Surveys show that 60% of US adults don't like it which means 40% either don't care or do. I'd advise not getting your ideas about sentiment towards it from places like HN which are very biased and unrepresentative places of anything.

I find the anti crowd increasingly to be hateful and close-minded and it is disappointing because I have a lot of friends in it. There's a moral puritanism which gives people feelings that they are on the "right" side and thus any level of rudeness or hatred is justified and it only hurts their side.

I don’t disagree with your characterization.

But from a purely Machiavellian perspective I don’t see a lot of downside in courting this group in the short term.

I'm not anti-AI at all but to call people who don't want to use it "moral puritans" is laughable. It's hard to read that as anything other than a self-report on your own extreme nonchalance when it comes to the many ethical thickets surrounding this technology. While the possible benefits of AI in fields like medicine are promising, the concerns that a lot of people have about LLMs and the supporting infrastructure, power shifts, and more that have come along with them are diverse, serious, and completely understandable, and I can't imagine them being "puritan" to anyone other than those ruthlessly driven by nothing but capitalistic self-interest.

I just don't see how it's different from the pre-LLM landscape, personally.

The takes I have seen about the "ethical thickets" all call out things that could have concerned the authors before LLMs, but which apparently did not.

It's ubiquitous among dinosaurs. Don't worry. They will be left behind.

Bahahaha no, your little of time of delusion is coming to an end. Real engineers are coming back.

Real engineers don’t eschew powerful engineering tools because of what their political tribe says about them.

Real engineers aren't vibe coding. Please don't mistake Bun, Claude Code, web development et al, etc, as "engineering".

What is real engineering?

Real engineers do real engineering with all tools at their disposal. Don't cry about one specific tool because it hurts their childish feelings...but you keep crying. It is ok to be a dino.

Is popular sentiment a good measure for a decision? Anti lots of things have been growing at some points in history, including bad things.

My point is that it’s a non-decision. You can use AI later, when the models are better.

In the short term, you can address the anti-AI market.

Or perhaps it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations and the people with anti-AI sentiment are called "laggards". If so, their amount will likely be near zero soon.

This has happened thousands of times in human history.

Sure. That’s why I said “short-term” and “change your mind later”.

The thing about laggards is their money spends the same as everyone else’s.