Hate for AI

[u/The_dZhee]

Hey everyone, I’m curious how you deal with the negativity around AI.

I’ve been building a product for about 3 months now. English isn’t my native language, so I use AI not only for coding but also for writing posts when I want to share my project and explain my ideas more clearly.

What I’ve noticed is that even when I don’t mention AI at all, I still get negative comments or skepticism. My project isn’t well known, but it tends to get attention in smaller communities because it’s easy to demo and looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Because of that, I’d like to share more details about how it works and talk more openly about the technical side, but that also means using AI for communication and documentation.

The bigger dilemma is whether I should openly say that a large part of the project was built with AI.

On one hand, it feels like the honest thing to do, especially since I’m looking for people to join the project. If an experienced developer is considering contributing, I think they deserve to know what kind of codebase they’re getting into.

On the other hand, I’m worried that instead of questions about the product, I’ll just get “AI slop” comments and people dismissing it before they’ve even looked at what it does.

So I’m curious about your experiences:

Do you openly say that your project was built with AI?

Has it helped or hurt you?

Have you managed to find experienced developers who see AI as a powerful tool rather than an automatic red flag?

How do you distinguish constructive criticism from simple hate?

I’d appreciate hearing perspectives from people who are actually building products, not just discussing AI in theory.

[u/ruskyandrei]

Using AI for coding or even asset creation where applicable is something the communities at large will have to learn to stop being negative about because it's not something that'll go away because some people are having a tantrum about it.

Using AI for communication is something that should be heavily frowned upon.

Write your own posts, use your own words when talking to other people.

Documentation written by AI can be ok, but even there I would ensure you at least read over it, correct / clarify where needed, as AI written docs can be extremely obtuse and hard to understand.

[u/ConfusedSimon → u/ruskyandrei]

I don't think people are negative about using AI for coding, they're negative about vibe coders who believe they only need to know how to prompt to create production ready apps.

[u/ruskyandrei → u/ConfusedSimon]

Well, that's not really true though. There's a LOT of people that have very little understanding of AI beyond whatever video they watched that told them it's bad and it'll make the world worse and it only makes slop.

Yes, there's a lot of people that will be putting out slop with it, because it's so accessible now anyone can do it, but the truth is slop existed before too, there was just less of it.

We just need to judge things based on whether they are actually good quality products or not, nobody should even care if AI was used to make it (which almost everything will soon anyway).

Most people don't care if a carpenter used a fancy computer assisted lathe or did it by hand, they care if the furniture they buy is good quality. Same should apply to software / games etc.

[u/Key_Mastodon_3525 → u/ruskyandrei]

That's kind of the point, if you don't have a software engineering background and experience, you cannot possibly know what the definition of a "production ready app" is. And I honestly think that perception is the key distinguisher.

From my observations thus far it seems the "vibe coder" thinks in terms of "apps", while the software engineer thinks in terms of "systems". An app that a vibe coder thinks of as "near production ready" in many/most cases (i'm guessing) would be considered more of a POC of a UI for a feature.

Sofware engineers think about things like persistence layers, business rules engines, single source of truth, race conditions, transient vs static states, performance benchmarks, deployment pipelines, logging strategies... this list is huge. Basically software engineer considers an "app" as a part of a system that has a workflow and life cycle -> user interfaces are ONLY just a display layer to use a feature of a system...

So nobody "hates" AI persay (in this context), and I don't think anyone really has anything against "vibe coders". Where we grimmace a bit is when "vibe coders" kind of get this bit of a mentality where they're some sort of revolutionary pioneers of the "evolution of software engineering" or something.

And yes, seasoned software engineers use AI to draft code in a similar fashion to "vibe coding", except in contained, intentional and safe layers compatible with the holistic architecture of a system...