I think it's largely become focused on generating AI training drivvel for current TV shows.
I don't understand this desire to ignore that aspect and pompously dismiss Reddit as a whole. It's like dismissing an entire country as worthless because you didn't like the vibe in a couple of the big cities.
A belief I hold not of just Reddit but several countries I'm surprised have a tourism industry[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/06/turkey-blocks-...
It's an aristocracy with the progenitors being chosen on a first come first rule base. One could say: "So what? It's a private website with its own rules, make your own!", but then again for most topics and most groups the relevant subreddits are THE biggest forums: Country, province, city specific subreddits, politics, etc. And that makes it extremely problematic.
Reddit might be a private company but the reach of their subreddits makes them a significant player in world wide public opinion forming and opinion sharing -and they largely leave it in the hands of powertripping, chronically online weirdos.
Linus Torvalds recently said he uses AI to develop Java GUIs because he doesn't know how to write Java GUIs. Between the mods of r/java and Linus Torvalds, I know who I trust more with judging new technological potential.
Here is more from a recent interview:
"I used to think it was just not very good — but now I’m at the point where I actually really like using AI. [...] I don’t do a lot of kernel programming. I’m a maintainer. The Linux kernel is a project where other people do the real work, and I act as the collection point. But I still enjoy programming immensely. I think AI is a wonderful tool if you use it correctly and treat it as a tool, and I find it makes programming much more enjoyable. [...]
I started programming in 1981 or so, and back then computers were much simpler, and you could understand what they were doing, and also the programs you compared your own programs to were much simpler.
It’s a different story today. The bar in software engineering has grown so high that it’s hard to see your own small efforts as worth anything, because you’re used to all these polished, professional programs. [...]
A lot of people make fun of vibe coding, but I think it’s a wonderful way to find joy in programming. It makes you feel like you’re doing something relevant. It allows you, as a new programmer, to do things that you would otherwise have a really hard time with.”
https://www.zdnet.com/tech/linus-torvalds-ai-coding-programm...
Given the quality of the output when I ask it to do things I do know how to do, I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of using AI to do things I don't know how to do myself. It reeks of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
I have a slightly more nuanced take on it — I use Claude to write Ansible playbooks for my homelab because I know enough about server management to have a clear opinion on how I want things done and why, and enough Ansible that I understand the fundamentals and can recognise (but not write) idiomatic playbooks. That's the perfect storm of getting the LLM to do something I'm not good at, while still being able to judge its output.
Writing code by hand is writing code, with AI assistance you don’t write code, you order code. You became a manager
If you make this stand, you're committed to calling many other professions managers, which you don't. You probably haven't fully cashed out your own position yet.
Where is the difference between telling an AI what to do and telling a human programmer?
Lets make an experiment. I give you a slow AI which you can prompt once a day and you get the answer the next day.
Are you still a programmer?
What if I randomly replace the AI with human programmer who delivers your code.
Still a programmer if a human wrote it?
I can ask AI to create an illustration but I would call myself an illustrator.
I wouldn’t even claim I calculated the root of 1,234,567 when I used a calculator to do it.
Are you even human or just an angry bot who has been told "not to back down"?
But Java is getting more and more attractive. Who would have thought?
Why no mention https://openjdk.org/legal/ai ? even if you think it lie you should say that
Maybe I would tend a bit to the "very clearly state if and what was done by AI" side of things, but I would definitely love to ban all the 95% overconfident agent, 5% pebkac customers that are spamming our ticket queues.
lol
> I’m not so upset by the banning.
> At some point in the future, I’m sure this irony will become too obvious to ignore and they’ll need to move the goal posts.
This person is very sour indeed.
This is a great analogy because an excavator is much more expensive than a shovel and can’t fit into small places, so it’s only worth it for large projects.
Similar to how subreddit mods often banned people for saying things that they correctly or incorrectly perceived as being right-wing, being hate speech, etc.
And some of those people just made their own websites. Musk bought X. Etc. The overall level of speech online coming from people who would have been banned by those Reddit mods probably increased rather than decreased.
And that doesn't always come from building more software. That's where the craft is. AI just helps you build more software.
AI helps you build more software in the same way that a C compiler helps you build more assembler.
I spend far more tokens on specification and verification than I do on actual feature-code generation.
And with it a small team of 3 developed something in just a few weeks that would have normally taken us 12 months. And we are selling it for multiple-seven figures to customers who (by all rights) should have been able to token-gen their way to the same outcome, but haven't.
So there is clearly some value in the people, and clearly some value in the AI. But I think people are misplacing/misattributing which goes where, in some cases.
Agree! To me it comes down to intention and attention.
Depending on my *intention*, I should devote more or less of my *attention* to one thing vs another.
Another way to think about it is essential vs incidental attention, which I borrow from essential vs incidental complexity [0].
Many things require attention, or it doesn't perform correctly. Essential attention. Many, many more things don't require my full attention, and they'll still perform adequately. They satisfice.
Farm out the tasks that require only incidental attention.
[0]:https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/main/d...
There are tons of smaller ones that offer good value for your time, my personal favourites are r/ragdolls and r/raspberrypi
Monitor my comment go grey in few minutes.
You, as a user, only see one side of it. I'd quit, but I don't want to let down good people who are making an honest effort to keep the sub a nice place to be. Some part of me hopes I catch another site wide shadowban for vpn usage, and I have an excuse to put my account to the torch and start over as just a normal user
The biggest issue is power tripping reddit mods, and mods trying to shape the discourse by deleting posts or banning dissenting voices.
Banning someone because their software uses AI is clearly an example of it.
Now, post removals, we do a lot more of. We do try to moderate the sub such that it has an open, positive vibe in line with it's stated purpose.
I do fully understand what you're saying though. I've been banned for everything from merely asking that a sub enforce it's rules consistently, to asking for sources, to even posting in a particular collection of subs that another sub found objectionable. You have to run pretty far afoul of reddits sitewide rules as a mod to be removed from the position. That's why you see so many thing2 or thingNoCensor subs on subreddit maps.
I do agree HN is substantially better, more behaved though I find many too questionable
After researches, I can tell where they are learning toward.
There are good people but mods will eventually try to "shape" your mind accroding to what they believe in regardless what HN officially claims to do.
Same for Reddit and other "mod" maintained communities.
And who has the most people in the world?
It’s tolerable mostly by dipping in for targeted issues and lurking. I stopped contributing to any subreddit either by commenting or posting. In many subreddits to which I tried to contribute in the past, users seem not to care in the least that I’ve given thoughtful answers. So I lurk, taking what I need without feeling obligated to reciprocate. In other settings I try to add value; but for Reddit, I don’t care.
internetter•1h ago
What an insane assertion. While it is undeniable that AI has gotten good at writing code, there are absolutely times where it makes sense to reject it (for writing, at least), such as when a high degree of comprehension and correctness is required. People have been "productive" writing code by "hand" for over 50 years. This hasn't changed, though AI does in many cases incrementally improve productivity, it does not always and it does not mean not using it is inherently unproductive.
For instance, for many libraries such as the ones I use to access databases or do complex calculations, I would like it to, at the very least, not be immediately obvious the project was vibe coded. Would you have still been banned if it wasn't so obvious you had prompted your way through the whole library? If it is obvious you prompted blindly, how can the code be human quality?
> some guy off the street can type a prompt into AI, and produce better code than we could. It’s not fair.
AI rarely seems to write better code than humans. It certainly writes mostly functional code faster. But significant time is lost in review compared to human code in my professional experience.
mgdev•1h ago
Do craft people like outcomes? Sure. Can outcome people appreciate craft? Sure. But fundamentally, you typically fall more in one camp than the other.
And this assertion comes from the outcome people. Is it insane? No. To assert it's insane is insane, because it shows a fundamental disconnect from the economics of software development.
Which is about right, because the craft people don't do something primarily for the economics.
internetter•1h ago
At work, I've frequently used AI to rapidly build MVPs. Then I get back to work and spend a lot of time on my own, with the help of AI, and with the help of code review from my teammates, raising the quality and correctness bar. Much longer than it would've taken if I just wrote it myself out of the gate, though there is still a net AI productivity gain because writing is just so so much faster.
All this is to say is that I do not care* if AI or a human wrote a library in actuality, but if it is obvious from the code and readme that an AI (or an amateur human) wrote it, I will reject the library because it is clear it is not up to the spec I demand. But tovalds can use AI all he wants in linux as long as the correctness of the output remains the same.
* perhaps I care slightly because on a more personal level, I do think its a little sad, though in a professional capacity I do not care.
mgdev•1h ago
I've rarely met a "craft" person that authors TLA+ models to find correctness issues in their systems. And yet as an outcome person I frequently ask my AI minions to do this and similar exercises.
What I think you're actually describing is competency using AI as a tool to drive effective and correct outcomes. That takes practice and systems - same as it ever was.
If you buy in, I think you'll find you can create great, correct systems... only more than you could ever do alone. Without N*N comms overhead. Without having to convince your louder, less competent teammate to actually finish their work.
internetter•1h ago
Right, but I suspect (the author did not link the library) that this was not what was happening. I suspect the Java mods looked at the library for a solid 30 seconds and it was immediately obvious there was heavy AI usage in a more negative way.
hartator•1h ago
The thing is since Fable 5+ generation of models this is not true anymore.
claytongulick•58m ago
For a while, I dutifully believed it, and would go try again, and it would be awful.
I'd then have another conversation like this, where someone would say something along the lines of, "sure, sure but this NEW model now fixes all that and is really awesome!"
I'll revisit it when I start seeing some real studies that show real productivity increases rather than stuff that just shifts the burden of broken slop onto PR reviewers while claiming awesome speed.
mgdev•42m ago
But models are climbing their way up the percentile charts.
90% of the software development in the work, by volume, can be done by people who are in the 50th percentile of skill.
So these model advances do meaningfully expand the amount of "useful" work that can be done without people. And simultaneously not be "good enough" for the specific kind of work you find yourself doing day to day.
Both can be true.
ageitgey•23m ago
I've been writing code professionally a long time (since the 90s). My honest assessment is that for most common consumer app work (web / mobile CRUD, etc.), Claude Opus 5.5 now outperforms most developers. If you are knowledgeable and can use your taste to guide the models, you can easily produce commercial-quality work in hours that used to take months or years. You can also poop out slop, but you don't have to.
In other domains, your experience will be different. But in many common commercial domains, machines have surpassed the average developer in the past couple of months. And the breadth keeps increasing as the training data and RL quality increase.
solatic•1h ago
> I would never actually ship any code anymore without using AI to review it
I can very much understand how the author can come off as calling people insane for not using AI to generate the code itself, but the impression I got is that he's calling people insane for not using AI at all in the coding process, i.e. for refusing to use AI even for code review.
And let's be fair: if you're not willing to let a completely local model (so as to put aside privacy concerns and API cost concerns), in a sandbox with read-only permissions, conduct code review for you in 2026, then yeah, I think you're doing the equivalent of refusing to take antibiotics. You can decide to reject the review results, or re-word the proposed fixes, but to refuse AI assistance at all as a matter of principle during the review stage is no longer a mainstream defensible position.
internetter•55m ago
nozzlegear•49m ago
Personally the position strikes me more like the people of yore who would write code entirely in vim/emacs or, god forbid, notepad++, while the rest of us were using IDEs. We can all sit on our high horses and croon about how much more productive they'd be if they just tried a little bit of AI – "come on bro, just a puff" – but they've got their workflow and it isn't broken.
sublinear•46m ago
There's a very clear pattern regarding pushback against AI, and it's not as ideological or political as you're making it out to be.
Lots of devs absolutely hate linters just as much, or maybe even more, than LLMs. It's simply a matter of having precise control over the result that gels with the dev's thought process enough to approve a release.
Let's be honest here. If you've got at least an 8-hour day to wrap up a medium size change of less than 1k LOC, the debate over LLMs is more of a personality judgement than advocating for a productivity tool. It's still going to get reviewed anyway, and most bugs in the software most people write for a living aren't subtle mistakes.
enraged_camel•1h ago
This assertion is at the crux of a lot of these debates. Fundamentally it depends on what is meant by "better code", does it not?
Code that is bug free? Frontier models are inarguably better at that, because they can think of far more edge cases and test each one much faster than you can. You can argue that its code and surrounding tests are frequently overkill, but that's a dial you can tweak until you're happy.
Code that is performant? Frontier models are inarguably better at that too. They can create a benchmark harness and run it over and over to optimize the code they wrote while you're still poring over the docs on which method of iterating over a list is faster.
Code that is secure? Frontier models are also better at that, for the above two reasons: they can create complex security vulnerability plans and run swarms of agents to audit the code and attack the system that runs that code until it's like a god damn fortress.
Code that is easily understood by humans and fits coherently with the rest? I think humans are better at this still, because humans are definitionally the best at understanding what is easily understood by humans. I posit that this definition of "better code" is quickly going out of fashion though.
internetter•58m ago
I have found that on the level of an individual function, this might very well be the case. On the level of an entire system, it very quickly falls apart and you get a lot of redundancies which cause security, bug and performance recessions, because nobody has really solved the issue of AI understanding whole systems at the time of inference.
kobalsky•35m ago
When I make manual changes I run them through an audit and risk analysis agent to make sure I didn't miss anything important.
This has caught more errors than our test suite lately.