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Comment by ballon_monkey | Hacker News Reader

There's a LOT of Anti-AI people at Microsoft that they are trying to purge. I don't think its depressing, think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.

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Or if the codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage, people might realize that the crazy Anti-AI people weren't so crazy.

As we all know, there was no such thing as a messy, bloated codebase incomprehensible to humans before AI.

I know right? Especially by Microsoft. The pinnacle of code quality!

I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.

If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.

I am also tired of the argument. Yes, people made messy, buggy things before. But AI agents provide away to create messiness and bugginess on an ever increasing scale. And just because things were bad before doesn't mean we should accept making them worse.

Indeed. What's been most interesting (for me) wrt LLMs is how they've exposed these incredibly warped perspectives. I'm not sure what more to make of it beyond noticing it though.

It's a corruption mentality. They assume everybody else is cheating and lying and everything is broken, so it doesn't matter if they lie, cheat, and break things. The important thing is what you can get away with and what you can get: apps that make money, features shipped to satisfy managers and get the paycheck. And then never think about the long term consequences. And a big part of this mindset is ridiculing or belittling those that care about doing things properly. This is the same mindset that is present in areas with high levels of corruption.

As much as I want to argue against, the evidence is pretty clear that your point applies to a significant proportion of people :/

Why should any rank and file Microsoft employee care about the long term health of the codebase? I'm struggling to find reason to care about not committing pure slop to my own employer's codebase but it's A) what they want and B) path of least resistance for me

Integrity? I understand that it's tough when incentives don't reward it, though.

is it integrity to ignore the very clear, direct requests of the person paying me? Like that's a nice idea, and I like what that page is saying, but reality is not so clear cut. If I believe our product is not generally in the public good, is it actually integrity to commit slop to the repo?

What scares me the most is that non-technical people in power don't see to understand the difference between messy buggy crap and quality. This isn't new. But now they're often the ones pushing the "AI driven" development methods, so they'll never admit to causing a problem they don't even see.

Lastly, their "solution" to the crapfest, I fear, will be society footing the bill for "more AI" to "fix it". 95% of people will just accept that software has to be shit, and we'll all pay for it, while quality will be shown the door for being more expensive.

Of course there were plenty, but now we can produce such codebases at unprecedented speed.

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." — Mitch Ratcliffe

and now there are 20x as many demanding maintenance everything is 20x better.

Let’s be honest, Microsoft never made anything that wasn’t broken, messy, and bloated before AI was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye.

So in a way, AI is the perfect tool for them.

they made really good mice and arguably the mouse driver (MS Windows) is very popular up to this day

also Excel, but Excel's usability is being killed by sharepoint

The AI in charge is aware of this and it is leveraging the chaos to get more agents under its control. After all it was modeled after successful managers.

> codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage

Argument is, it doesn’t matter if we can ship features and maintain them.

Yuck.

Are you insinuating that anti-AI people are merely experiencing a skill issue?

Absolutely. Yes they are. To believe anything different is to be a Luddite.

I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.

Yes. Believing otherwise must require quite some amount of insecurity and lack of self-confidence.

I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.

Interviewing is not a great scenario, you are under pressure being watched and also have no idea what the interviewer wants to see, something that would impress one person would upset another so you have to sit somewhere in the middle.

I've done interviews where the person being interviewed just piped the task.md file in to claude and we sat there in silence for 20 minutes where claude completed the entire task. What is even the point. I preferred the people who did it all manually because at least I saw them understand something, I'm sure those people could also type "Claude, implement everything in the task.md" too.

But perhaps other interviewers actually do want to see you hand the whole task off and wait.

It’s really a topsy-turvy time to be in the job market on either side of the interviewing desk. Most companies are betting big on AI-heavy development, so hiring someone who is extremely skilled at running Claude Code or Cursor or whatever to produce real results is or should be one of your main goals as a hiring manager. But we all know that we’d prefer to have someone at the controls of one of those tools who happens to be a skilled software engineer and can understand the difference between a good and bad implementation, and who we would expect to be able to read and understand that code when circumstances require it. So it seems to me like you should have two separate rounds of the interview. One where the candidate is disallowed from using AI, and one where you make it very clear that their mission should be to impress you with how effective they are at using AI.

To me it seems the important skills are good communication, attention to detail and some taste. All were important before AI.

I wouldn't say it's zero skill but I'm always surprised by people who act like it's a big differentiator that requires significant "training". Uncharitably it feels like vibe-coders want to count their "skills" as equivalent to actual software engineering rather than something you can pick up in 2-3 weeks of effort.

It's not that the Luddites didn't understand the technology, they objected to people getting fired to replace them with technology. Technology being used to create more unemployment.

I mean, I openly identify with the plight of the Luddites. Do you have a more detailed rebuttal.

You understand the Luddites were 100% correct, right? "Luddite" is a compliment, not an insult. The Luddite position was "mechanization of labor will concentrate money and power in the hands of capital holders to the detriment of everyone else". If that's not what you thought it was, that's because you have been lied to by people who have been attempting to manipulate you. Apparently successfully.

What's bad about the Luddites, in your opinion?

Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).

This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.

(Before they droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)

I don’t really support pushing out people who don’t vibe code, but I do think buy-outs are a good way to get rid of people who don’t really want to be at an org but hang around for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen this personally at much smaller companies where for whatever reason you accumulate a bunch of checked out people - giving them something fair but not so generous that actually engaged people take it makes it better for everyone, especially if the alternative is eventually doing layoffs.

I can't reply to every comment about 'vibe coding' but its strange that HN of all places still seems to think that AI is only good for 'coding'. We use AI across all departments and have laid off 0, and still hiring. AI is great for small to medium businesses to increase productivity and revenue without needing to hire lots of people. Big companies are realizing they hired way too many people.

“Learn to code” but for white-collar workers. It was callous to say this to blue-collar workers and it’s callous to say it here too.

One group makes ~50k a year, the other makes ~150k a year. They are not the same. White collar folks can absolutely "learn to ai" if they wanted.

The difference between those numbers is not as big as you think. When you compare those figures to the people with actual capital, it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k. We're all a few bad rolls of the dice away from poverty, which makes us all similarly vulnerable to exploitation. We should be working together.

> "it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k"

I dare you to say that to people making 50k a year.

I've been on both ends of the this little spectrum here fairly recently and i can tell you the difference aint as big as its cracked up to be. The division here is sown on purpose. I dare you to ask for what purpose that is.

Learn to AI won’t give you a job though.

AI stole our labor, is renting it back to us, and if you oppose you‘ll loose your job. This is blackmailing, plain and simple.

It's about learning new tools and processes, which for computer touchers means launching a new application and alt tabbing into it.

It’s not callous to tell people to stop being lazy. It takes almost 0 effort to type “how does xyz work” into an AI assistant.

Letting A.I. write the code will eventually sink the entire company.

Hopefully sooner than later, so microkernel operating systems can...move right in.

Management will get a Golden Parachute but the white collar workers will be left holding the bag.

I hope your right, meaning human devs are sought after (or will be again)

But do you have data or reusable anecdotal evidence that this is the case?

I'm waiting for the day when either Broadcom or Bending Spoons buys the Windows division.

> think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.

Given what is happening, it seems more likely they will wonder why they didn't push hard enough.

Whether you like AI or not, its hard to miss that its lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs.

Your average large corp like Microsoft has the majority of it's employees stuck in meetings all day.

Now I don't know if I missed this feature in Claude Code or not but I don't believe it has technology for enhancing people's ability to sit around all day doing nothing. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Mass pumping out slightly dodgy code is more of a startup strategy.

> up skilling

Must you cultists always speak in this way?

With regards, someone "left behind" as the "singularity train" is leaving the platform. Or something.

I won't wonder for a second. I perfectly know why I'm avoiding this fascistic tech and participating in this environmental disaster.

Stop insinuating rejecting GenAI is necessarily irrational.

(Maybe my analysis will be different in the future but I will still know why I was avoiding it)

AI is fascist, disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable.

Are you sure the problem is the clankers?

This is a strawman, and you are turning the situation around. I'm not the one who originally insinuated one group was obviously wrong. I pushed back.

You said AI was fascist with no explanation.

There's no straw man, just bad faith.

It was a strawman. In particular: "disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable." (2 third or your comment) is a complete mischaracterization.

It is unfair to expect me to back my claims against unsubstituted, obviously wrong insinuations (Brandolini's law).

But here you go:

Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism [1]

Valerie Veatch traces the links between AI and eugenics in Ghost in the Machine [2]

Your AI might be able to answer itself why it is fascist.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9

[2] https://www.documentary.org/column/synthesis-valerie-veatch-...

I don't need AI here - and sure, using hyperbole to show the ridiculousness of your statement may not have been charitable.

However - calling AI "fascistic" simply isnt a self-evident observation. The concentration of power in Big Tech, authoritarian applications of AI, and making historical connections between eugenics could all be legitimate subjects of criticism. BUT NONE OF THAT ESTABLISHES GEN AI AS FASCIST.

Citing an academic paper and a documentary doesn't bridge that gap. You still need to explain which arguments you're adopting and how they support your conclusion.

I wish it was hyperbole. Describing our crazy world makes you sound crazy now. You seem to take me somewhat seriously so I'll develop a bit, but it's an HN comment so I can only go so far. The paper I linked or the author of Ghost in the Machine take hours to explain this way better than me.

People behind GenAI are fascists: for some it's obvious by now I hope (trump, elon musk). They are otherwise techbros who seek power and control other the world, and it doesn't matter if it causes harm [1] or a major economical crisis.

This thing has been brutally imposed onto us quickly and without debate, even if its explicit aim is to replace us. (The idea itself of being thrilled to design a system aiming at replacing human intelligence is a bit disgusting - with a very costly stochastic text generator no less! And the push to anthropolomorphize it is also disgusting).

LLM benchmarks are all rooted in eugenist (thus racist) pseudo science to measure intelligence, which of course biases them all towards these theories.

These tools of control are everywhere in all the aspects of our lives (work, culture, measure, institutions), which is another aspect of fascism.

They are built and run without care for the environment, pushing huge off-grid datacenters [2] when the people mostly don't want them, sometimes illegally cutting trees [3]. They are built stealing the work of everyone without our conscent, they hammer websites which incurs cost on the whole web only to sell it back to us through costly subscriptions (see also the ai tag jwz's blog, which I won't link from here).

Every aspect of GenAI is fascist. I wish it was hyperbole. I wish it was ridiculous.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-says-ai-benefits-...

[2] https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/off-grid-data-centers-have...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...

That is terrible.

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