Ask HN: Looking for programmers who don't use and don't want to use AI

12 points by Eliah_Lakhin 99 days ago | 28 comments

Hello everyone,

I would like to know if there are programmers, communities, conferences, companies, forums etc, where people deliberately refuse to use any forms of AI tools for software development.

I'm looking for the same-minded people who are willing to keep developing hand-made things, and don't want to use AI tools at least in personal projects. If there are already existing communities, I will be glad to join.

What I mean by not using AI tools:

1. It means that you don't use it at all, not even GitHub Copilot for code completions. Everything you create, you made by hand.

2. If you are using AI for something else aside from your personal projects - it is ok. For example, if you are requested to use it on your current job, or like to discuss with ChatGPT your cooking recipes on weekends, it does not count as using AI for software development.

To clarify, I'm not against AI. This technology is marvelous, and it is totally fine if you are using it. I'm just looking for people who don't use it, because they don't want to.

conartist6 99 days ago |

Someone called for me!? It's deeply unfashionable to believe in human potential, but, well, I do. I am one of the last working (human) hackers. See: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html.

My reasoning in not using AI (at all) is many-fold. First, I am a powerful learning model, the most powerful one I have access to. This model is so powerful that to reach its true potential I must continually feed it huge amounts of learning experiences and training data. I must seek out other unique perspectives and try to understand them. There is virtually no end to the amount of data this model in me can process and integrate using tools like "philosophy" and "logic".

Second, it seems to me that models have shown us that the human limitation is not our ability to think, but how fast we can type. The model-first people think that means that we must find a way to offload all our ideas to agents, since agents are on the other side of the low-bandwidth interface that is the keyboard. I just think we need to arm the human with more expressive tools: an instrument, not an assistant.

Third, most people have stopped believing in the potential of great software. They seem to think that the tools we have now are the best that can ever be made, so by their reasoning there wouldn't be much point to getting good at building new things when instead you could learn to copy what already exists.

If you're interested in the tools we're making to mint a whole new generation of (human) hackers, I would urge you to come check out the BABLR Discord! It's where we work on our tools, talk philosophy, and boot anyone who tries to sell us their AI shit. https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX

Every line of this code in the BABLR ecosystem was written by human hands too: https://github.com/orgs/bablr-lang/. In five years of full-time OSS work I've built a streaming regex engine, the world's most powerful streaming parser, a language-agnostic AST/CST format, and a data serialization language that will eventually replace both XML and HTML: https://docs.bablr.org/guides/cstml

chromoblob 99 days ago | |

are you against technologically modifying your body in order to become more productive? if no, then why not do that?

conartist6 99 days ago | | |

Well I put a ski straight through my ulnar nerve once and a surgeon had to splice nerve lining from my wrist into my elbow.

I'm also currently wearing technological augmentations on my wrists. I call them "the gloves of coding" and they help me not succumb to carpel tunnel.

And yeah, I spend all my time building developer tools, which are a technological means of augmenting your brain. I just happen to focus on technology that is deterministic.

dryark 99 days ago |

I'm against AI. I've written two books on the topic so far. I also use AI, as I must if my software company is going to make money. There is no choice any more.

If I had a choice I wouldn't use AI for anything, ever. It's a blight on humanity. But it is a blight everyone has chosen so we are stuck with it.

archagon 99 days ago |

I'm not sure I'll be fully anti-AI in perpetuity: the future is hard to predict. But it's certainly becoming clear to me that we need "-noai" variants of programming communities.

pera 99 days ago |

Virtually everyone on Mastodon is against generative AI

chromoblob 99 days ago | |

care to explain the discerning characteristic of the term 'virtually everyone' as compared to synonyms?

chromoblob 99 days ago |

what's wrong with using AI as a language-extrapolation tool specifically, for people who absolutely forego AI in personal projects? is it that "language is God-like" and therefore cannot be extrapolated artificially?

Eliah_Lakhin 99 days ago | |

I'm not quite understand what "language-extrapolation" actually means.

Personally, I don't use AI because I like to program myself. There are many other reasons, but this simple one dominates.

MaxMussio 99 days ago | | |

Programming with the use of AI can still be seen as programming but at a different level of abstraction.

Depending on your "job to be done", you will prefer one level of abstraction or another.

Example from before AI: I've always hated javascript frameworks like nest.js because they were doing too much magic under the hood. But for a simple CRUD application in MVP, I'd might use it.

chromoblob 99 days ago | | |

language extrapolation is extrapolation applied to language.

example: you try to come up with the name for the most promising next tool (as in, a concept), as you personally judge how it should be named best. (IF YOU KNOW HOW TO TALK, you should have no problems with this.) you ask AI to explain that term. if AI misses significantly, you make your term more precise. pro tip. inspired by my learning style. example can be seen in my latest submission

i like to program myself by hand too, but you can use AI for programming others.

chromoblob 99 days ago |

wait till you conceptualize "hand-made AI"