Ask HN: Are 80s high school hobby programmers overwhelmingly pro-AI?

I'm not that old, but literally no engineer I work with is "overwhelming pro-AI". Befitting engineers, they understand that AI is a tool and while it has its uses, it also has its limits. The enthusiasm that exists stems from AI solving actual hard engineering problems in front of our faces, but everyone using it has also encountered AI doing something very stupid as well.

Even our management is pretty honest about this. Our in-house AI platform running near-frontier models from the larger vendors requires manual confirmation of every command executed on a company machine. It's tedious, but aside from establishing a clear line of blame if the AI does something screwy, it also forces you to step through the AI's analysis which can be quite educational.

Anecdotal, but my dad fits this grouping and he's pretty indifferent. He asks Claude questions, but hasn't incorporated agents for work. He likes it as a better search, but doesn't have a lot of care or opinion in either direction with it. It's a very healthy take IMO.

Of course not, it goes against everything they love and cherish about personal computing. It's pouring concrete over their playground and wilderness, to be replaced by factories. "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated." Sadly many natives join their colonizers willingly, so they can stay relevant and productive in the industry that is actively devaluing their work.

In short, no.

Most of the folks I talk to in my age group are somewhere between anti-AI and "AI works for specific use cases". I find it is the younger folk who think it is miraculous and want to use it everywhere.

I am very pro-AI and I was coding in the late 80s, although not in high school, I was in elementary at the time.

Given I started on an Apple IIe with a green screen and basic, and have since had to shift languages and techniques repeatedly over the decades, I have to be someone that embraces new technology if I want to stay relevant and productive.

This means that I will adopt things that make sense and AI does make sense.

I have no idea in general, but I was an 80s high school hobby programmer and don't think this way, nor do the devs I know who are roughly of the same vintage.

Yes, cautiously, it's a great freaking tech. Same excitement I had with computers back in the days, the possibilities is endless.

I was a hobby programmer in the 80s, but that was after college. I was a hobby programmer in the 70s via my high school's library having a terminal to access a mainframe for self-study programming courses, and I built mail-order computer kits which I programmed in machine language.

I think AI is a great tool, but requires safeguards. I use it every day, but I use a lot of tools to reign it in, keep it on task, check its results, and force it to follow an engineering process.

I don't know about the "as quickly as possible" part, since there needs to be guardrails, but improving AI should be done sooner rather than later. e.g, instead of training to give the answer it thinks you want to hear, it should be trained to give provably correct answers. instead of being trained and fine tuned and then let loose, it should be able to continuously learn and improve.

While people keep chasing tokens/second and vibe-coding, I'm more interested in correct results per kWh, sustainable and ethical AI. Also, I'm worried that there will be an increasing digital divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, so I do want AI to be available and not locked up just for corporations and governments.

To me, the fun is solving problems, and AI let's me solve more problems, harder problems and more quickly. I was happy to move from assembler programming to high level programming languages, to 4GL, to frameworks, tech stacks, etc. Moving to AI coding is just another shift in solving problems at a higher level with more productivity.

hacking microprocessors was fun. building complex systems using AI is fun, too.

No, you see some high profile Gen X-ers like Torvalds, Carmack etc. bend to corporate and investor pressure.

But the majority isn't. In the same manner, the math people who were enthusiastic about AI (before Navier Stokes was proven by a human guided AI!) are the ones that are terminally online and were enthusiastic about Lean before. You simply don't hear about the rest.

Opposing AI under one's real name is dangerous, so one does not get an accurate picture.

I'm 55, about to turn 56, and I did hobby programming back in the 80s, mainly in a C64 and C128, so I fit the bill, although I'm no developer and right now all my programming is reduced to some shell scripts aimed to automate repetitive or tedious tasks.

And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.

This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.

Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.

So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.

A major goal of experienced programmers is to manage risk, often by reducing unnecessary complexity. LLMs seem to be the exact opposite of this, perhaps soon producing volumes of code noone has time to review.

Should the industry go this way, there very possibly will be some reckoning later with a misaligned model.

That said, there are certainly less risky ways to use LLMs positively in development!

90s highschool hobby programmer here. I see LLMs as what it is. Not a bit more, not a bit less.

I'm a hobby programmer from the 80s. If I want to make a table from wood, I'm not going to start by shopping at IKEA.

It aligns with my general thoughts about mastering a craft.

Nope. I built and programmed a single-board Kim-1 in high school and went on to an Apple II then Commodore 64.

The thing is 80's hobby programmers also read a ton of science fiction which, unironically, was very pro-tech but also explored the social impact of tech.

Case-in-point: My favorite AI novel of that era was "The Adolescence of P1" which starts with an engineer innocently prompting P1 to dig a foundation for a moonbase as efficiently as possible. He expected it to start deploying robot construction equipment and take a week or two. Instead, P1 redirects a massive cargo of moon rocks in orbit and blows a crater in a few minutes from space.

From there, P1 propagates itself and gains control of everything from the global "Internet" to power grids to all nuclear bases and satellites. Not good.

We THOUGHT numerous cautionary tales like this would inspire rigorous "alignment" guardrails and controls once we needed them but, no. ... It turns out even when AI experts and CEOs themselves are saying there's a "10% chance of total human annihilation" by AI, our government and the tech oligarchs are kind of, sort of, thinking about, maybe, instituting controls.

Please, go back and read more science fiction.

I don’t think there are any sectors of the population that are “overwhelmingly pro-AI” except for: a) people who think it will help them better exploit or surveil others; b) people who think it will raise their social standing by making their deficiencies less obvious if they pass AI work off as their own

No. None of the coders are overwhelmingly pro-ai. But, all are learning it and ramping up. The GenX money people are 100% into AI now. They are the same people who always had "an great idea for an app you should make." We have seen multiple waves of technology appear and then get exploited and collapse. Personally, I think coding is the least interesting use of these things. If I was independently weathly I would point AI at pesticide reduction in farming, water management and distribution, and drug addiction mitigation through chemistry.

90's high school hobby programmer. I'd rather not use AI for programming if given the chance. For everything else I am pro AI.

I first started with a TI/994a and I like AI. Programming is not my job, and never has been. Is that all you're asking?

I have been a professional SWE for 30 years, I was also paid to write software when I was in middle school in the early 80s. I quit to do other things before high school.

I am not pro AI nor anti AI. since machine learning is not an interest of mine and is not programming I simply have no interest in it.

im also not interested in being a consumer of machine learning products as it relates to my profession.

If I need solutions coded with automation code generators are much faster and reliable. i write them all the time.

The only benefit I derive as a consumer of machine learning at this time is to avoid using the degraded and near useless google search engine for minor lookups of trivia I dont commit to memory. And I do value this very much given the pathetic state of internet search.

As an engineer I can do everything I need and want to do and dont need help building systems. People who do frequently need help enjoy machine learning consumerism more than I do.

As far as what I want in regards to machine learning in the workplace is to be allowed to do my job and not be bothered to use a bunch of junk I dont need.

and the noise around LLMs is annoying and I am anti building data centers and destroying general purpose computing over some corporate lust for power just because an LLM can string a few sentences together.

I am also vehemently against the massive theft of copyrighted content to train LLMs and view LLM output as a form of obfuscated theft.

This one does not.

Not this one, or, come to think of it, any that I know of.

Now, hobby entrepreneurs, that’s different.

I most certainly am. I taught myself how to program 40+ years ago and I love using Claude Code both at work and at home for hobby projects.

It feels like going from walking to running. Love it!

no. How about AI being consistent and accurate?

Well, a considerable amount of what you call "80s high school hobby programmers" ended up going through formal computer science education in an university, the only difference being that a lot of them already had been programming since their early teens.

On the contrary, my experience is that Gen-X programmers are far more sentimental about the machine and languages, while Millenials have been raised in the cult of the VC backed startup money printing machine.

Just compare the zeitgeist of Slashdot circa 2000 with the ethos of HN nowadays.