Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the past
Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the pastProgrammers were better back in the day, weren’t they? Not just people who got paid to write code, but people who lived it, who were obsessed with their craft, and whose code was a lively expression of themselves. Hackers were hackers in those days before money took over the industry.
- ▪Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the pastProgrammers were better back in the day, weren’t they?
- ▪Not just people who got paid to write code, but people who lived it, who were obsessed with their craft, and whose code was a lively expression of themselves.
- ▪Hackers were hackers in those days before money took over the industry.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,456 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Seangoedecke |
| Canonical URL | https://www.seangoedecke.com/anti-ai-nostalgia/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:09:17 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T22:18:29.257Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T22:18:29.257Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | nZlvybV1QQS5 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the pastProgrammers were better back in the day, weren’t they? Back when we had real programmers. Not just people who got paid to write code, but people who lived it, who were obsessed with their craft, and whose code was a lively expression of themselves. Hackers were hackers in those days before money took over the industry. Don’t even get me started on LLMs. Could there be a better example of today’s degenerate spirit? A machine to mass-produce software (not good software, just barely good enough), so that the weak minds that dominate the industry can indulge their obsession with quantity: of slop code, of features, and ultimately of money, which is the only way they can understand value.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Seangoedecke.