Thread · HN Continuity

This is the AI companies' fantasy, to replace simple, efficient, deterministic computing with expensive LLM calls. It'll be bad for customers, bad for users, bad for the environment, bad for everybody except the companies selling it.

I'm a heavy AI user and haven't written code by hand in a long time (and probably won't until Advent of Code, honestly) but I'm already sick of people using AI to replace code at things that code excels at and AI is no better at, just slower and more expensive.

It isn't just driven by the AI companies, either. I've already seen it internally, with developers who need diagnostic tools creating Claude skills, and in the excitement of adopting AI, barely noticing that they're incredibly slow, expensive, unreliable, and even slow to create compared to the script or diagnostic endpoint they would created in the past. And they're surprised to learn that Claude skills suffer from bitrot and cross-repo dependencies just like traditional software: somebody's Claude skill fails because it wasn't updated to match changes elsewhere, and it takes much longer to realize that a conversation with Claude is going wrong than if a script or an endpoint returns an error.

When code is the best solution, by all means use AI to write it! But don't use AI instead when AI isn't fit for purpose.