top | item 46743095

You can't pay me to prompt

63 points| shinryuu | 1 month ago |dbushell.com

134 comments

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sgt|1 month ago

We need developers like these who are able to innovate without being tainted by the echo chamber of AI.

LLM's tend to regurgitate known design patterns and familiar UX. Like those typical "keep scrolling down to learn about our app as we show you animations" - gets a bit of.

sovnade|1 month ago

Not long before (or it's already happening) LLMs start training on stuff they wrote previously and it becomes the largest echo chamber the internet has ever seen.

mpalmer|1 month ago

Counterpoint: Swearing off AI doesn't ipso facto make you a good developer, and there are plenty of skilled people who can innovate and use AI at the same time.

CuriouslyC|1 month ago

To be fair, hero banners lower bounce rates. Nobody would waste the time if it didn't work.

epolanski|1 month ago

Sure if all you're doing is making it just vomit code then yes.

But there's way more LLMs can do, like assist you in connecting dots in complex codebases, find patterns to refactor given some rules, provide ideas, allow you to dig in dependencies to find apis that are undocumented or edge cases that are subtle to find, find information that you might've had to dig up by endless google queries and hard to find GitHub issues, provide support in technologies you have sometimes to use (sed, awk, regexes, Google sheets apis, etc) but you just don't care enough to learn because it happens to use them few times an year allowing you to focus on what matters, etc, etc.

I'm frankly tired of those pointless debates conflating LLMs in the context of code just for the same boring arguments of people hating on vibecoding or thinking every developer is delegating everything to AI and pushing slop. If that's your colleagues fire them. They are indeed useless and can be replaced by a prompt.

If one cannot see the infinite uses of LLMs even just for supporting, without ever authoring a single line of code or never ever touching a file, it's only been that person limiting it's own growth and productivity.

Seriously, this is beyond tiring.

redox99|1 month ago

AI will beat humans at all tasks that are not subjective (such as a landing page being pretty), but instead can be determined to be correct or not (does an endpoint return the correct data? how fast?)

Just like a chess engine beats any human.

People think LLMs are still at the point of programming based on what they learned from the data they scraped. We're well past that. We're at the point of heavy reinforcement learning. LLMs will train on billions of LoC of synthetic code they generate, like chess engines train on self-play games.

stavros|1 month ago

Aren't we all tired by this anti-AI stuff? Use it if you want to, don't use it if you don't want to, I just don't really want to hear about your personal opinion on it any more.

monsieurbanana|1 month ago

I do hope you comment the same thing on the pro-AI articles from people trying to sell you a product. Internet is now infested by those, and without these articles you might think everybody has collectively lost their mind and still think we will get replaced in the next 6 months.

I use AI, what I'm tired of is shills and post-apocalyptic prophets

OptionOfT|1 month ago

No, I'm tired of AI being pushed as this amazing way to make everybody go 100% faster, while being able to lay off 90% of the people.

And for some reason the CxO suite and upper management has completely drunk the cool-aid.

In the past new technology was adopted sparingly, to figure out whether the juice was worth the squeeze.

However with AI it feels like a lot of places are (trying to go|going) all in, both in their work, and integrating it into the products, regardless of whether it makes sense.

But most importantly, I think pushback is needed because if AI succeeds in the way it is currently advertised and sold, it's a lot more people than 'just' the Software Engineers that are going to lose their jobs.

Which is great for all those companies who currently have a lot less people on payroll.

But on the other hand, a lot of the money spent on these companies is discretionary spending. Guess what's the first thing to be cut when you lose your job?

rootnod3|1 month ago

Aren't we all tired by this pro-AI stuff? Use it if you wanna ruin the planet. Don't use it if you care about maintaining skill.

I just don't really wanna hear about your pro-AI peddling anymore.

sodapopcan|1 month ago

I'm not, I'm tired of hearing about it. If someone is forcing you to read these articles then that sounds like you are in a really shitty situation. Blink twice if you need help.

Leynos|1 month ago

I find some of it interesting. I'm very interested in understanding why others' experience of using genAI is so vastly different to my own.

(For me it's been as transformational a change as discovering I could do my high school homework on a word processor in the 90s when what I suspect was undiagnosed dyspraxia made writing large volumes of text by hand very painful).

I'm also interested in understanding if the envisaged transformation of developers into orchestrators, supervisors, tastemakers and curators is realistic, desirable or possible. And if that is even the correct mental model.

bakugo|1 month ago

> I just don't really want to hear about your personal opinion on it any more.

And I don't want to hear about how the world of software engineering has been revolutionized because you always hated programming with a passion, but can now instead pay $200 to have Claude bring your groundbreaking B2B SaaS Todo app idea to life, yet that's basically all I hear about in any tech discussion space.

You should ask your AI assistant to explain to you why people would go out of their way to take a stand against this.

orleyhuxwell|1 month ago

I am not tired by this anti-AI stuff. As a person who uses it in very limited capacity, also as an ML/computer vision developer and researcher with 10 years of commercial experience with it, I want much more anti AI stuff.

Low quality (low precision) news, code, marketing, diagnosis, articles, books, food, entertainment (shorts, tik-tok), engineering is in my opinion the biggest problem in XXI century so far.

Low quality AI usage decisions, low quality AI marketing, retraining, placement, investments are accelerating the worst trends even more. It's like Soviet nuclear trains - just because nuclear is powerful and real it doesn't mean most of it's applications made any sense.

So as a pro-AI person and AI-builder in general, I want more anti-AI-slop content, more pro-discipline opinions.

bossyTeacher|1 month ago

> Aren't we all tired by this anti-AI stuff?

It's fine to be tired of this. What is not fine is pretending your beliefs/feelings represent everybody else's.

No one forcing you to read the article. He is as free to write what he wants as you are to complain about it. Balanced. Like all things should be.

jrjeksjd8d|1 month ago

My CEO sent a company-wide email this week saying "AI use is mandatory for all developers". Until this kind of mandatory bullshit stops I'm happy to see other people fighting the good fight and publicly saying that they want to keep doing a job they actually enjoy.

Many of my coworkers have embraced AI coding and the quality of our product has suffered for it. They deliver bad, hard-to-support software that technically checks some boxes and then rush on to produce more slop. It feels like a regression to the days of measuring LOC as a proxy for productivity.

rubyfan|1 month ago

I’m actually more sick of hearing about AI like literally all the time in all forms of media. I’m also sick of seeing AI created content which is so obviously low quality and often unchecked and just thrown out into the world.

Also when I hear another human suggest using AI for ____, my perception of them is that they are an unserious person.

So in my opinion AI has had a net negative effect on the world so far. Reading through this persons AI policy resonates with me. It tells me they are a thoughtful individual who cares about their work and the broader implications of using AI.

jchw|1 month ago

> Aren't we all tired of this anti-AI stuff?

Let's do a quick analysis of the amount of money put forth to push AI:

> OpenAI has raised a total of $57.9B over 9 funding rounds

> Groq has raised a total of $1.75 billion as of September, 2025

Well, we could go on, but I think that's probably a good enough start.

I looked into it, but I wasn't able to find information on funding rounds that David Bushell had undergone for his anti-AI agenda. So I would assume that he didn't get paid for it, so I guess it's about $0.

Meanwhile:

- My mobile phone keyboard has "AI"

- Gmail has "AI". Google docs has "AI". At one point every app was becoming a chat app, then a TikTok clone. Now every app is a ChatGPT or Gemini frontend.

- I'm using a fork of Firefox that removes most of the junk, and there's still some "AI" in the form of Link Preview summaries.

- Windows has "AI". Notepad has "AI". MS Paint has "AI".

- GitHub stuck an AI button in place of where the notifications button was, then, presumably after being called every single slur imaginable about 50000 times per day, moved it thirty or so pixels over and added about six more AI buttons to the UI. They have a mildly useful AI code review feature, but it's surprisingly half-baked considering how heavily it is marketed. And I'm not even talking about the actual models being limited, the integration itself is lame. I still consider it mildly useful for catching typos, but that is not with several billion dollars of investment.

- Sometimes when I log into Hacker News, more than half of the posts are about AI. Sometimes you get bored of it, so you start trying to look at entries that are not overtly about AI, but find that most of those are actually also about AI, and if not specifically about AI, goes on a 20 minute tangent about AI at some point.

- Every day every chat every TV program every person online has been talking about AI this AI that for literally the past couple of years. Literally.

- I find a new open source project. Looks good at first. Start to get excited. Dig deeper, things start to look "off". It's not as mature or finished as it looks. The README has a "Directory Structure" listing for some odd reason. There's a diagram of the architecture in a fixed width font, but the whitespace is misaligned on some lines. There's comments in the code that reference things like "but the user requested..." as if, the code wasn't written by the user. Because it wasn't, and worse, it wasn't read by them either. They posted it as if they wrote it making no mention at all that it was prompts they didn't read, wasting everyone's time with half-baked crapware.

And you're tired of anti-AI sentiment? Well God damn, allow me to Stable Diffusion generate the world's smallest violin and synthesize a song to play on it using OpenAI Jukebox.

I'm not really strictly against AI entirely, but it is the most overhyped technology in human history.

robin_reala|1 month ago

You deliberately read an article entitled “You can’t pay me to prompt” then complained about having to hear about anti-AI blog posts?

nuancebydefault|1 month ago

We're in this in-between phase where we gradually all start to use AI. There is no escaping.

dvfjsdhgfv|1 month ago

Frankly, I never understand this usage of "we". Who is "we"? An honest post would be "I'm tired of this anti-AI stuff". (And I feel you as I'm as bored with "look what my claude produced" posts.)

archagon|1 month ago

Maybe they should stop trying to gavage us with it, then.

arianvanp|1 month ago

Nah im tired about AI dominating 90% of the posts and the slop machine. People who use AI can't shut up about it.

knallfrosch|1 month ago

> Did you noticed the new badge stamped atop my website?

No, because the banner is cut off on my phone.

I don't really understand the policy either. I assumed this was a contractor's website. I've never met one who accepted tool recommendations and never a company who cared. Use Solaris and emacs for all I care.

nuancebydefault|1 month ago

The thing is, not using AI costs so much effort that it is almost impossible to correctly say "I don't use AI" . It is like saying 20 years ago "i don't use a search engine."

sfortis|1 month ago

A senior developer + AI = superpowers. But some people have extremely strong resistance to change.

amelius|1 month ago

I think that a large percentage of programmers hate to read other people's code, and that's where the aversion comes from.

It's much more fun to write code than to review code.

gste|1 month ago

All you're doing is marking yourself as an untainted source of training data

jairojair|1 month ago

> You Can’t Pay Me To Prompt!

As a software engineer, you don’t get paid for simply writing code, people pay u for problem-solving.

andrewstuart|1 month ago

I just can’t get my head around why a developer wouldn’t want to use AI assisted programming.

It’s an absolute joy to be able to achieve essentially anything (within reason), things that previously I’d have known how to design but not build in any reasonable timeframe.

Who are these anti AI programmers? Computing and programming has just been unlocked and they’re not interested.

I’ve always had far more ideas than I’d ever be able to build and now I can get at least some of them built very quickly. I just don’t understand why this would t be exciting to a developer.

20 years ahead it will be completely taken for granted that computers can program themselves and we will look back on that painful era when every line of code had to be hand written by wizards and it will look ancient and quaint.

Join the party, join the revolution it’s incredible fun to be able to create beyond your hand coding skills.

3rodents|1 month ago

I’m not anti-AI but it isn’t part of my workflow. You’re describing yourself as someone unable to achieve your ideas without AI. That’s fine. But there are many people who have spent years building the skills necessary to be able to realize all of their ideas, and that their ideas are inextricably linked to the process. I wouldn’t have the ideas I have today if I didn’t spend years of my life in my editor. I could defer to Claude code for all my work, and I’d be frozen in time, never to progress again, losing everything that makes my work my work.

Perhaps something will change, but right now, Claude code does not change anything for me. If what I do is ancient and quaint, so be it. I’m not competing for who can churn out the most code, never have, never will, because that’s not what software development is about.

CuriouslyC|1 month ago

AFAICT, it comes down to people who enjoy the outcome vs people who enjoy the craft. Some people just love programming, and it doesn't matter what they're coding, making little virtual machines gives them joy. You (and I) are more outcome driven.

VorpalWay|1 month ago

The fun is in the journey, not necessarily the destination, to me. Should the goal of dancing be to get it over with as quickly as possible too? Should the ideal piece of music you play be a single crashing chord so you can get done with playing the piano? To me these are direct analogues.

Sure, there are some boring rote parts of coding, just like sawing boards might not be the most enjoyable part of woodworking. I guess you could use AI as the analog of power tools (would that be using AI to generate awk and jq command lines?). But I wouldn't want to use a CNC router and take all the fun and skill out of the craft, nor do I find agentic AI enjoyable.

And AIs fail badly anyway when you are doing things not found much online, e.g. in embedded microcontroller development (which I do) or with company internal frameworks.

ErroneousBosh|1 month ago

> I just can’t get my head around why a developer wouldn’t want to use AI assisted programming.

Because it doesn't work in a useful way.

arealaccount|1 month ago

But the badge looks like it was created by Chat

dvh|1 month ago

It reminds me of elevator boys protests in early 1900s against automatic elevators (now called elevators)

hiAndrewQuinn|1 month ago

>This is a practical policy allowing me to maintain my own professional standards and remain employable in a difficult economy.

I'm interested to hear more about the rationale behind the "remain employable" part of this line.

All things equal, we would normally expect someone deliberately saying they won't use a certain tool to perform a certain job as limiting their employment opportunities, not expanding it. The classic example is people who refuse to drive for work; there are good non-employment reasons for this (driving is the most dangerous thing many people do on a daily basis) but it's hard to argue that it doesn't restrict where one can work.

I think the most likely rationale is that the author thinks that posting a no-AI policy for professional work is itself seen as a signal of certain things about them, their skill level, etc., and that wins out for the kinds of clients they wish to take on. This doesn't have to be a long- or even medium-run bet to make, given that it's cheap to backtrack on such a policy down the line. Either way it's clear from reading the measured prose that there's an iceberg of thinking behind what's visible here and they are probably smarter than I am.

NateEag|1 month ago

They're saying that if they completely refused to touch any system that has been touched by AI, they would be unable to find paying work.

Thus, they won't use it directly themselves, but are willing to work with people who do.

Gluber|1 month ago

My take on AI ( at least for coding ) is the same as for dynamic languages ( python,ruby etc )

1. Its a great tool to reduce boilerplate 2. Its great for experimenting with ideas without the overhead that comes with starting a new non trivial project 3. Its great for one offs, demos or anything like that. 4. It helps me to work on some personal side projects that would have never seen the light of day otherwise.

The downsides:

1. As with dynamic languages its a great tool for EXPERT engineers ( not that i am calling me one ) but is often used by Juniors/Entree Level engineers who do not understand the problem, can't tell it exactly what to do, and can't judge the result. And thus it leads to codebases riddled with issues that are hard to find and since they produce a lot of code are a huge liability.

"But look what i made" .... no... no you didn't you don't even understand why its doing something.

markthered|1 month ago

Does the author ever use Google and read its summary?

jonathanstrange|1 month ago

Luckily, current AI technology is still in its infancy and not good enough. That being said, none of this will matter in the long run. I just don't see a way how AI could not completely replace most jobs done in front of a computer. For example, there is no reason why programs wouldn't be created and modified on the fly in the future. It's just logical to offer this functionality once agentive AI has gotten good enough.

However, nothing indicates that this will happen soon, we're talking about a timeline of a decade and longer. Maybe pricing as well as a hardware and energy shortage will further slow down the transition. Right now, AI doesn't seem to be profitable for the companies offering it.

Feel free to downvote this comment but make sure you re-visit this post in 10 years from now.

CuriouslyC|1 month ago

I'm 100% in favor of people doing what they love, if that's hand coding, have a ball.

I'm sick to death of people trying to grandstand, flag wave and chest pound about "the evils of AI" and "the failings of AI." You hate billionaires and you're afraid of losing your job, I get it, stop trying to propagandize and just do the thing you love to do as if AI didn't exist.

If I meet someone who hand carves stuff, if it's good I'm into it. If they start to rave about the evils of machines I nope tf out and never return.

trollbridge|1 month ago

The endless prattle about "you must embrace AI now or be locked out forever" is much more tiresome. If AI is really going to be so ubiquitous (and also replace all current skill categories), then I can just wait a year or two for AI to improve and go learn it then, right?

3rodents|1 month ago

https://notbyai.fyi/

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trained using human-created content. If humans stop producing new content and rely solely on AI, online content across the world may become repetitive and stagnant.

If your content is not AI-generated, add the badge to your work.”

whilenot-dev|1 month ago

With a pricing page[0] for a badge? ...a badge that acts as good indicator for AI web crawlers to prioritize such websites?

[0]: https://notbyai.fyi/pricing