Even on HN, people don't comment purely out of 'rationality.'

I think AI generates well patterned code. Essentially, it handles a lot of situations with standardized code. But recognizing those patterns and knowing how to implement them are different things.

In programming, there are people who know how to implement something but can't explain the contract or the model behind it. For those people, AI might not be very useful, or they might be one of the rare few who write code far better than AI. Either way, the fact that an AI beat a top competitive programmer is enough to say it performs better than most people on HN. There's no point in arguing with them.

It's not that they're necessarily wrong. It's that they tend to generalize their own personal workflows.

AI can't do software engineering, but it can code well. Software engineering is the problem of transforming a complex open system into a closed one, taking a PM's requirements and building a single system out of them. AI can't do that. Why? Because AI can't adjust emphasis the way humans do. The design for frequently accessed parts and rarely accessed parts should be different, but AI treats everything uniformly, which makes it harder to modify later.

On the other hand, once a problem is closed and well defined, AI does much better than most people. It's logical and doesn't make the kind of leaps humans do, at least with frontier models. So there's no point in arguing with them at all.

Their experiences are based on their own workflows, so their perceptions naturally differ. And it's hard to tell whether they're saying it's bad because they truly understand it well, or because they don't understand it at all.

I'm not saying they should live in an echo chamber, but there's no reason to argue with them. It's better to trust statistical facts.