Some fortnights the complaints about AI come from people who barely use it. This one they came from the people who use it most. Scroll Hacker News over the past week — the forum where developers argue about their tools in unusual detail — and the grievances about AI coding assistants weren’t existential. Nobody was worried about the robots waking up. They were worried about their bill, their UI, and the effort of reading what the model just wrote.
Quotes sourced from: Hacker News. Every quote below was located at its comment permalink and reproduced verbatim; each is listed with its username, the platform, and the date in the Sources section. As always, we quote experiences, not verdicts — a forum comment is one practitioner’s account, often mid-argument, and we’ve framed them as exactly that. What makes this batch worth reading isn’t volume; it’s specificity. These are checkable complaints.
“Enshittified at a surprising clip”: the dark-pattern gripe
The sharpest thread of the fortnight was about Cursor, the AI code editor, and it wasn’t about the quality of its completions. It was about the way the product behaves around you. A user posting as jmuguy, on 20 August, laid out a bill of particulars that will sound familiar to anyone who’s watched a beloved tool curdle:
