We never use AI. For anything | Hacker News Reader

We never use AI. For anything

corkmac.app

86 pointsfrizlab100 comments

The app is Cork: https://github.com/buresdv/Cork/network/dependencies

It depends on Factory: https://github.com/hmlongco/Factory/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

Sticking to a strident "No AI" policy developing software is going to become increasingly difficult.

It's a dependency that clearly AI is used for during development. Fair point since the blog post is phrased like a total ban on AI in the supply chain

Edit: Landing page says "Completely free of AI. Read our stance." in the hero section. That borders on false advertising

I'd be interested to see the project author's reaction to this. Will he downgrade to an older version of the library out of principle?

Why would you expect a dogmatic approach instead of a more pragmatic one?

We're discussing this on a submission of a dogmatic manifesto.

"We never use AI. For anything." doesn't mean "We audit every single one of our dependencies, and make sure they never use AI".

It surely can. It's what I would assume by default.

"We never use AI. For anything." becomes a much weaker statement when you exclude dependencies. Your whole app could just be a thin wrapper around some third party dependency which leans heavily on AI.

It makes the manifested statements become more realistic, sure, as I doubt any dogmatic approach could even exist for long. But I don't think this warrants anybody to bring out the pitchforks and scream "HYPOCRISY!", though...

This whole thing is a matter of choice, and we shouldn't necessarily conflate the role we take when we consume/use a dependency/tool with the role of crafting own things. I, for one, can apply agency solely on things that offer me means to change them.

> Completely free of AI. Read our stance.

> Turns out to not audit dependencies

I think there's merit to it. It's not as if doing it exclusively with AI is all sunshine and rainbows. As someone doing agentic engineering at work I'm actually starting to sour on it after seeing what it's doing to people's ability to think for themselves and even do basic software engineering tasks.

Oh I shall propose my dependency injection lib, it has not and will never use AI…

Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.

The difference is that one is physical and the other digital. Digital art, even if exceptionally high quality, has been commoditized by artists from developing countries asking dumping wages, and not recovered since. People who have enough money to buy for the "soul" of an object, and the labor behind it, usually buy physical.

I agree with you but I believe the definition of handcrafted will shift to include software produced partly by AI, just as most handcrafted things involve industrial machinary at some point.

But then, I can also imagine a world where nobody cares enough about writing code and instead we have "human designed software" just as we currently have human designed cars and fridges but few made by hand (and no market for them). Then, handwritten software becomes an impressive curiosity like Chris Sawyer's original Rollercoaster Tycoon written entirely in ASM.

Etsy like situation is very possibly. Where people will simply lie about something being handcrafted to sell it at some sort of premium. And then when questioned defend it with reasoning like everyone else is doing it or it doesn't matter or it is actually superior.

I doubt it. Software is, well, software. Most people have their aesthetic preferences in regard to clothing or furniture, and aesthetics of these are obvious to anyone. Code that runs on a device and implements some functionality is not like it. It is more like infrastructure - nobody cares about handcrafted sewage pipes. Plumbers possibly can have strong preferences regarding plumbing, but other people don't.

“I’m not an elitist,” Green said. “It’s just that I’d much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen.”

https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...

Off-topic, but this Onion piece is a bit weak. The hook is that the man is obnoxious about his habit of not watching TV, and that's all there is to it.

Some stuff from the Onion is genius, but this is not it.

> All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.

This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.

So does this one.

The hacker news echo chamber gone literal.

There's a reason the biggest market for datacenters is in northern Virginia, and it ain't for the cheap power.

> AI will lead to a tyrannical police state > What will happen once the rug invariably gets pulled? Those data centers will start serving another purpose. > All around the world, governments are assembling massive networks of cameras, “license plate readers” that are suspiciously equipped with microphones sensitive enough to listen in on your conversations, and other unimaginable surveillance devices. > All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.

Isn't there a case to be made that this is/already has been the case and is not uniquely an AI thing? The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?

If I was maintaining such a boutique implementation I could probably do without AI as well, sans the moral high ground posting.

Yeah. What do they want, a golden star next to their name?

This is the kind of posturing that leads nowhere. If you're concerned about resource usage then use an open model locally

Why would an open local model use less resources?

My advice: let these people think what they want, it reduces competition in an already saturated market

To put it bluntly: this particular product category is now an afternoon's vibe-coding project for one person. The result would be worse code, probably. Also probably still good enough.

> The result would be worse code, probably. Also probably still good enough.

And that's because the definition of "good enough" is drifting towards "crappy", has been for decades, now accelerated by the AI.

Was thinking the other day how the bars of quality for software pre-Internet was so much higher just because any small software shop only ever had one shot: ship your software on floppy disks, with practically no chance to patch and fix bugs later. People either like your 1.0 or they don't and that's your whole business story.

Then came the Internet, bug fix updates became so much easier, and with it came crappification and bugs-as-a-norm attitude.

And now this.

Not whining, just stating the facts.

> And that's because the definition of "good enough" is drifting towards "crappy", has been for decades, now accelerated by the AI.

Interestingly I have found the opposite in the software I write. LLMs make it so easy to get the basics in place that I spend the time on the details and polish.

Are you measuring the number of bugs per line of code in production, compared to pre-AI? That's the metric.

Nothing so scientific. Im just having a lot of fun using the software I write with LLMs because I can easily add polish and build things I didnt have time for before.

Ah yes, just want I want, slopcoded dev tools by people who don’t understand what the fuck they’re doing and who will drop support the moment their agents hit some minor issue.

More developers need to grow a spine and take this stance.

Good on them, and shame on those dumping on them.

As much as I want to agree with this, for some of the reasons given, even I must admit that AI does have its uses. I think a reasonable take is the ObjFW one:

https://git.nil.im/ObjFW/ObjFW/src/branch/main/documentation...

> AI/LLMs cannot be used to generate any code, documentation, assets or similar – all of it needs to be 100% written by a human.

> Utilizing AI/LLMs to help find bugs in the code or to help with debugging is acceptable. However, if the AI/LLM proposes a patch, this cannot be used – the AI/LLM should be instructed to only explain bugs or fixes, but never produce any code.

> Using an AI/LLM agent to create tickets is not acceptable. However, using an AI/LLM for translation between languages in tickets is acceptable.

I tend to agree this is the only reasonable use of AI indeed.

This statement reminds me of how older Queen albums like A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races proudly stated that No synthesizers! were used in the production of songs like Bohemian Rhapsody. Of course Queen did eventually relent and used these instruments on later albums. Did they do right in not using synths back then? Sure they did. Did they do right in using synths in their later albums? Sure they did. Does a statement like No synthesizers! or 'We never use AI. For anything' have added value other than informing the reader about the tools used to create a work? No, not really.

Reads like religion, not fact based analysis.

I'm by now past the point where I thought "this is a great tool that will help me programming" to the fear phase where I know it will destroy my job and career. But still I can't agree fully with the article. Hallucinations are not the issue. We can extract value from it even when it does hallucinate.

The only reason we're having this discussion is because AI is intelligent and therefore poses a threat to us.

AI has no intelligence whatsoever though… Well not entirely true, but the only intelligence there is in AI is the human one behind it all.

Seems like this is old?

> AI is not intelligent, and hallucinations are a feature

How the times have changed... I would have agreed two years ago.

A lot of these criticisms seem to be very 2023-coded.

There have been a lot of hiccups to the transition towards using AI-assisted code but, ignoring some of that sloppiness, I've enjoyed the product velocity from some of the services/apps I know that heavily use coding agents.

That's a strange hill to die on. It's like saying we will never use an IDE or static linter or syntax highlighter etc...

Also there are already non-VC subsidized hosted open weights LLM providers which should give you a very good sense of the marginal cost.

IDEs and static linters are tools that produce deterministic results, and AI does not. You simply can't compare them.

And the human beings who use them to produce code don't produce deterministic results either. Current harnesses have come a long a way to make non determinism not be a problem for quite a few areas. And the scope keeps increasing every day.

So, determinism is the core of the issue for you?

I'm sorry but you can compare them in the sense that they're just computer programs that can be useful to you.

AI is as deterministic as a human programmer. A programmer who is burned out and has not slept well produces code of a different quality than a programmer who has slept well and is highly motivated. That's hardly deterministic. AI can be made deterministic enough if you have strict quality gates, just like with humans.

Yet nevertheless, both e.g. syntax highlighting and intellisense have been heralded as things that "fry ur brain". So have high level programming languages by the way.

To give you a particularly specific example, Rob Pike really wants you to know that if you use syntax highlighting, he thinks of you as a child.

There were many folks rejecting IDes for long while and also RAD. They kept doing assembly and C with macros’ all over.

Still I’m quite alright with people kneading on one hand while there’s the big bad Jacquard Loom.

BTW I vividly remember there was the older non-programmable loom at my grandmas place and it was huge. Like one room big. People used both techniques though and nobody hated it. Eventually there was also a foot powered Zinger and eventually the electrical one. All these coexisted and I’ve never seen a printed manifesto against any of them.

Pretty sure also people were smarter back then.

I am pretty sure the Luddites did more than just print manifestos.

IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters aren't designed to replace any part of the problem solving process, but rather augment them. It's impossible to become dependent on any of these tools to the point where your cognitive skills begin to atrophy, unlike LLMs [1].

IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters aren't the cause of a global microchip shortage, immensely increased energy demand, or the destruction of rare works. They have not, at any point, been the cause of effectively DDoS attacks in an effort to slurp up all of the internet's data, or the extensive proliferation of hallucinated content on the internet.

The development of IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters has at no point employed low-paid labor from third world countries for data labelling or safety filtering, exposing thousands of people to violent and abusive content for multiple hours a day.

Any of these issues alone would be a reasonable cause for adopting a policy to avoid using such tools. Calling it equivalent to not using IDEs or linters is bizarre to me.

* [1]: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

It’s truly a waste of time to post this sort of content here anymore. The community is too far gone and the hackers and enthusiasts have long left for greener pastures.

The torch of software engineering will be carried by people like the author going forward.

I don’t think that something that feels like aura farming is an especially sound basis on which to choose your technology stack.

If you’ve done a proper cost-benefit analysis and truly found that it’s not yet worth it for your use case, great.

But if you’ve decided it _would_ be helpful but then decided ostentatiously not to use it so you can farm clout on Twitter… not so good.

This quote from the post makes me sad for all the researchers and all the math and the scaling and the investing that I believe was done in good faith in pursuit of pure science and betterment for us all:

"AI is designed to make you dependent on it"

This is throwing a lot of agentic opacity bathwater and not really looking what else's in there.

Trying to hold back the tide hasn't worked particularly often for innovation throughout human history

This feels like saying you'll never use self-driving cars.

Sure, LLM effectiveness might seem debatable to some (not for me), but these things improve frequently. So saying you'll never use it, is a red flag to me and I question what other technologies and advancements you ignore.

Reminds me the viral "lonely penguin" video from Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World shows a single penguin turn away from the sea and walked fatal interior mountains of Antarctica instead of staying with its group

I agree with most of what’s written here though the tone is a bit smug and off-putting. The important point is this though:

> corporate executives love AI because it is extremely good at one thing - making you think it knows what it’s talking about, and masterfully avoiding any accountability.

Whether or not the LLM output is actually correct is often overshadowed by efforts to convince people that it is. This to me is the most concerning thing about AI (in its current state): the potential for mis/disinformation is huge and the companies controlling AI are more interested in it being widely used than in it being factually correct.

Sort of like how you can be a vegan without verifying that no animal ever died and decomposed and got uptaken by the root system of whatever plant you end up eating.

This movement came from consequentialism instead of deontology.

The goal is to avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering to other animals. Eating a bug while breathing or from a plant nutrients source is a nanominimal problem in that regard.

We're entering a hilarious new world where people advertise their "artesanal", "hand carved", "organic" software of all things.

I find it very interesting that in a website that is ostensibly made up of the curious minded, the top level responses are everything but. From accusations of religious rhetoric, to outright dismissing the argument because they are 'old'. And the conversation naturally veers back into 'are humans not prediction machines themselves?', 'LLMs are much improved recently' and 'hand coding will be relegated to the artisans like other forms of art'. Nothing intellectually stimulating from the AI proponent crowd. Perhaps that's why they are fascinated by LLMs to begin with.

I get what they want to state, but in the end the progress won't be stopped. It never was. If the opportunity exists, it will be used.

This reads like ragebait trolling, like it's on purpose so completely out of touch to gain attention.

But maybe it was written years ago idk.

Is it just me or if you replace in the article "A.I." with "Humans", it would still be plausible? Don't get me wrong, I think those are fine points, but I see as many applications of the same situations that would be generated by A.I. that were and are actively generated by humans.

"AI is designed to make you dependent on it" - pre-AI service subscriptions - music, movies, you name it.

"AI is not intelligent, and hallucinations are a feature" - yes, pretty much the same way most (if not all) humans I ever interacted with hallucinate some times; me included. And I don't think it needs fixing (it's not a disease, it's a feature for us also), it just needs dealing-with.

"AI is great at lying. And that’s it." - Where shall I start about humans lying and being great at it? I just can't seem to find a good example....

"AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives" - pretty much humans have been inflicting this kind of damage onto themselves and our environment since the start of time, and even more so once doing this accelerated due to heavy machinery that can do what humans never could.

"AI will lead to a tyrannical police state" - Again, don't get me started on the ingenuity of humans building tyrannical police states.

[Edit: typos]

This one will age quite remarkably.

> We are still in the gravy train part of the rug pull scam

Can we stop using this argument? Multiple Opus/Fable class open source models have shown the prices are sustainable with open models and self hosting.

People using these arguments are stopping better arguments from surfacing (loss of agency in workplace, junor ot senior training path, etc).

Ironic, as AI can probably build this app locally in an hour or so.

I use it for new code base summary, documentation lookup, code review, improvement suggestions, security audit, everything but writing code, I still do that by hand. I'm more productive and my skills improve. Reviewing slop burns me out. I can't be the only one.

I think this whole piece is just a collection of lazy cliches.

- Rug pull scam

What's going to happen when the AI companies jack up prices 20x to meet API prices? 1: they won't, because they'll get their lunch eaten immediately by 2: the local models that are almost as good that you can run yourself (with a few thousand in hardware costs).

- AI is not intelligent

This doesn't matter at all, as long as it performs the task who cares? It's better that it's not intelligent because otherwise we'd be enslaving it. A plane doesn't flap its wings but it gets you somewhere - without actually "flying".

Hallucinations are also clearly way less prevalent than, say, 2023. Perhaps it's not possible to get rid of them totally, but there's much fewer.

- AI is the most successful con man in history

If this is true, won't AI-free companies soon outcompete ones that use AI? I'm afraid this is just wishful thinking. You can easily create complete garbage with AI but if you know how to code you can also be much more productive, hence why so many renowned programmers, mathematicians, creators of languages and so on use it.

- AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives

How could a data centre be polluting the water with rust? The power problem is true but the amount of land used by them is miniscule.

- AI will lead to a tyrannical police state

It could contribute, but we've had surveillance since long before AI. The Stasi had mass surveillance without even computers (which I would say have been much more conducive to the proliferation of surveillance).

- Nobody knows what AI even is

Then what did you just spend the rest of the page complaining about?

Thanks for writing this! Was about to say something adjacent but much less structured and precise.

if someone knows this guy, please provide him a good therapist, he really needs one.

I was thinking about this anti AI sentiment and how it is related to American individualism. In socialist countries like China there has never been a protest related to data centres or job loss etc. unlike in the USA. Because the large scale impact of AI on the country is exclusively a net positive.

The reduction of the individuals cost of labour by also reduces perceived egalitarianism which is the mental model used by ultra capitalists to allow themselves to sleep at night whilst homeless people beg for food on the streets.

The long term impact of AI on society is exclusively a net positive if utilised in the correct way. But most of the westerners lack faith in government fiscal policy and think that they are going to be left destitute when they can no longer provide for themselves. When in fact UBI is going to be the most likely outcome.

They are myopically focusing on the short term labour market effects of AI on their own profession instead of realising the long term utopian societal outcome.

"We need to ban AI because I'm going to lose my job!" - This is only said by someone who is winning in their society and wants to maintain the status quo not by those who slipped through the cracks.

Another AI hater making a fool of themself.

Look, it’s fine to be anti AI. You don’t need to justify it.

But when you say it’s bad at programming then you’re just proving your own ignorance. Honestly saying AI can’t program in the same breath as saying you don’t use it makes you look like a fool.

Be anti AI - no problem with that, just don’t be an ignorant ill informed fool.

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