Don't hate AI 'cause it's bad; hate it 'cause it's good

The anti-AI programmers have a problem. As I'm a programmer and anti-AI myself, I'm going to talk specifically about LLM-assisted software engineering, not other uses of AI, such as generating books, paintings, or music.

Many anti-AI programmers still believe LLMs aren't useful at all. I'm not going to try to change your opinion on the usefulness of LLMs in programming. Only you can do that.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it. -Linus Torvalds, 2026

Denying the usefulness of AI is cope. We are allowed to be sad. We need to talk about how our lives have changed, but not by going into denial.

Many arguments against AI have been anecdotal examples of how AI once wrote bad code, or misunderstood requirements. It's important that we bring up the issues that AI has created in our society, but using dumb arguments makes us all look dumb and ignorant.

Many open-source projects have adopted policies to outright ban any use of LLMs. From an idealistic standpoint this does make sense if you are anti-AI, but considering that humans depend on software we build, it's important to make sure we don't put them at risk.

If you haven't read the news in the last few weeks, dangerous vulnerabilities are being discovered with the help of AI in almost all software, especially open-source. I don't think it's practical to put everyone at risk to convey a stance. You don't need to write code using AI. Using it to review your code (including dependencies) is enough.

If your argument is that AI-generated code is bound to have vulnerabilities, remember that hand-written code by authors of Node.js, PHP, musl, etc. had vulnerabilities that were discovered by AI. Do you really believe they are bad programmers?

Endlessly debating the usefulness of AI distracts us from serious issues that are more important. I don't want to talk about how good or how bad AI generated code is. Let's talk about how it affects our mental health, how it makes us collectively devalue curiosity and creativity, and how it dehumanizes our craft.

There has been a shift in communities and teams that once valued curiosity and hack value. A community that values curiosity rewards them who want to get better at their jobs. If someone asks a rather simple question in a tech community nowadays and gets pointed to the sign saying "Let me ask Claude that for you", they might feel that their curiosity isn't valued. Of course, no one owes anyone their time, but previously even the simplest question would often evolve into a discussion of how everyone sees it differently and people might share small technical details that could be undocumented.

Part of the reason why I enjoy tinkering with computers is the community. We have so much fun sharing the discoveries we make. When AI magically hands us a solution and nobody cares how it works, I lose the desire to tinker.

Hackers like to compete with each other to find the smallest, most elegant, or fastest hacks. This has been a large motivation for me to do things, which I feel is going away. If everyone can do everything with AI, how do we maintain healthy competition?

There are many good reasons to hate AI, but I will not hate it for being smart.