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Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

I laugh at the vibe coding nonsense now -- yeah, a million people making tiny variations of the same crappy web games is not revelatory -- but it truly does feel like there are extremes that are just as harmful.

On the one side are the super enthusiasts who grossly oversell to try to seem innovative and "with it", hoping they can claim some land in the great new AI development world.

On the other side are the head-in-sand types who keep railing about how useless AI is, it's a stochastic parrot, only super juniors find it useful and it holds no value for the Super Novel Work that they engage in, etc. You see this sort of commentary on here all the time.

Right now it's somewhere in the middle. I find the tools extremely helpful in my day to day, and they've completely changed how I work, and the tools are growing more valuable with each passing week.

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I've not run into anyone who says AI is useless. I'm highly critical of AI as an "everything machine", won't let it code for me and believe AGI is a pipe dream... and I still have incorporated it into my workflow as a rubber duck, idea soundboard and documentation search engine.

On the other hand I've run into way too many people (dozens in person, hundreds online) who are overselling AI, most with a direct financial interest as their motivation.

It's not true that the sides are at all balanced unless you create an extreme "anti-AI" side that doesn't exist.

> I've not run into anyone who says AI is useless.

There's a front page post on HN at least once a week about how AI is useless. And in the threads that aren't about AI being useless, at least one person who will comment that they are.

Okay, I will concede it isn't balanced.

There are magnitudes more delusional or in-denial people underselling AI in hopes that they can create a reality and that the status quo remains unchanged (and they're probably sure that everyone impressed by AI assists all are really shills, bots, etc. It's a pretty classic cope mechanism). Magnitudes. Every discussion about AI on this very site, which presumably includes a higher than normal proportion of early adopters, yields the highly up-ranked "Sure it's useful for crappy developers, but not for me The Excellent Developer and my Extremely Novel Needs". Many, many devs on here last experienced AI development assists in the era of the first release of CoPilot, and carry all of those initial assessments forward unchanged.

These people absolutely dwarf the tiny number of social media agitators that ply the "AI has replaced devs! I am the 100X vibe coding CEO" type nonsense.

I think it’s like any other tool. Some people get better mileage out of it than others.

There are even very skilled and accomplished engineers that don’t even use language servers.

Not programming, but even some legendary Disney animators still draw out their key frames by hand… on paper… in pen.

Build with what you build best with.

Personally, they help with little refactors and occasionally a quick, difficult to google, question, usually about syntax.

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