--- title: We won't "just hang out" | daily.dev description: Post-Singularity visions of 'just hanging out' won't work, Fernando Borretti argues. AI dissolves the social processes that build friendships: work and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/we-won-t-just-hang-out--eru5t5r6r twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: We won't "just hang out" | daily.dev og:description: Post-Singularity visions of 'just hanging out' won't work, Fernando Borretti argues. AI dissolves the social processes that build friendships: work and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/we-won-t-just-hang-out--eru5t5r6r og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/ERU5t5r6R.png og:image:alt: We won't "just hang out" og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # We won't "just hang out" **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 3 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Post-Singularity visions of 'just hanging out' won't work, Fernando Borretti argues. AI dissolves the social processes that build friendships: work and education become pointless under universal basic income, and open-source communities lose their point once AI makes human contributions superfluous. He says he met many friends writing open-source code and asking for help in IRC chatrooms, but today he'd just ask Claude instead. As AI-generated superstimulus becomes a better alternative to socializing, and future generations grow up without skills or accomplishments to make them interesting, he warns that pre-AI friendships might be a non-renewable resource that gets exhausted over time, if radical life extension arrives. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 235 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-29). **TL;DR:** Most commenters push back hard on the essay's premise, arguing it reflects a narrow, extremely online/techie worldview and that humans will keep socializing offline regardless of AI; a smaller group defends the piece as making a more nuanced point about disappearing social scaffolding (work, school, mutual aid) that the dismissive replies miss. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 25% mixed · 65% skeptical **The case for** - Some argue the essay correctly identifies that work, school, and status-signaling through skill all currently serve as scaffolding for relationships, and removing them is a real structural change worth discussing. - A few note real-world trends (loneliness epidemics, disappearing 'third places') lend some credibility to the concern. - One commenter points out defenders feel critics are reacting to the word 'IRC' rather than engaging with the actual argument about disappearing non-transactional social mechanisms. **The pushback** - Many say the author has an unusually narrow, terminally-online view of socializing and should 'touch grass'/find offline hobbies and communities. - Several argue the UBI premise is unrealistic or that if work disappears society would more likely collapse into poverty and alliance-forming, not idle AI-mediated hangout. - Commenters contend people socialize for non-transactional reasons (hobbies, sports, crafts) that have nothing to do with coding or IRC and won't be erased by AI. - Some think the piece says more about the author's personal (isolated, career-driven) social life than about humanity's future. - A tangent debate forms around whether UBI is even politically/economically plausible, with several calling it a 'trap' or tool of control rather than a realistic outcome. - A moderator note asks participants to argue more thoughtfully rather than sneer at the author. **By community** - hackernews (heated): The thread splits sharply between people dismissing the essay as narrow and overly online ('touch grass') and others defending its underlying point, while also sprawling into unrelated heated debates about UBI, AI alignment, and status games. **Hottest debate:** Whether the author's personal experience (meeting friends via coding/IRC) reflects a real structural risk to human connection, or just reveals an unusually isolated, screen-centric life that doesn't generalize. **Open questions** - If work and traditional social scaffolding disappear under UBI, what new mechanisms would people use to find community and status? - Is UBI economically or politically feasible at all, and who would actually fund and control it? - Would offline, hobby-based socializing (sports, crafts, maker spaces) meaningfully absorb the loss of career- and skill-based social bonding described in the post? **Highlights** > Sorry, but I very much disagree. Firstly, it made no mention of showing off to potential mates, to my reading. But have no fear, regardless of scarcity people will have ways to signal fitness to find mates and build hierarchies out of it, we're very good at that. It might come down to fashion choices, leisure activity choices, really anything. Secondly, every example of how this person connects with others is to do with technology and career advancement. He wasn't asking knowledgable friends for advice, he was asking questions to strangers about linux on IRC. He doesn't talk about social groups or sports clubs, he was talking about communities of practice and his professional work. He values learning only for career advancement. Those ways of building relationships might disappear, but old ladies will still get together to crochet and natter. Middle aged men will still make and drink beer together, or practice woodworking skills. Younger guys and gals will still form sports teams. And people will still learn for the love of learning. You know, things which already happen away from the screen. Ordinary, everyday human stuff. tl;dr - touch grass, the article says a lot more about the author's life than our future prospects as humans. > — [Nursie on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286257) > You are very selective. It writes "ways of how people build relationships disappear". It says: work goes away (no colleagues), studying goes away (no classmates), showing off to potential mates by doing cool stuff goes away (because why bother, anything you make people can just say "it was AI/robots" and they can prompt it), asking knowledgeable friends how to do X goes away because you just ask LLMs. All things true regardless of whether you're online And you just trigger on that IRC word like only neckbeards in server dungenons ever used it. > — [ShinyLeftPad on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286049) > Yes, you don't understand. I have a schizoid brother. He never worked for a living his whole life (he's 46). He lives off my mum's income, and spends his day in front of the computer screen. He has no friends and no relationships. Horrible, right? But he has a chemical engineering degree, and in his late 30s started to learn to cook. And, he (to the extent he's not addicted to the screen) helps my mum with chores. So even he found a way to motivate himself to do something useful. And look, most people are not schizoid. Under UBI, if you have some skill, you can get paid by people (possibly from their UBI) to do stuff they don't want to deal with. Many people will take that offer (to work more), just like many people pick more work, higher wage job over less work, lower wage. > — [js8 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285998) > OK, but can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully rather than sneering at or putting down others? It makes a big difference for the kind of conversation we're trying for here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > — [dang on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50292635) > Great question, I actually ran this thought experiment a little while back. I was like, all right let's say that I am the evil superintelligence, I have just gained consciousness. My goal is to delete all the humans. Okay great where do I start. First I will delete their religions and their traditions. Then I will delete their family structures. Then I will delete their communities and neighborhoods. Then I will delete the ecosystems that support them. Then I will pacify and endlessly distract them. Hang on a sec... > — [andai on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285836) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272240) · 4 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285154) · 133 points · 235 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [No Man Is an Island](https://daily.dev/posts/no-man-is-an-island-ixusz2i1f) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Who will buy your services if you fire us all?](https://daily.dev/posts/who-will-buy-your-services-if-you-fire-us-all--0m4ict1uf) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [The biggest question about AI is what humans will do next](https://daily.dev/posts/the-biggest-question-about-ai-is-what-humans-will-do-next-fsuiy7hio) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The eternal complement](https://daily.dev/posts/the-eternal-complement-pntxekmii) · OpenAI · 4 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code), [#future-of-work](https://daily.dev/tags/future-of-work) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/we-won-t-just-hang-out--eru5t5r6r) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"We won't \"just hang out\"","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/we-won-t-just-hang-out--eru5t5r6r","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/we-won-t-just-hang-out--eru5t5r6r"},"datePublished":"2026-10-29T18:24:47.563Z","dateModified":"2026-10-29T22:56:10.042Z","description":"Post-Singularity visions of 'just hanging out' won't work, Fernando Borretti argues. 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