My main job is running a small eComm business, and I have to both develop software automations for the office (to improve productivity long-term) while also doing non-coding day to day tasks. On top of this, I maintain an open source project after hours. I've also got a young family with 3 kids.
I'm not saying Claude is the damn singularity or anything, but stuff is getting done now that simply wasn't being addressed before.
It’s fine for you to take a stand, but please understand your position is simply factually wrong if you think you can outprogram Claude for a range of common tasks.
Being anti AI is fine, but if you deny facts of how far LLM programming has come then you lack credibility.
The most effective anti AI position is to acknowledge it’s power, not pretend that vast numbers of people are somehow hallucinating the power of LLM assisted programming.
Programming is not hard. You’re just lazy.
Why should I spend my mental energy doing simple things just to avoid being perceived as “lazy”? I have endless other engineering work to do other than typing code.
Childish and naive.
If you said you’ve been using Claude heavily and it’s never done better than you on your own, then your position would be credible.
There is a reason discussions about agent use have been on Hacker News every other day, and it's not a grand conspiracy. Even in this submission, people have talked about how they have used Claude Code and its longer context window successfully as a tool for programming, even if they may be technically skilled to do it themselves. However, if you assume that every commenter is acting in bad faith, then there's no point in continuing.
That being said, I’ve seen hard evidence that pro AI bots do exist on HN.
And at the very large tech company I work at there is a push for everyone to spend more on Claude Code regardless of output. The metric is literally how much you’re spending on Claude Code not how much you’re producing (and in my org we’ve seen no measurable increase in productivity). People are legitimately trying to figure out the easiest way to get it to blow through their allocated credits.
I use AI all the time, I find that Opus 4.6 is great for all kinds of tasks. I don’t think it’s all just hype, but there’s clearly some serious astroturfing going on here, and I understand the urge to be suspicious of everyone.
Note that I'm not talking about the low-level grunt work (and even with that, its just that it is tedious and time-consuming, but if I had enough time to read through all the docs and stuff, I will almost always produce grunt code of much higher quality).
But I'm more talking about architecture, the stuff of proper higher level engineering. I use Claude Opus all the time, and I cannot even count how many times I've had to redirect its approach that was obviously betraying a complete lack of seeing the big picture, or some egregiously smelly architectural approach.
Also, expressive typing. I use mostly TypeScript, and it will often give up when I try to push it beyond a certain point, and resort to using "any". Then I have to step and do the job myself.