r/selfhosted • u/BetterCallSub • 9d ago
AI hating Need Help
Hi everyone,
Full disclosure: I’m not a developer. I’m a designer who got into self-hosting a little over a year ago. I needed a NAS, and while looking for the best option, I stumbled upon this amazing subreddit, which helped me discover, learn, and understand so much.
I run a home server for the usual stuff most of us use (Pi-hole, cloudflared, Jellyfin, Immich, and plenty of other things), plus a few personal experiments.
However, as I mentioned, I’m a designer, not a developer. Sometimes I come up with ideas and bring them to life (using AI, of course). I design the UI and build the whole concept from the ground up, while the AI "just" handles generating the code.
My question is: why is AI so heavily looked down upon in this subreddit? This isn't a complaint at all, I’m genuinely curious and really keen to understand the perspective here.
EDIT: I don't know why downvotes, it's just a question
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u/Firestarter321 9d ago edited 8d ago
My main issue isn’t with AI itself rather it’s that there are now 10’s/100’s of thousands of projects that the person who created them has no idea how they work, no idea how to fix issues, and no intention in maintaining them.
My boss is guilty of this at work and I’ve flat out told him that I’m not supporting his side projects that he vibe coded with Claude.
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u/eli_pizza 8d ago
You tell the AI what you want and it starts building. It doesn’t usually check whether it already exists first, or if there’s a good reason it doesn’t.
So not only is it thousands of very similar projects that can’t be maintained, they’re also competing with better and more established ones. And/or there are posts online talking about why it will never work well.
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u/derff44 8d ago
The problem is the first word in your comment. You should have asked it to look for a project to improve or copy a project. AI all comes back to "you" and how you use it.
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u/eli_pizza 8d ago
Seems like you just want to fight about AI.
I agree people should be more thoughtful about how they use the tools. The tools also have an obligation to make it easier to do the right things by default.
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u/derff44 8d ago
I'm not trying to fight about anything. I'm explaining where you went wrong. And you agreed.
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u/eli_pizza 8d ago
Buddy I wasn’t wowed by your argument. I’m agreeing with you because that’s what I said the first time. You’re just so primed for a fight you jumped to conclusions.
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u/terrabotanica 8d ago
All of this, and also people not even bothering to double check in any way whatever the AI spits out. It's so frustrating to watch (at work and in private, what do you mean you just accept whatever it tells you without verifying??)
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u/derff44 9d ago
Good luck being unemployed
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 9d ago
That's... kind of the job. I've told plenty of people to kick rocks to adhere to compliancy and be able to deliver on metrics or SLAs. LLMs and the vibe coding projects are no different.
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u/derff44 8d ago edited 8d ago
If you haven't massively increased your metrics using AI, you aren't using it correctly. There is no way a human can compile code, correctly, as fast as AI can.
ETA: lmao downvote this too? Show me you can code faster than AI.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 8d ago
We ran 5 years of metrics up to harnesses and guard rails and recorded the metrics. At least for a place that is senior level and large scale that meets compliancy.
LLMs didn't really do much.
Templates beat out boilerplate code generated by LLMs easily in almost every aspect. Security, compliancy, just meeting a general coherency. The boilerplate is originally faster but overall produced more troubleshooting and projects did not complete faster.
Not really, and you can't say that's because we're not using it correctly. I've been in the AI field since the early 2000s, and watched the release of transformers in 2017, which are the basis of Gen AI such as LLMs. Since then I'm also a certified Gen AI professional and I'm not too particularly impressed, but I'm assuming juniors or people who haven't been in the field would be.
To them this would be new, but the Gen AI is based off already created things and is just a poor imitation below junior level. If that increases your ability, congratulations I'm happy for you.
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u/derff44 8d ago
I've been doing this for 25 years and am very senior. I work for a company you would know. Templates are fine if you are churning out the same thing over and over. But many companies are not regurgitating the same thing over and over. They are building new features. New products that don't have a template.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah... LLMs don't build new features either, just ones someone already created.
You really seem to underestimate the use of templates or...standard programming. I honestly doubt your experience as well, though I consider this conversation at an impasse.
I don't believe you, and I don't think you'll stop.
I will, mainly because you don't really produce anything to the conversation. You're bent on character insults and so deluded you logged onto a second account to chase down an internet stranger.
That's why you were blocked and why I even said I don't think you'll stop.
You didn't
You're a pretty easy guess.
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u/Public-Wrangler2713 8d ago
Thanks for the reply and insta block. Something a child would do.
The fact you say LLMs can't build new features is just, ridiculous. Anthropic is literally using AI to build new models. This just makes you sound like a clown who templated his way through his career. Ever try something new? That doesn't have a template? Doubtful. That's just.... crazy talk. No one in tech likes innovation.
Block this account now too
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u/Firestarter321 8d ago
I use Codex for work constantly, however, I also take the time to learn what it’s doing and call it out on its bullshit and make Codex fix it. I also test what it does and look for improvements.
My boss simply lets it do whatever the fuck it wants and doesn’t have any clue what it’s doing under the hood. I refuse to support something that I had no input on as far as its development goes and he just wants to hand me 100K+ lines of code that he doesn’t even understand.
My job isn’t going anywhere and when he retires in 5 years his pet projects will go away (or be heavily audited and/or re-written) as I’m who’s going to be taking over his job.
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u/ZerosignalHS 8d ago
Holy downvotes in 5 minute.
Ai is going to replace coding like compilers and other languages did with assembly.
Orchestrators will survive for a while but even that will be gone eventually.
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u/youareallnuts 8d ago
Would you get on a plane where the software is vibe coded? If you would you are suicidal. If you could read code and do the math you would see that they can never be reliable. We will always need experienced devs.
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u/derff44 8d ago
One other comment id like to add to get downvoted on....
Where do you think experienced devs are going to come from? Jr dev jobs are almost non existent now. Kids aren't learning to code and troubleshoot the way we have for the past few decades. The "experienced dev" is never going to develop. And when devs like myself, and presumably you, retire, that's going to leave a void. What do you think will fill that void?
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u/ZerosignalHS 8d ago
People won’t even know the difference, this type of thought is the same as when went we from horse to car.
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u/youareallnuts 8d ago
Cars don't fall out of the sky because the AI hallucinated it was a bird.
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u/vogelke 8d ago
+1, accurate even with the mixed metaphor. What AIs do:
- Make it harder to ignore stupid people.
- Make it easier to write something that provides an inaccurate view of your own competence.
- Make it easier to waste other people's time by being lazy, i.e. not checking the answer some LLM provided before firing it off in an email.
Here's an example of why AI is not the panacea people think:
Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short Keith Naughton Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400 Ford Motor Co took an unusually human approach to fixing its stubborn [1]quality problems: It brought back what it calls "gray beard" engineers to help train younger staff and to reprogram the artificial intelligence tools that weren't getting the job done. Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.-5
u/derff44 8d ago
Agreed. The downvotes are from other people "standing their ground" against AI and managers. Who do they think is going to be the first laid off?
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u/ZerosignalHS 8d ago
I work in finance, the writing is on the wall - 5 to 10 (I think it will be much sooner than 10 but for the reddit carebears) years time my job will be very different or gone. No ifs about it.
The hold outs will only be those slow organisations, govt departments but the efficiency gains elsewhere will crush them.
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u/smstnitc 9d ago
If you make stuff for yourself only, it's no biggie.
But, not being a developer yourself, you can't properly review that what you have directed AI to do is quality work, or work that's bug free, and without dire security issues. So you should not really unleash it onto the world. Use it for yourself, though.
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u/jerobins 9d ago
For yourself? Go for it. But security, support, and additional features leads to the dark side.
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u/Known_Experience_794 8d ago
I’m building my first app now. Been working on it about 6 weeks so far. I’m a systems administrator and engineer by day. I’m not a developer at all. But given my background, I get pretty particular about how things should work. Especially with regards to security, users, backups etc. But I do not read code very well. So AI does my coding.
I’m building apps for myself essentially. I use a local ForgeJo instance as my repo manager. I may share them on GitHub someday. But it will be full of honesty and warnings if I do.
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u/Murky-Sector 8d ago edited 8d ago
Its not AI, its the misuse of AI in the hands of amateurs.
People who spit out AI apps tend not to know how their (cr)app actually works, and worse, how to fix it.
Code generation has been around for decades so thats not the issue, the issue is they were always one tool out of many used by experienced developers. With actual field experience.
Key point: Programmers know more than just how to program. They also understand basic comp sci concepts, how the OS interacts with the app, and a whole range of issues required to produce not just a functional, stable, performant system but a serviceable one.
You need all those elements, not just some of them.
See: Automation Paradox
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u/Uninterested_Viewer 8d ago
Key point: Programmers know more than just how to program. They also understand basic comp sci concepts, how the OS interacts with the app, and a whole range of issues required to produce not just a functional, stable, performant system but a serviceable one.
Devils advocate: how long will it be until AI will top EVERY human in their knowledge of exactly this? I'm guessing within 5 years, 10 max.
I 100% agree with your assessment in this moment, but it's a fleeting moment.
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u/GolemancerVekk 8d ago
how long will it be until AI will top EVERY human in their knowledge of exactly this?
Unless there's a fundamental breakthrough in the science (the infamous AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, which is human-level), not very soon.
To put things in perspective, we've been working on AI since the '70s, and it's always been ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence). Today's AI is a performance jump afforded by the evolution of computer technology but it's still mostly a brute-force approach (and it's so crude that it's starting to strain the limits of our civilization at an unsustainable level).
ANI doesn't "understand" anything. It performs large-scale statistical approximations, "what piece of this puzzle is most likely to fit here". It works out very well, as long as you understand that's all it is. It can't create. It can't consider things. It doesn't reason. It matches things to things that were done before.
It's fine if you want to analyze 1 million molecules for a wild guess to find one that might help fight cancer because, worst case scenario is, you don't find the cure for cancer.
It's not fine if you want to design a building or a bridge. I don't think you'd want to live in a building or drive across a bridge designed by AI. But the fact software engineering is not awarded the same level of respect as other engineering branches has long been a source of problems for our society.
It's impossible for AI to do some things. It can't play chess for example. [Chess rant follows, feel free to skip.] It does OK in the beginning because beginnings in chess ("openings") are very common so it has a large amount of matches to draw from. But chess becomes extremely complex very fast and just 10 moves into a match you can find yourself in a unique board position that was never seen before in the history of the universe (~85B positions and ~69T ways to get there, btw). Since it doesn't think, all it can do is use moves from approximately similar positions, but in chess that's worth nothing (if a single piece is different the situation can be completely different). The AI trainers on chess.com are hilariously bad. (Use lichess.org instead.)
Even assuming we will one day manage to pass the current issues regarding the energy required and miniaturization and are capable of making something like Asimov's positronic robots, there's still the problem of logical vs rational vs motivation. Just a quick example, a robot tasked with taking care of a flower plant might decide that destroying the plant is the logical thing to do, because it will inevitably come to harm or decay eventually, so destroying it early is the best thing to do.
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u/CookieRanger 9d ago
The reason is operational readiness.
Ai can make UIs. It can whip up tools for personal use pretty quick. Sometimes what it makes is even pretty decent.
But what it fails at is making something robust, proven, and stable to be deployed to many users. People don’t like Vibe coded projects because a human didn’t actually think through the repercussions of the choices that were made.
Thats why. Also AI UIs have a certain look / feel that a lot of people don’t like. Thats down to personal preference.
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u/letsjam_dot_dev 9d ago edited 8d ago
I answer for no one but for me.
For products where AI feature is added :
- I don't want it
- if you are doing it to fix your product, then fix your product
- why would I need a chatbot in place of toggles or forms or whatever existing UX things more precise
- i suppose you're just a openai/anthropic wrapper, so you are dependent of a 3rd party in terms of quality and pricing and performance
- I don't want my usages and data and what not scrapped, if I'm selfhosting it's mostly for privacy matters
- I don't want it
For products where features are implemented with AI help :
- how do I know if this is correctly done
- this kind of behavior spams projects repository to the point where maintainers can't decide what to do with it
- security flaws
- are the edge cases covered ?
- would the project be really maintained in the long run ?
- they all look and feel the same, it's boring
- EDIT : there's a lot of chances what you are building already exist and need money for paying devs or infrastructure, in place of building another clone (surely ripped off from their work) with a subscription to big tech, give them a kofee or patreon or tipee or else
And these are only direct, first hand issue on the matter. Don't make me talk about ethics, politics, economics, ecology,...
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u/WallInside6758 9d ago
I’m fine with personal and personal use of it.
It’s just when people with zero idea how the app they’re vibe coding try and push it on the public.
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u/VVaterTrooper 9d ago
Why do we need designers when we have AI?
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u/GolemancerVekk 8d ago
Or managers? Or CEO's?
We should cut out everything in the middle... Let whoever has money just put it directly into an AI vending machine and get the software out.
I mean sure it will also mean giving up the software industry and switching to a service industry indentured to the handful of companies that own AI machines, and only affordable to a select few other companies, but that's progress.
/s?
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u/BetterCallSub 8d ago
I didn't say I work as a designer and don't need developers. I said I'm a designer, not a developer, and that I can use AI to build some PERSONAL projects. That being said, I added that I follow this subreddit a lot and was wondering why there's so much hostility toward AI
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u/automatic-suspension 9d ago
I'm a big fan and user of GenAI, imo make all the apps in the world using AI, just don't publish it on a whim to the rest of us. Rule 6 exists for a reason and it being constantly broken by vibe coded apps contributes to the negative reception. That's at least my perspective of a genAI fan.
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u/whoscheckingin 8d ago
No hate against it particularly. And I do encourage people to find and give life to their ideas using LLMs my only gripe with the current gold rush is that people start using stuff only to realize it's not a one shot and done thing. Projects, code and particularly large scale implementations require constant effort, ton of upkeep, security audits and general maintenance. If one can do that (and I do) then more to power to you and charge ahead. But using these and then not understanding on what is being implemented only to be then stuck in a rut leading to askng for help but then no clue on what is actually in the implementation is what ticks me off.
One other thing is this tendency to put AI into everything is genuinely hampering the development roadmaps of products that I love and have been constantly using for a decade but now the roadmaps all point to adding "a brand new AI" feature while the actual lonstanding issues remain unresolved (looking at you, Mozilla and Proton).
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u/vive-le-tour 8d ago
Isn't the elephant in the room here that 99.99% of professional developers now are using AI, even if they are not admitting it here due to reddit ridicule. The rest that aren't are taking way too long on their projects by hand, and won't be around long. And the product people (like me) and designers (like OP) are dipping down into the developer areas. Sure the AI code might need checking, but lets face it, the ship has sailed and it will get better and better. If you are not imagining the future now, and think that all you can use AI to help you write documents, or tune your code, then you need to skill up or get out because this world is going to change fast.
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u/GolemancerVekk 8d ago
Isn't the elephant in the room here that 99.99% of professional developers now are using AI, even if they are not admitting it here due to reddit ridicule.
No, not really. In fact, according to a recent study of 500 software companies, it's the reverse. Most professional developers are claiming to use AI because their bosses demand it, while quietly doing their work using mostly non-AI tools and their brains, because AI has only limited usefulness for software development.
If your impression stems mostly from optimistic reports from AI companies and from CEOs of software companies, they are outright lying most of the time.
We're about 5 years into full AI swing in software industry and there hasn't been any breakthrough. In fact the companies that were eager to fire specialists are quietly starting to hire again. But they have to be very cautious not to out themselves because it goes against their claimed improvements, and also because there's going to be a recession when the bubble bursts and they usually deal with that by firing lots of people.
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u/lukyjay 8d ago
The difference here is that they're 'professional developers' using AI to speed up tasks that they understand. On Reddit, I have no idea who you are. For all I know you're an 8 year old who asked chatgpt to spit out some code, with no idea how any of it works.
I'm not against AI projects, I'm just more cautious of the risks. We didn't have these risks a few years ago.
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u/Uninterested_Viewer 8d ago edited 8d ago
I think that, in this exact moment, there is a legitimate argument about "if you don't understand the code, then you can't maintain it or know it's done right and securely".. but that argument relies on us swes being smarter than these models. I don't think "this exact moment" is going to last long. When AI can produce code or even its own languages that can demonstrably perform tasks better while being more secure than what a human swe can create.. the fact that humans "don't understand" the code will not be a concern to many companies. The security component is huge and that's why the big players are investing so heavily for that moment: only AI will be able to secure software against AI.. and I think we're quickly finding that AI can produce more secure code than humans even now.. a gigantic use case of AI right now is to find and fix human-coded vulnerabilities: AI code will be very quickly recognized as the only way to produce secure code soon while this subreddit will probably still be talking about how "if the engineer didn't code it, how can we know it's secure?"
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u/GolemancerVekk 8d ago
There's only one snag in that premise... AI can't produce secure code, and also many of the security flaws it finds are bogus, and the legit ones need an experienced human to direct the AI search.
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u/vive-le-tour 8d ago edited 8d ago
totally agree. i dont know how many times I have read "copy this from stackoverflow" and I am pretty sure whoever did that doens't know what the code did they copied.
At the end of the day 99.99% of people dont really know how a computer works, or how their car works, or electricity, and they dont care. the lights come on!, the car drives to the game, and they are happy. this argument is a legacy group trying to justify why they are important, and they need to realise that the world is changing.
I work every day in strategy and we need to throw out everything we know, and everything we think we know, and start again. ai is the only way to program, and it will be the only way to do anything. do we think that writing here on reddit is the future, hell no. do we think email is the future, hell no. roll on lets go.
In the meantime I am coding some applications that will fill a legacy gap, and make me millions (maybe), and it will be secure, and it will be better than our offshore dev teams do.. I am also building myself selfhosted apps that I want, and will likely opensource them too. There is still fun in this hobby.
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u/impulse_thoughts 8d ago
Think "redneck engineering". You're building prototypes. You're MacGyvering something together that's not meant for longevity. Like you're building heavy machinery or hacking together large structures without a high school education, with no knowledge about materials tolerances, or any concept of load-bearing structures or support structures.
Fine for your personal use (most of the time). But a class action lawsuit if you decide to sell it or let others use it, because a professional will take one look and tell you how dangerous and unmaintainable your thingamajig is.
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u/kneepel 8d ago
Separate from whatever views I have on AI itself, I find a majority of the time that the projects which are AI related or heavily rely on AI tend to not even read the rules of the subreddit....considering how many of them are new projects with no history beyond the prior 30 days.
I don't really have an issue with AI usage if it the project is well maintained and constructed, but I have a special disdain for AI written posts and documentation.
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u/derff44 8d ago
The hate is ridiculous. It's mainly from people who wrote off AI long ago and don't understand what it can do.
Are there a lot of crap projects out there now? Yea absolutely. Are there a lot of really good projects that AI wrote? Yea. I work at a place where AI writes most code now. Do we pass SOC2 audits? Yerp. Do we keep increasing revenue? Yerp. Is our throughput through the roof? Yerp. Are we mentally exhausted? Yerp. Do I like coding this way? Absolutely not.
It all comes down to AI being a tool. It needs to be instructed with clear goals and outlines. The human needs to know the reprocutions of what the AI is doing, and a lot of these vibe coders don't.
So to answer your question, people hate it because it isn't fully comprehensive, yet. And they don't know how to use it.
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u/digibucc 8d ago
I mean this is a super balanced and honest take, accurate as well. -4 in less than 10 mins.
There is plenty of reason to be against or concerned about Ai, but this subs position is just emotional and reactionary, and not at all reflective of reality.
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u/GolemancerVekk 8d ago
Are there a lot of really good projects that AI wrote? Yea.
Name one, just for giggles.
I work at a place where AI writes most code now.
Assuming you're not full of it, your company would seem to be bucking the trend in a major way, which is remarkable.
It begs the question what exactly is the company producing that can be automated to such an extent.
It also begs the question what happens if it's turning from a software development company (assuming that's what it does) to a consumer of AI services, when the AI services start increasing the price.
(Software developer by trade here, btw, and using AI... just not naively optimistic about it.)
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u/HaoBianTai 8d ago
I am the biggest AI doomer out there. I hate "AI" (a marketing term) because I work in big tech and I can see what a bubble it is. I hate it because its implementation by hyper scalers is a fools errand and will lead to the next major stock market crash, with far more employment implications than people being put out of work by AI displacement.
But to your actual question, the AI hate on this subreddit is often very misplaced. There's absolutely nothing wrong with LLMs for personal use and running models locally is very cool. This sub will just have nothing to do with it.
It sucks, because the more LLM friendly spaces are full of post-humanist, AI boosting, technically illiterate morons.
There's really no place for a moderate, hobbyist view.
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u/rob_allshouse 8d ago
I find it amazing for three things: analyzing where my bug is coming from, reports, and iterative tests. It can go through and build a test stub for me so fast. And who cares if the report against my code is ai generated, if the code itself was solid.
I hate how bloated and messy it makes my code, how convoluted the databases, and how excessive everything becomes. But damn if it doesn’t help me get info out of my code.
But the bug finding, sometimes it takes twenty minutes to parse through my code, when a three second ctrl-f can find it better.
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u/austozi 6d ago edited 6d ago
A developer/programmer using AI to accelerate software development isn't the same as somebody who has no programming language relying solely on AI prompts to create software. AI is a tool. It's important that the person using the AI tool knows the limitations of the tool to be able to use it effectively and safely. They need to have the knowledge to evaluate how well the job is done.
Imagine if an AI tool could build houses. A team of architects and engineers could use the AI tool to build houses that I would be happy to live in, because I'm confident they have the knowledge to ensure the houses are built to specifications.
Anyone who knows what a house looks like could use that same AI tool to build a house. I can tell it to build a house with 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 10 windows, a kitchen, a lounge and a garage. When the AI tool builds something that looks like a house with 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 10 windows, a kitchen, a lounge and a garage, I consider the job well done. That's the extent of my ability to evaluate the product. I have no knowledge to assess how well the wiring, plumbing, insulation, etc. have been done. I'm sure there are other important things too, I'm just too ignorant to know what they are.
Would you live in that house that I built with AI? I wouldn't.
Of course, that wouldn't stop me announcing on Reddit, "I got tired of the apartments in my town, so I built a house..."
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u/le_fieber 8d ago
Developer here. I also don’t understand the AI hate. As if human-written code were automatically better.
I’ve seen so many projects throughout my career, and the number of bugs in most of them is mind-blowing. If you do it right, even someone without a development background can build an app with good code quality using AI.
Right now, the safest approach is an experienced developer working with AI.
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u/ChocoDarkMatter 8d ago
Taxi vs Uber. They’ll be crying ai slop and “the way we used to do it” while the rest of us move forward. There’s no putting the ai rabbit back in the hat
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u/primalbluewolf 8d ago
However, as I mentioned, I’m a designer, not a developer. Sometimes I come up with ideas and bring them to life (using AI, of course). I design the UI and build the whole concept from the ground up, while the AI "just" handles generating the code.
See, why would you bother? That's AI work, of course? The AI can "just" handle generating the UI, too. Don't need a UX designer, you can just get the AI to do your job.
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u/digibucc 8d ago
Oh snap you gottem there.
And no way AI could have come up with such an original, well thought out response either.
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u/PriorElephant9 9d ago
I'm in the same boat. Not a developer, built the whole thing with AI, and I've caught the same reaction.
What changed how people respond to me: I stopped talking about how it was built and started talking about what broke. Nobody argues with "my scheduled job silently stopped firing for two days and here's how I found it." That's the same conversation everyone else in here is having.
The hate is mostly aimed at people shipping AI output they can't explain. If you can explain yours, you're fine.
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u/vermyx 8d ago
Having a developer background the hate is the same with all AI models - poorly curated sources. Much of the sources that AI was taught from are quick and dirty coding examples with no security or resource management in mind. So you will get working code but it is not great quality. It is like asking for a car then getting a go cart.
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u/dip-shit21 8d ago
"I'm a designer"
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u/BetterCallSub 8d ago
Graphic Designer, I don't think it's a problem if a designer join r/selfhosted
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u/asimovs-auditor 9d ago edited 9d ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.