It’s been a very hard year

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

AI Work as a Moral Line vs. Business Reality

  • Central tension: the studio reports refusing AI product‑marketing work “on moral grounds” while most inbound demand is exactly that.
  • Many commenters call this a self‑inflicted wound: “adapt or die,” especially for a small services business that depends on market trends.
  • Others defend the stance: being “right and out of business” can be preferable to compromising ethics, and not every worker is obligated to help concentrate power in AI firms.
  • Some try to distinguish between refusing all AI‑adjacent work vs. selectively avoiding hype, surveillance, or copyright‑hostile applications.
  • Several argue this is a “sub‑game”: winning a moral battle while losing the game of keeping a studio alive, affecting employees as well as founders.

AI, Tutorials, and the Collapse of Programming Education SEO

  • Multiple course authors report tutorial/SEO businesses collapsing over the past 2–3 years: traffic down ~20x, sales down to a few percent of previous levels.
  • LLMs increasingly replace Stack Overflow, W3Schools, and beginner courses for “how do I X in language Y” questions.
  • Complaints about Stack Overflow: harsh gatekeeping, capricious moderation, wrong/outdated answers, and off‑putting community tone—all making LLMs feel more attractive despite hallucinations.
  • Some still strongly prefer well‑crafted human courses over “AI slop,” but acknowledge the market is much smaller and more saturated.

Jobs, Oversupply, and Historical Parallels

  • Fears of a “new normal” with oversupply of programmers, falling salaries, and career changes; parallels drawn to:
    • Dot‑com bust (early 2000s)
    • Defense downturns and oil/gas cycles
  • Debate over whether good developers will “always” be in demand vs. AI eventually encroaching on even senior roles (code review, architecture).
  • Some see current conditions (post‑COVID correction + AI hype) as worse or more prolonged than 2001–2003; others note tech is still far from “dead.”

Ethics and Externalities of AI

  • Concerns cited: unconsented training on copyrighted work, environmental cost of training/inference, labor displacement (especially juniors), misinformation, enshittified search, and mental‑health harms.
  • Counterpoints: AI as just another tool like photography or sewing machines; training seen by some as transformative fair use; “the market” and governments largely don’t share strong moral objections.
  • Ongoing argument over whether to regulate AI tightly (e.g., banning legal/medical advice, ad‑generation) vs. futility of stopping it while other countries race ahead.

Frontend, “Slop,” and Commoditization

  • Many see HTML/CSS/UI design as commoditized: AI, Squarespace/Wix, templates, and WordPress already cover “good enough” for most clients.
  • Others argue that when 99% of sites are garbage, the remaining 1% of high‑quality work can still be valuable—but the niche is small and competitive.
  • Emergent view: a future market in fixing AI‑generated or low‑end messes, similar to today’s business in repairing bad WordPress implementations.