Chris might have good reasons to avoid defense. But Blank's point is that he didn't even know the opportunity existed. The issue is not really about a moral choice, more generally it's a situational awareness problem.
I think Blank's story is about a guy who missed a $20B market shift in defense VC, not a guy who failed to adopt AI.
He's not saying "add AI to your product" or "use AI or die" but more that AI has shifted institutional assumptions about tech stacks, defensibility and fundability. The bottleneck moved up the stack from engineering to judgment, insight and design.
Chris lost because he was heads down building while $20B in defense VC was flowing into his exact problem space and he didn't build the boat to capture that wave.
Great to clarify the guidelines. Many HN discussions have been dissolving into debates about whether posts are AI or not.
But the argument of "If I wanted to read what an LLM thinks, I could just ask it" assumes that prompts are basically equivalent, which is not the case.
There's a risk of reducing everything to Human -> authentic and AI -> fake. Some people's authentic writing sounds closer to LLMs, and detectors are unreliable.
The problem is not so much AI generated content that has an interesting point of view generated from unique prompts, but terrible content produced for metrics to harvest attention, which predates AI.