Why one reader gravitates toward books published before 2022Why one reader gravitates toward books published before 2022

A Hacker News post by user @trms struck a nerve by confessing a subconscious bias: they gravitate toward books published before 2022, discounting newer titles—especially from unfamiliar authors. The reasoning is simple but loaded. Before the generative AI era, every word in a published book was 'typed manually, checked manually, edited manually, proofread manually.' Even though the author uses LLMs daily for coding and acknowledges that output quality is what matters, the knowledge of human effort changes how they weight a book's authority. The post drew engagement on Hacker News, surfacing a tension many readers share but rarely articulate.

a hacker news user named @trms posted something that's been bouncing around a lot of readers' heads: they unconsciously prefer books from 2022 or earlier. the logic? before generative AI went mainstream, every word in a book was typed, checked, edited, and proofread by humans. they know that's irrational—they use LLMs themselves for coding—but the knowledge of that manual effort changes how much weight they give a book. the post resonated because it names a bias a lot of people feel but haven't said out loud.