem like it should be controversial. I have known for quite a long time that a motivated high school kid could learn to code well enough to be perfectly useful. Especially with popular languages like Python. This is just an object lesson for everyone who thought all that software guys did was write code that there is just a little bit more to the job than that. rootusrootus： 这似乎不应该有争议。我早就知道，一个有动力的中学生完全可以学会编程并写出有用的代码，尤其是像 Python 这样流行的语言。这给那些认为软件工程师只会写代码的人上了一课：这份工作远不止写代码那么简单。

josephg: Yes, I’m in this camp. I’ve been pushing forward some personal projects lately using LLMs. At first, I was delighted at how productive I was, prompting. But over time a lot of cracks have started to show. Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self-contained, well-scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large-scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become riddled with poor design choices layered on top of one another. josephg： 是的，我属于这一阵营。最近我一直在用 LLM 推进一些个人项目。起初，我对提示词带来的生产力感到欣喜。但随着时间的推移，很多裂痕开始显现。Claude 擅长“小规模”编程，能很好地完成自包含、范围明确的任务。但它不擅长大规模的系统思考。久而久之，我让 Claude 编写的每个项目都充斥着层层叠加的糟糕设计选择。

wild_egg: I’m a divided individual. I’ve spent an obscene number of hours learning how to get reliably good quality code out of these things. I’m actually very happy with where the tech is right now and can’t imagine ever going back to typing code by hand. But I absolutely hate how companies and society at large are acting because of this stuff. It feels like all rationality has flown out the window. wild_egg： 我是一个分裂的个体。我花了大把时间学习如何从这些工具中获得高质量的代码。我实际上对目前的技术水平非常满意，无法想象回到纯手工敲代码的日子。但我绝对讨厌公司和社会大众因为这些东西而表现出的行为。感觉所有的理性都抛诸脑后了。