[patates]

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected.

Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.

I'm conflicted, confused and afraid, HN. Look at what I just wrote, yet I use claude and deepseek and all the skills and complex harnesses and MCPs and whatnot... But all now seems like a transition phase. Transition to f-ing what though?

A lot of questions cannot be answered unless we dedicate a meaning to our lives. Human touch? Too late? Also: I liked a song and it was sonos. I unliked it after discovering. I feel so stupid, so often.

Sorry for the unhinged digression.

I love Ladybird (have a sticker on my laptop to prove!), I hope they thrive.

[torben-friis]

>But all now seems like a transition phase. Transition to f-ing what though?

It feels like being in the middle of a tornado. But I think it helps to turn off screens, sit in a desk, and calmly remember first principles and consider them slowly.

Quoting obama, "reality has a way of catching up with you".

I see a lot of talk, but iOS is not delivering a decade of features and fixes on each yearly release. Literally no one does, if anything people are complaining that existing functionality is breaking down. So it can't be true that we're at 10x productivity, and this fact will eventually catch up with us.

Let's be human, and remember that many people are emotionally invested. Juniors want this to be a chance to shine in a market that otherwise rejected them. CEOs placed their bet on AI and don't want to walk that back. Seniors want to signal that they are not obsolete. AI companies will poison discourse. But all this smoke will eventually clear.

[Folcon]

I've been thinking a fair bit about what I'm seeing in terms of the output I experience

It's quite hard to quantify, but I think it's one shot nature really makes it hard to gauge it's capability

Friends have spoken of good days and bad coding days with me, and I find it odd nodding along, it's a strange new normal

At times it feels like we're just coding with one-armed bandits, trying to carefully line them up for a jackpot and just discarding and retrying if we don't hit

I think about some of the more complex systems I've built and I wonder how well we can build them like this

And over engineering, there seems to be over engineering everywhere, and yet, more fragility to our systems

It's all a little surreal

[customguy]

I imagine this stuff is probably really good at iterative changes to improve objective benchmarks like CPU or RAM use. I'm thinking of little contained optimizations that you can understand in and of themselves, that you maybe have done yourself before in other places, found really quickly and applied uniformly. Stuff you can confirm to be what you expect it to be by mostly just scanning. Low hanging fruit for sure, but something where you can actually know what is a fruit and what is crap, and only keep the fruit, and develop some confidence in the process, if that makes sense?

Or trying to reduce complexity, increasing readability and coherence of variable names (the opposite of code golf if you will), while staying within a certain limit of performance regression (e.g. "make this code as nice as you can while making it at most 0.5% slower").

Making the stuff millions of people have been using for decades better, in a way that also makes it better for humans when they read the code. Surely that's possible, some people are probably doing it but it doesn't go viral as much, because it's too mundane.

And of course, making new stuff is more exciting. I mean, you could hit on something with a vibe coded thing, and then know it's now worth to make a non-sloppy version, but you won't get much fame for making ffmpeg twice as fast by prompting an LLM. Though on the other hand, it's like a safe investment (if not in "fame", then in "improving the stuff we all have to use daily"), because you know ffmpeg and many many other things will still be around, whereas a vibe coded thing that wasn't special will be 100% forgotten the next day, or have just the one user forever.

[patates]

> Juniors want this to be a chance to shine in a market that otherwise rejected them.

I actually am training 2 trainees (Azubi in German) and 1 working student. All three are somewhat anxious about the future but also all are learning in a significantly increased pace, compared to the ones I worked with 1.5 years ago.

They don't have to wait for random senior to answer questions, so they get stuck way less often. They aren't allowed to use AI to generate code though, so not sure how that'd look like learning-wise if we/they went all-in on AI.

[leononame]

Is that a good thing? I think getting stuck is an intrinsic part of the learning process and sometimes it's good that there isn't an immediate answer from a senior. For some things you'd never have solved yourself, sure. But pain and suffering is a big and important chunk of learning and I fear we just throw it all out of the window with asking AI.

[runarberg]

I am skeptical. This is a testable hypothesis, and I know there have been tons of research done trying to provide evidence of claims like these. However I have yet to see a convincing evidence. If this statement was indeed true, I think experimental data backing it up would be old news at this point, it however is not, and I suspect that is because junior developers are by and large in fact not learning faster or more with the help of AI.

[kibwen]

> But all this smoke will eventually clear.

I wish I could be so optimistic. Our lives are ruled by distorted, irrational, inefficient, failed markets, and the markets can remain distorted, irrational, inefficient, and failed for longer than we as individuals can remain solvent. "In the long term the market is a weighing machine", for term lengths that include the heat death of the universe.

[sph]

> It feels like being in the middle of a tornado. But I think it helps to turn off screens, sit in a desk, and calmly remember first principles and consider them slowly.

It’s been enormously alienating talking to laypeople about the apocalyptic atmosphere in the tech world, while for them ChatGPT is a cool piece of software but the world still hasn’t changed very much. They look at me bug eyed when I tell them how dramatically software engineering has changed in the matter of a couple years. We are in a bubble, or we’re just, as you say, in the eye of the cyclone which still has to hit the rest of the world.

[abustamam]

> iOS is not delivering a decade of features and fixes on each yearly release

This is insinuating that code was the bottleneck in the first place, or that every line of code is to build a new feature and not fixing existing bugs, or that apple didn't lay off enough engineers and reallocate resources to other departments to make up for the productivity boost.

I do think that companies with poor AI practices will eventually pay the piper in the form of technical debt or debilitating bugs. But let's not equate a productivity boost with a boost in releasing features, because there's plenty of business reasons to not release thousands of new features every year.

I agree with you on the rest of your points. Eventually the smoke will clear. What awaits to be seen is who is left standing when it does? I don't think I like the answer to that question.

[thedevilslawyer]

I sense your comment as saying: "AI is hype, and reality will catch-up.".

But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

Reality will catch-up with that too, once the other smoke clears.

[shinryuu]

100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before. I strongly doubt that is happening for an individual.

[mistersquid]

> 100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before.

Reduce your scale: "100x achieves in 1 hour what used to take 1 week."

One year of work could require levels of complexity and human judgement that can't be accelerated past a certain point.

1 week of work can be reduced to an hour and some change.

[shinryuu]

That requires that you not only one-shot the thing. You will also not have the time to verify the solution yourself in that time period.

Besides 1h what used to to take 1 week is basically 40x given a workweek is 40h.

[freeopinion]

Ignoring the obvious math problem here, I think the broader scope is important. Some of the point from preceding comments is that overall longterm output is not changing. So if somebody is oneshotting a week of work in an hour, but has the same annual output... where are you losing all the normal productivity that should have happened the rest of the week/year?

If one week of work can be reduced to an hour, then you should be able to complete a year's worth of work in 50 hours. If you break that into two 25-hour weeks (because a 40x dev earns the right to loaf?), what is that dev doing for the other 50 weeks in the year? What is making them so incredibly unproductive 50 out of 52 weeks in a year?

[fauigerzigerk]

>One year of work could require levels of complexity and human judgement that can't be accelerated past a certain point.

In other words, if you include everything that's required to create useful software then 100x turns out to be a fantasy.

[ruszki]

That’s also not possible in “skilled” hands. My output is roughly the same. It does the scaffolding, but I need to rewrite almost every line, because it introduces footguns around that often. And before I had about 20000 LOC it failed even with scaffolding, ie architecture. And it wasn’t taste, just footguns all around, architecture ones. Nowadays for example still introduce mutability or completely unnecessary complexity where it shouldn’t, even when the example code which does almost the same is pristine. Many times it’s like StackOverflow, when a question doesn’t need 90% of the accepted answer, but people happily copy it brainlessly.

This is especially bad with new, or quickly improving frameworks, like Android Compose. LLMs use completely outdated, deprecated APIs all the time, when they are not completely supervised. Or at least, I hope so that the framework causes it. Because if that’s not the case, then your products are fucked.

Also even with the best prompts it could never produce more working code in an hour than what I can produce in a day. Regardless of quality, just “working somehow”. Not even with an uninterrupted session. If that’s the case for some, then there is definitely also a developer skill issue. And so would definitely not trust anything coming out of their “supervision” of an LLM.

[Kudos]

The baseline engineer in that case must really be something incompetent.

[kibwen]

Ironic. The best way to turn 1x engineers into 100x engineers is to reduce the median skill level by 100x.

[vanviegen]

> But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

Each of these three sentences are in need of some evidence. I'm not actually seing any signs of software velocity notably increasing anywhere. Except perhaps in the AI-reseller sphere, but that seems mostly due to throwing huge amounts of VC money at it and a lack of quality control.

[koonsolo]

Name a single project that has a 10x increase. I mean real production ready code, not some single person hobby project.

[f17428d27584]

AI is turning 1x engineers into 0.3x engineers claiming to be 100x engineers.

[realusername]

> And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

At my large org (+100 engineers), I'd say it's a mixed bag and the overall impact of AI rollout looks to be slightly negative productivity.

They probably won't say it publicly though.

It's not because some people are more productive with it that all of them are and it certainly doesn't mean that the company itself is more productive either as you have other things than code to take into account.

[pianopatrick]

I can believe that the difference between the slowest programmer in the world and the fastest AI aided programmer in the world is now 100x in terms of lines of code output. Like I can imagine a programmer writing 250 lines of code per week by hand and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

[nunez]

But we spent decades as an industry trying to dispel of the notion that SLOC/KLOC does not matter.

I still believe that. 250 lines of tight code that solves a specific problem in a way that others can maintain will always be better than 25k lines of code that's difficult to review and consume (and, therefore, becoming a liability).

[torben-friis]

>and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

A year of that is 1.3M code: the size of systemd, or postgres.

Can you imagine a single person writing systemd (not a POC, the current version feature complete and battle tested) from scratch in a year? If so can you point me to any such project?

[pianopatrick]

Well, as a thought experiment, I'd say that depends on if the measure is "1.3M lines of production code" or "1.3M lines of code (test code, comments and production code combined)".

I don't think you could get to 1.3M lines of production code, but people say AI agents are good at writing tests. I could imagine that if you had an unlimited budget you could set up agents to generate lots and lots of tests and comments, inflating your weekly total. Like, maybe you can set up an agent to loop against a code coverage tool trying to generate more and more tests to hit MC / DC levels of testing.

In the extreme / absurd case, if you could hit the SQLite ratio of 590x lines of test code vs real code then 25,000 lines of code per week could be 43 lines of production code and 24,958 lines of test code.

You'd be a "100x programmer" in terms of lines of code output, but that would not get you to SystemD levels of production code in a year.

I can't point you to a project taking that route, and I don't have the budget to try it, but I can imagine someone hitting 25k lines of code per week with lots of tests and comments padding the numbers.

I am not sure software written that way would be any good though.

[sph]

I have seen people with that kind of AI assisted productivity-by-volume, building eldritch abominations like Gas Town.

[afdbcreid]

10x? The most generous studies I know give up to a 50% improvement.

[torben-friis]

I'm not say it's pure hype. Not in the sense of previous hype waves like the metaverse or NFCs. It clearly has uses.

I do think it is hype as a killer of knowledge work. It can certainly remove a lot of friction in the kind of borderline mechanical work that you'd formerly outsource to the lowest priced denominator, serve as an idea bouncer, remove friction for bug tracing, etc.

Attempts to cross the next line ("no need for architecture discussions, ai plans", "no need to read the code, ai reviews", and so on), nope.

As someone else mentioned, 100x is a couple days producing the outcomes (remember, not output) of a year. Or for a team, iOS delivering in a single year ten times as many features as its entire previous existence. It's not something that doesn't get noticed.

[hypfer]

> Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.

These "contributions", while they did exist in small quantities, mostly were not actually what you've described there.

Instead, those boiled down to unsolicited opinions, hostile takeover attempts, value extraction, general drama and just overall overhead over simply building code.

This was not always the case, but the GitHub model of building FOSS (and removal of all friction) certainly made it the new default.

Said model was always unsustainable, but the burn rate made it sustainable enough so that we could just throw more humans at the problem to replace the burnt-out ones.

AI pushed the burn rate over the replacement rate.

=> We will likely see more projects adapt this or a similar stance I think.

[hombre_fatal]

It always seemed like a weird default to let people (esp strangers) submit PRs that weren't tied to an issue nor approved.

What do you mean you just spent a week implementing something in secret?

AI makes it extra silly because now you can craft up your unsolicited code change in minutes, making it extra obvious that code changes should spawn from real discussion and agreement.

TFA is part of looking for new processes that actually work. Dunno why people are having such rose tinted glasses about pull requests. Open an issue, talk to people. Have an idea? Then get people to cosign it.

[robryan]

I think it was different pre-AI. Someone might come in and spend days getting some understanding of the codebase before they contribute some minor fix. Over time they might stick around a make some more of these, progressively gaining trust so when they do take on something bigger the maintainers will know they aren't wasting their time reviewing it.

Now they can drop a multi thousand line poorly understood PR day 1.

[embedding-shape]

As someone who maintained FOSS libraries pre-AI, I think the frequency might have changed, but large drive-by PRs with thousands of changes happened before too, I've been on the receiving end of those many times. Usually they fundamentally change the architecture too, then the submitter get offended/sad/surprised when you tell them you impossibly could accept it and they should stop wasting their time contributing without discussing first. Usually ends with some threats how their fork will take all the contributors or something like that.

What I don't get, is why these LLM users aren't asking their LLM for how to contribute and how the project prefers to contribute, and how they can make sure it's accepted? Literally, the very same tools they use to code, can be used to make sure their PR follows all guidelines, from discussions to acceptance of the PR itself, it's right there, they literally just have to prompt for it! Such a lazy group of people.

[arzig]

Good faith PRs were also suffering under the current model. Ive opened PRs by hand on small projects to try and fix personal issues that probably affected others. Then the PRs languish for months or in one case literal years under the deluge of ai slop being spammed at the repo. I’m not going to ping the maintainers constantly when I know they are struggling so I’m left running my fork and no one else gets the benefit.

[hombre_fatal]

Big projects pre-AI also can have hundreds of rotting PRs. It's a lot of work to go through them, and unsolicited PRs are kind of the wrong way to spend time as a maintainer.

AI just makes it so obvious how bad of a process it is that we can't ignore it anymore, and now we need to finally figure out good processes.

Even little stuff like: I've created issues on the Claude Code github that got agreement and then led to code changes. Why isn't there a default, built-in way for my issues to rise above the zero-effort chaff? If you finally do the work of vetting someone's PR, why isn't there a built-in (hidden) way to +1 someone so we can see that they have some reputation with the project on their future issues/PRs?

[embedding-shape]

First off, to have conflicting feelings about something is really normal and doesn't immediately point to a problem, it's extremely human, and I feel similar to you to. I'm a creative + programmer, I hate to see what's happening in some communities yet I too use agents for development, it'd be like avoiding Google + SO when they first appeared, feels like there is a clear "before/after" moments with those, and with LLMs as well.

I don't really have anything useful to add here, I think, just that you aren't alone in feeling conflicting feelings here. New things usually are like that, comes with incredible benefits in some areas yet seem to strip humanity away from others, some people use it to produce fluff and crap, others essentially gain new abilities and use those to build even better stuff. I don't think there is any universal truths here, sadly.

[vasco]

We can also take some refuge in things like steam engines or electricity or the internet and how if you're just on the cusp of those you'd have similar feelings, but many years later here we are, still with jobs and meaning. A lot of people say this time is different but I guess when electricy showed up people would've said the same? I certainly remember people predicting that Manhattan would stop existing during the dotcom bubble because the internet would kill all street level businesses and people would work from wherever so big cities were over. And here we are.

I'm also conflicted but take a glass half full approach basing myself on the fact that when I'm feeling like "this time is different" it's probably my ego wanting my lifetime to happen at an interesting time in history, so my brain wants the current events to be the most transformative.

[fc417fc802]

> A lot of people say this time is different but I guess when electricy showed up people would've said the same?

No. Electricity didn't raise the skill floor all that much. Certainly nowhere near the human skill ceiling.

> the internet would kill all street level businesses

That was never going to happen overnight, if at all. But online retail (and food delivery, etc) does seem to be slowly but surely eating away at local shops so I think it's within the realm of possibility.

[robinsonb5]

> But online retail (and food delivery, etc) does seem to be slowly but surely eating away at local shops so I think it's within the realm of possibility.

Online retail eating away at local shops is a problem with two aspects - one of which is largely ignored and much more pernicious.

Yes, many people are shopping online which reduces footfall in the town centres. If this were a case of all the existing businesses simply shifting away from physical storefronts to virtual ones it would merely be unfortunate.

What's far worse is that the vast majority of the business that shifted away from a diverse collection of bricks-and-mortar stores now goes through one of a very few online retail giants.

Likewise, a couple of food delivery apps are parasitising takeaway food businesses.

And now we're allowing a handful of AI giants to tollbooth software development.

[marknutter]

> That was never going to happen overnight, if at all.

Very easy to say that in hindsight.

[fc417fc802]

It was trivially predictable the entire time, just like it's trivial predictable that advances in robotics can only replace human labor at a rate that takes the necessary capital expenditure and associated manufacturing capacity into account. On top of the basic reality of logistics and infrastructure, the sears catalog provided a practical example that long predated the dotcom era.

[mplanchard]

It certainly didn’t kill Manhattan, but it did kill or at least seriously maim lots of small towns. We lost a lot of local culture in the switch to everything being available online. I’m not sure we’re better off.

[iaaan]

I, very genuinely, highly recommend reading the Wikipedia page about the Luddites if you feel confused. This is a class consciousness problem. People feel conflicted because they know they aren't acting in their own best interests when they use generative AI (i.e. it does not lead us, as a society, to a good place -- mainly due to our bought-out legislature).

[embedding-shape]

Again, I don't think there is any universal truths here, no correct nor incorrect answers, it's all very subjective. For example, I'm conflicted about the thing as a whole, but also I wouldn't say "Usage of generative AI for sure leads society to a worse place" like you just implied, that's too absolute for me and not something I'd agree with, and it wouldn't resolve the conflicts we're talking about here.

Maybe your legislative feels bought out, that sucks, but that's not the situation nor the feeling everywhere in the world, certainly not where I live, so also doesn't seem to be related although if I assume where you live, I totally understand why you're currently feeling like that.

[fc417fc802]

> that's not the situation nor the feeling everywhere in the world, certainly not where I live

Do you expect your government to navigate whatever transition might await us in a manner that works out well for the vast majority of your countrymen? What about the governments of other major world powers? Even if your local government does all the right things, will the world as a whole end up in a good place?

That said, I'm not sure that there's much in the way of actionable options, at least not with clearly defined outcomes.

[embedding-shape]

> Do you expect your government to navigate whatever transition might await us in a manner that works out well for the vast majority of your countrymen?

No, but I expect them to do the best they can, with the information they have available, as always, as they just like me, are just humans. Trusting the legislative branch of my government is different from "so you think it'll work out well for everyone then huh?", btw.

> What about the governments of other major world powers?

Why does it matter how much I trust the legislative branch from other countries? They do as they wish, we continue to do as we wish.

> Even if your local government does all the right things, will the world as a whole end up in a good place?

My experience and opinion is that generally the world is getting better almost every day, vast difference even compared to ten years ago, how much better the world is today, for most people. There are some few countries which lately been going in the wrong direction, but for the most part, we (humanity) are getting incrementally better.

[fc417fc802]

> Trusting the legislative branch of my government is different from "so you think it'll work out well for everyone then huh?", btw.

Agreed, and that was exactly my point. Concern about possible impacts of a technology were expressed and you responded that you trust your government. But that's not the same as thinking that everything is headed in a good direction and doesn't require intervention.

> Why does it matter how much I trust the legislative branch from other countries?

Because in a globalized world if everyone else goes to shit you will probably also experience significant negative effects even if it's not as bad.

> for the most part, we (humanity) are getting incrementally better.

It seems to me that it's prudent to perform a risk assessment rather than assuming that everything will work out just because things seem to have been going well enough so far.

[duskdozer]

You can stop at any time. It's an unfortunate reality that many will not pay much mind as long as it's other people who are being harmed, but why support something morally and financially when it's now destroying something you personally care about?

[gpvos]

For many, there's a cost involved in stopping, and not all can bear it.

[account42]

Can't they?

[gpvos]

No.

[sdevonoes]

It doesn’t help to know that using and supporting private LLMs is only making openai/anthropic/google/etc even richer. I myself cannot justify its usage.

[gpvos]

Side question: what's wrong with Sonos playing a song? Are they generating AI music now?

[nunez]

I think they meant Suno.

[patates]

Yes, sorry for the confusion.

[singpolyma3]

> When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans

As in cheer for the humans because they've been liberated from the drudgery they have lost?

[MrBuddyCasino]

Very related: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-lamplighter

[__MatrixMan__]

AI first happened in the 1950s

[oceanhaiyang]

Is cursing not allowed..?

[flaviolivolsi]

Sonos? Did you mean Suno?

[gpvos]

Apparently, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411805

[ninjagoo]

> Transition to f-ing what though?

The future is a bit fuzzy, always. That said, here's my take on it.

> Transition to f-ing what though?

Not jobs. Those will be gone once ai can do them cheaper than humans. ai can already do many (most?) of them better than humans. The jury is still out on the cost aspect. Judging by r/LocalLlama, the lower cost is not that far off. There may be some structural adjustments around compute pricing before that happens, though.

In the EU, humans will probably be ok. They have a strong tradition of focus on human needs. Because of lower average salaries [1] than the US [2], human employment will likely carry on longer as well.

In the US, those folks that have capital will likely be ok. They'll be able to purchase services from ai companies and invest in ai companies and corporate armed forces (ai-populated, not human) to protect the Haves. Those that don't have capital? Who knows? America hates poor people, women and minorities.

China? No idea. Though I hear that their demographics are upside-down, so there'll be fewer people to support over the long-term. That they'll supply the robotics and goods for the rest of the world is not in doubt: cheaper electricity from solar/wind, advanced ai and robotic tech, science and industry moving forward while the US regresses, hard.

India? Hard to say. No social net of any consequence. Not enough capital to go full ai/robotics, human labor way cheaper than ai/robotic labor at the moment, so maybe they'll survive as that last major bastion of human work for some time to come. But their economy is growing, and they have a lot of people, so at some point they'll come to that same fork in the road. Hopefully they'll have serious social safety nets by that time.

Africa? In a lot of ways, they're similar to India on the human labor costs side, so their future hasn't been written yet either. India can probably fend off an invasion by rapacious US corporates with ai/robotic armies looking for resources because of sheer numbers, but Africa, fragmented, is a different story. Maybe China will be their friend? If you think this scenario is outlandish, look into the history of European companies colonizing the world. You didn't think the East India Company with its massive private armies were government-owned, did you? Likewise with the Spanish/Dutch/Portugese expansions. The govt. takeovers didn't happen until much later, tens of decades later.

South America? They're an interesting case. Brazil may take a trajectory similar to the EU. Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay too. The others are a ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

[jatora]

> Also: I liked a song and it was sonos. I unliked it after discovering. I feel so stupid, so often.

This is asinine. Keep depriving yourself of things you enjoy I guess?

[Anamon]

That's like saying it's irrational to disregard a news report after finding out it was fake. You believed it and found it interesting at the time. Why would knowledge about it being untrue change that?

Because we don't read reports just to have something to read, we do because we want to learn something about the world. And actual music fans don't listen to music just to drown out the silence, they want to listen to what another human being has to say, someone with their own history, experiences, views on life and the world, something to say and the creativity to express it in an interesting way. It makes absolute sense to be pissed off at something artificially generated, devoid of any intent or meaning, statistically generated based on a mass-pirated library of real musicians' work, skinsuiting as music with content.

I admit there are situations where music is used just to have sound, and some people just want to have something on in the background without having to pax attention to it. And one could lament or not the fact that humans are no longer really necessary to produce vapid muzak. But going by the GP's words, I don't think that that's what they were doing or looking for.

[nunez]

Every like to an AI-generated work is (literally!) one more data point in support of record labels dropping human artists for AI artists that will do what they want, perform where they want, and give all of their profits back to the label.

Movie studios are "signing" AI artists from AI studios for massive dollars; this is happening.

Maybe you don't care, but music is beautiful and difficult, and I really enjoy hearing works from people that have a passion for it.

You don't have to worry, though; most people are in your school of thought. "Who cares? It's good." Short-term thinking is best-term thinking.

[jatora]

I dont think AI music proliferation is in favor of music studios at all, hence why they want to crush it by all means necessary. You should question your stance when you find yourself on the same side as the MPAA/RIAA/etc.

I am in favor of being able to find music I like, with the least friction possible, without fueling the legacy music industry that is inflated far beyond reasonability.

[nunez]

AI music is EXCELLENT for the labels.

They (theoretically) have the physical infrastructure and capital to produce entirely AI-generated records, master and press them, promote and market them, retain an in-house band to play the record and book venues for them to play in (see also: Live Nation/Ticketmaster).

The members of the band are replaceable, thus capping the compensation ceiling.

The label retains almost all of the revenue end-to-end in this model. No messy contracts (except to AI providers).

Why would they invest in human talent that has needs, like, idk, sleep, when they can have AI-generated artists that can be available any time for any reason? (Lots of people don't care where their music comes from, unfortunately, and Spotify, the biggest streaming app, is already working hard to desensitize people to AI-generated tracks.)

This is already happening:

- https://www.ohio.edu/news/2025/07/your-new-favorite-band-may...

- Even Timbaland (very successful producer in the 2000s) started an AI-only label: https://www.thefader.com/2025/07/25/imoliver-human-ai-music-...

[account42]

> You should question your stance when you find yourself on the same side as the MPAA/RIAA/etc.

This is tribal thinking.

[wussboy]

Perhaps knowing a human with talent worked on it, putting some small part of themselves and their lived experience into the music has value to them? If so, then their actions make complete sense.

[tejohnso]

Human created music might have value to them, but it doesn't mean that the AI song was valueless. They admit they enjoyed it. So it doesn't make sense in terms of it not having value.

I wouldn't say it's asinine though. People reject creative output out of personal protest against the creator. Someone might love a movie only to refuse to ever watch it again because they found out the director was accused of something horrible.

Some people just don't want to support anything to do with AI. Although in this case the OP admits to also using AI directly so there's some inconsistency there, which is consistent with the state of confusion and uncertainty OP is expressing.

[jatora]

True, asinine was too strong a critique. I am just not in favor of emotional decision making where it can be helped. I can despise Tom Cruise as a person while still enjoying many of his movies. I know that some can't do that. I have always detached the creators from the art and that makes AI slot right in for me.

[sodapopcan]

It's not emotional when there is still always a person behind these "works" that stands top benefit from it from you listening to it.

[sodapopcan]

It's not asinine at all. Context matters in art. Otherwise, more songs exist that I would probably really like than I will ever hear, so I'm going to focus on the human-made ones. Besides, part of the joy of music extends beyond listening. For many people, myself included, if we feel really connected to a song we like to learn about the people who created it.

[jatora]

Context doesnt matter in all art. Sunset, aurora borealis, waterfall, clear night skies, etc. These are devoid of a creator and have beauty nonetheless. While they aren't "art", they evoke the exact same brain centers, which means the creator can be factored out of our enjoyment of external stimuli. And you can follow that chain of reasoning to a more rational stance on AI and art in general.

[sodapopcan]

> Context doesnt matter in all art. Sunset, aurora borealis, waterfall, clear night skies, etc. These are devoid of a creator and have beauty nonetheless.

I'm sure the religious fundamentalists would have something to say about that XD I'm not one, though, but I don't much appreciate the framing of needing a more "rational" stance here as it kind of signals bad faith to me. There is nothing emotional about worrying about artists' livelihood which has already been under attack for decades before LLMs existed. I'm not saying that one HAS to derive (additional) enjoyment from the presence of a creator. I listen to plenty of human-produced music where I don't care about the artist but these are always songs that I listen to for a short period of time then never think about again. And of course this goes way beyond just who the creator is as a person, it's also about what they inflict into the art itself: the unique vocal inflections, odd ways someone play's an instrument, how they perform it... but that's getting more into this than I meant to when I started typing what I thought would be two sentences, lol.

Anyway, I'm also not saying that people can't enjoy generated output, I'm just not going to support it. Especially since there is still always a person behind it who is maybe going to benefit from people listening to it. No thank you.

[dzonga]

I think your response is reactionary.

how was open source managed before GitHub ? you had to find a mailing list, be involved in the mailing list - ask questions, make a proposal, then create code after -- code goes through x rounds in the mailing list. finally it is merged if it suits direction of the project.

this willy nilly of opening pr's while not being an active member of a community I would say decimated open source.

[thegrim33]

"I was afraid" .. "hurt a lot" .. "I hope that" .. "that feels" .. "I'm conflicted" .. "I'm confused" .. "I'm afraid" .. "human touch" .. "I liked" .. "I feel so stupid".

Maybe, just maybe, you're not thinking rationally/logically about the situation and instead are mostly operating on emotion and feelings?

[BoostandEthanol]

The core of the human experience is to react to emotions. There’s nothing without emotions. Even if you feel like you can numb yourself to look at everything objectively, those “objective” “rational” thoughts are still based on feelings and inklings about what you trust and which facts you believe through chains of sources and anecdotes. There’s no such thing as operating without emotion.

[grepex]

The irony is that it is sometimes irrational/illogical to only consider rationality and logic.

Have you ever had an experience where, by all calculations, you should be happy with the outcome but for whatever reason you're not?

In some ways, that is the state of the internet today. Everything is optimized based on analytics, but so many of use are unhappy with how things are.

[penguinPhilosop]

And that is perfectly acceptable if somebody is a human person.

[john_strinlai]

its okay for humans to have feelings (and even occasionally talk about them).

[boca_honey]

What are you talking about? There was nothing irrational or illogical about what he said. The fact that he balanced his (well thought-out) opinion with emotion does not make it instantly irrational.