Friends, just write the code. It’s not that hard.
My main job is running a small eComm business, and I have to both develop software automations for the office (to improve productivity long-term) while also doing non-coding day to day tasks. On top of this, I maintain an open source project after hours. I've also got a young family with 3 kids.
I'm not saying Claude is the damn singularity or anything, but stuff is getting done now that simply wasn't being addressed before.
It’s fine for you to take a stand, but please understand your position is simply factually wrong if you think you can outprogram Claude for a range of common tasks.
Being anti AI is fine, but if you deny facts of how far LLM programming has come then you lack credibility.
The most effective anti AI position is to acknowledge it’s power, not pretend that vast numbers of people are somehow hallucinating the power of LLM assisted programming.
Programming is not hard. You’re just lazy.
Childish and naive.
If you said you’ve been using Claude heavily and it’s never done better than you on your own, then your position would be credible.
There is a reason discussions about agent use have been on Hacker News every other day, and it's not a grand conspiracy. Even in this submission, people have talked about how they have used Claude Code and its longer context window successfully as a tool for programming, even if they may be technically skilled to do it themselves. However, if you assume that every commenter is acting in bad faith, then there's no point in continuing.
That being said, I’ve seen hard evidence that pro AI bots do exist on HN.
And at the very large tech company I work at there is a push for everyone to spend more on Claude Code regardless of output. The metric is literally how much you’re spending on Claude Code not how much you’re producing (and in my org we’ve seen no measurable increase in productivity). People are legitimately trying to figure out the easiest way to get it to blow through their allocated credits.
I use AI all the time, I find that Opus 4.6 is great for all kinds of tasks. I don’t think it’s all just hype, but there’s clearly some serious astroturfing going on here, and I understand the urge to be suspicious of everyone.
I know that pro LLM bots exist. Here’s an example https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7
If you look at the timestamps you’ll see instances of it posting faster than a human could.
I know that there are numerous companies with hundreds of billions of valuation predicated on AI being better than just a useful addition to the programmers toolbox.
There are even more companies making millions off of the current hype.
People in these companies now have access to tools that can generate spam that’s nearly indistinguishable from ham. Of course some of them are using that capability.
Of course existence of astroturfing by itself doesn’t imply that that astroturfing is effective.
For that I’d point to other evidence. My personal experience with LLMs doesn’t match the hype. The experience of every single close programmer friend whose technical ability I trust, doesn’t match the hype. The output of my organization doesn’t match the hype. I can’t find any publicly verifiable numbers that match the hype. No new operating systems, no new browsers, no vibe coded hit games, the number of games released on Steam hasn’t gone up drastically, the number of apps on the Apple App Store has, but not if you filter out apps that are just wrappers for LLM APIs. Multiple studies show no impact on GDP, publicly traded software companies are showing large impacts to their bottom line etc…
Then you have things like my company pushing people to spend hundreds of thousands (per person) on Claude with zero productivity requirements. This is weird. I think the most likely explanation is an artificially inflated hype cycle.
Why should I spend my mental energy doing simple things just to avoid being perceived as “lazy”? I have endless other engineering work to do other than typing code.
If most people are average, then just use the bot to spit out average code. Or better yet, if you are above average, use it to spit out average code and then you need above average code, then write it.
Most programming is boilerplate. Its not faster to type boilerplate than t is to have the robot do it. I promise.
Programming is hard. If it wasn't you wouldn't be getting paid what you do.
Note that I'm not talking about the low-level grunt work (and even with that, its just that it is tedious and time-consuming, but if I had enough time to read through all the docs and stuff, I will almost always produce grunt code of much higher quality).
But I'm more talking about architecture, the stuff of proper higher level engineering. I use Claude Opus all the time, and I cannot even count how many times I've had to redirect its approach that was obviously betraying a complete lack of seeing the big picture, or some egregiously smelly architectural approach.
Also, expressive typing. I use mostly TypeScript, and it will often give up when I try to push it beyond a certain point, and resort to using "any". Then I have to step and do the job myself.