I write with AI, every article on my Substack and most of my code, and I've never hidden it. I'm saying it first because someone in the comments always will. When I post here, the top replies are some version of "your AI slop bores me" or "I won't read your article because there's an AI image in it." On Hacker News, a piece of mine got 20 points and 18 comments, then got flagged.

Hacker News belongs to Y Combinator, whose CEO, Garry Tan, has said a quarter of the Winter 2025 batch shipped codebases that were 95 percent AI-generated. His forum bans AI-edited comments.

I understand where the hostility comes from. Brian Armstrong gave Coinbase engineers until the end of the week to get set up on Copilot and Cursor, then fired the ones who hadn't and didn't have a good reason. Shopify put AI use in its performance reviews, and the Microsoft division behind GitHub Copilot told managers that using AI is no longer optional. If that's your job, you didn't get a vote. Downvoting anything that smells like a model is the one vote you have left.

It's still the wrong target. Grow up. This is how the work gets done now.

In Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey, 84 percent said they use AI tools or plan to. Refusing to read something because a model helped with the sentences, or because there's an AI image at the top, makes you look small. On a post about software or AI, it makes you look ignorant.

English is my second language. I've shipped production software on the Microsoft stack for close to thirty years, and a model helps me with English the same way it helps me with C#. Nobody reviewing my code asks which keystrokes were mine. The build passes or it doesn't.

Prose has no build, so check my facts instead, and if I got one wrong, hit me for it as hard as you like and I'll own it. "This smells like AI" isn't a critique. It's a claim about your nose.

Full piece: https://galratner.substack.com/p/y-combinators-hypocrisy-the-ceo-writes

https://galratner.substack.com/p/say-youre-pre-revenue

The company behind broadcaster .com was also behind most of the annoying early 2000’s popups.

Read the story: https://galratner.substack.com/p/the-man-that-invented-the-popup