[HN Gopher] Everyone in Seattle hates AI
___________________________________________________________________
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
Author : mips_avatar
Score : 444 points
Date : 2025-12-03 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jonready.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jonready.com)
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Author here if anyone has thoughts
| nickff wrote:
| I was under the distinct impression that Seattle was somewhat
| divided over 'big tech', with many long-term residents
| resenting Microsoft and Amazon's impact on the city (and
| longing for the 'artsy and free-spirited' place it used to be).
| Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the
| Microsofties and Amazonians? This is a genuine question, as
| I've never lived in Seattle, but I visit often, and live in the
| PNW.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| They kind of are, though I think so many locals now work in
| big tech in some way that it's shifted a bit. I wish we could
| return to being a bit more artsy and free spirited
| caconym_ wrote:
| > Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the
| Microsofties and Amazonians?
|
| As somebody who has lived in Seattle for over 20 years and
| spent about 1/3 of it working in big tech (but not either of
| those companies), no, I don't really think so. There is a lot
| of resentment, for the same reasons as everywhere else: a
| substantial big tech presence puts anyone who can't get on
| the train at a significant economic disadvantage.
| MicrosoftShill wrote:
| I've lived in the Seattle area most of my life and lived in
| San Francisco for a year.
|
| SF embraces tech and in general (politics, etc) has a culture
| of being willing to try new things. Overall tech hostility is
| low, but the city becoming a testbed for projects like Waymo
| is possibly changing that. There is a continuous argument
| that their free-spirited culture has been cannibalized by
| tech.
|
| Seattle feels like the complete opposite. Resistant to
| change, resistant to trying things, and if you say you work
| in tech you're now a "techbro" and met with eyerolls. This is
| in part because in Seattle if you are a "techbro" you work
| for one of the megacorps whereas in SF a "techbro" could be
| working for any number of cool startups.
|
| As you mentioned, Seattle has also been taken over by said
| megacorps which has colored the impressions of everyone. When
| you have entire city blocks taken over by Microsoft/Amazon
| and the roads congested by them it definitely has some
| negative domino effects.
|
| As an aside, on TV we in the Seattle area get ads about how
| much Amazon has been doing for the community. Definitely some
| PR campaign to keep local hostility low.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 'how much they do for the community' like trying to buy
| elections so we won't tax them, same thing boeing and
| microsoft did. Anytime out local government gets a little
| uppity suddenly these big corps are looking to move like
| boeing largely did. Remember Amazon HQ2, at least part of
| the reasoning behind that disaster was seattlites asking,
| 'what the hell is amazon doing for us besides driving up
| rents and snarling traffic?'
|
| (.. and exactly how is boeing doing since it was forced to
| move away from 'engineering culture' by moving out of the
| city where their workforce was trained and training the
| next generation. Oh yeah planes are falling out of the sky
| and their software is pushing planes into the ground.)
| jfalcon wrote:
| I'm sure the 5% employee tax in Seattle and the bill being
| introduced in Olympia will do more to smooth things over
| than some quirky blipvert will.
|
| I think most people in Seattle know how economics works,
| logic follows: while "techbro" don't work is true: if
| "techbro" debt > income: unless assets == 0: sellgighustle
| else sellhousebeforeforeclosure
| nomoreseattleforyou("techbro") end else "gigbot" isn't
| summoned and people don't get paid. "techbro" health-- due
| to high expense of COBRA. [etc...] end end
| jfalcon wrote:
| It depends on how AI affects your economy.
|
| If you are a writer or a painter or a developer - in a city
| as expensive as Seattle - then one may feel a little
| threatened. Then it becomes the trickle down effect, if I
| lose my job, I may not be able to pay for my dog walker, or
| my child care or my hair dresser, or...
|
| Are they sympathetic? It depends on how much they depend on
| those who are impacted. Everyone wants to get paid - but AI
| don't have kids to feed or diapers to buy.
| smikhanov wrote:
| "Grabbed lunch" is an awful phrase
| smikhanov wrote:
| Oh, and there's also "grok" just few paragraphs later!
| mips_avatar wrote:
| It kind of is
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Regarding _" And then came the final insult: everyone was
| forced to use Microsoft's AI tools whether they worked or
| not."_
|
| As a customer, I actually had an MS account manager once yelled
| at me for refusing to touch <latest newfangled vaporware from
| MS> with a ten foot pole. Sorry, burn me a dozen times; I don't
| have any appendages left to care. I seriously don't get
| Microsoft. I am still flabbergasted anytime anyone takes
| Microsoft seriously.
| robocat wrote:
| > MS account manager once yelled at me
|
| Presumably the account manager is under a lot of pressure
| internally...
|
| Do they repeatedly yell at you?
|
| Do you know how your <vaporware> usage was measured - what
| metrics was the account manager supposed to improve?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| He was trying to get people to use the Azure unnamed
| service. I assume others like me did a trial, POC, and
| immediately ran away screaming.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Would love to hear more anecdotes from former colleagues.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| One fun one was the leadership of Windows Update became
| obsessed with shipping AI models via Windows update, but they
| can't safely ship files larger than 200mb inside of an
| update.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| I like that you shared the insight. Feels like you shared a
| secret to the world that is not so secret if you work a
| Microsoft (I guess this is less about the city)
|
| I feel bad for people who work at dystopian places where you
| can't just do the job, try to get ahead etc. It is set up to
| make people fail and play politics.
|
| I wonder if the company is dying slowly but with AI hype qaand
| old good foundations keeping her stock price going.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Well I think it's interesting how much what goes on inside of
| the major employers that affects Seattle. Like crappy
| behavior inside of Microsoft is felt outside of it.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Howdy! I personally don't really understand the "point" the
| article is trying to make. I mostly agree with your sentiment
| that AI can be useful. I too have seen a massive increase in
| productivity in my hobbies, thanks to LLMs.
|
| As to the point of the article, is it just to say "People
| shouldn't hate LLMs"? My takeaway was more "This person's
| future isn't threatened directly so they just aren't
| understanding why people feel this way." but I also personally
| believe that, if the CEOs have their way, AI will threaten
| every job eventually.
|
| So yeah I guess I'm just curious what the conclusion presented
| here is meant to be?
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I guess in conclusion I'm saying that it's hard to build in
| Seattle, and that's really unfortunate.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't follow why it's hard to build in Seattle. Do you
| mean before this "AI summer" they struggled, or that _with_
| AI they have become too slow because they won 't adopt it?
| throwaway_dang wrote:
| Out of curiosity, is this piece just some content that you
| created in the hopes of boosting your company's mindshare?
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I'm just really isolated right now, I've been building solo
| for a long time. I don't have anyone to share my thoughts
| with, which is something I used to really value at Microsoft.
| the_af wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you redact this with AI?
|
| It has all the telltale signs: lots of em-dashes but also
| "punched up" paragraphs, a lot of them end with a zinger, e.g.
|
| > _Amazon folks are slightly more insulated, but not by much.
| The old Seattle deal--Amazon treats you poorly but pays you
| more--only masks the rot._
|
| or
|
| > _Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San
| Francisco, people still believe they can change the world--so
| sometimes they actually do._
|
| Once or twice can be coincidence, but a full article of it
| reads a tiny bit like AI slop.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I wrote it by hand but I had an AI do some edits. I got the m
| dash drilled into me by my creative writing teacher in
| college.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I actually think your usage is pretty different from the
| usual ai style, if that means anything. More traditional?
|
| I'm not sure why you needed it for edits though, since you
| seem good at writing generally.
| caconym_ wrote:
| It kinda seems like you're conflating Microsoft with Seattle in
| general. From the outside, what you say about Microsoft
| specifically seems to be 100% true: their leadership has gone
| fucking nuts and their irrational AI obsession is putting
| stifling pressure on leaf level employees. They seem convinced
| that their human workforce is now a temporary inconvenience.
| But is this representative of Seattle tech as a whole? I'm not
| sure. True, morale at Amazon is likely also suffering due to
| recent layoffs that were at least partly blamed on AI.
|
| Anecdotally, I work at a _different_ FAANMG+whatever company in
| Seattle that I feel has actually done a pretty good job with AI
| internally: providing tools that we aren 't forced to use (i.e.
| they add selectable functionality without disrupting existing
| workflows), not tying ratings/comp to AI usage (seriously how
| fucking stupid are they over in Redmond?), and generally
| letting adoption proceed organically. The result is that people
| have room to experiment with it and actually use it where it
| adds real value, which is a nonzero but frankly much narrower
| slice than a lot of """technologists""" and """thought
| leaders""" are telling us.
|
| Maybe since Microsoft and Amazon are the lion's share (are
| they?) of big tech employment in Seattle, your point stands.
| But I think you could present it with a bit of a broader view,
| though of course that would require more research on your part.
|
| Also, I'd be shocked if there wasn't a serious groundswell of
| anti-AI sentiment in SF and everywhere else with a significant
| tech industry presence. I suspect you are suffering from a bit
| of bias due to running in differently-aligned circles in SF vs.
| Seattle.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I think probably the safest place to be right now emotionally
| is a smaller company. Something about the hype right now is
| making Microsoft/Amazon act worse. Be curious to hear what
| specifically your company is doing to give people agency.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > Be curious to hear what specifically your company is
| doing to give people agency.
|
| Wrt. AI specifically, I guess we are simply a) not using AI
| as an excuse to lay off scores of employees (at least, not
| yet) and b) not squeezing the employees who remain with
| arbitrary requirements that they use shitty AI tools in
| their work. More generally, participation in design work
| and independent execution are encouraged at all levels. At
| least in my part of the company, there simply isn't the
| same kind of miserable, paranoid atmosphere I hear about at
| MS and Amazon these days. I am not aware of any rigidly
| enforced quota for PIPing people. Etc.
|
| Generally, it feels like our leadership isn't afflicted
| with the same kind of desperate FOMO fever other SMEGMAs
| are suffering from. Of course, I don't mean to imply there
| haven't been layoffs in the post free money era, or that
| some people don't end up on shitty teams with bad managers
| who make them miserable, or that there isn't the usual
| corporate bullshit, etc.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Nope, no one does. This thread is devoid of opinion on the
| topic.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I think people just have a lot of frustration to get off
| their chest, which is fine.
| jfalcon wrote:
| I get the feeling that this is supposed to be about the
| economics of a fairly expensive city/state and that "six-figure
| salary", but you don't really call it out.
|
| If it was about the technology, then it would be no different
| than being a java/c++ developer and calling someone who does
| html and javascript their equal so pay them. It's not.
|
| People get anxious when something may cause them to have to
| change - especially in terms of economics and the pressures
| that puts on people beyond just "adulting". But I don't really
| think you explained the why of their anxiety.
|
| Pointing the finger at AI is like telling the Germans that all
| their problems are because of Jews without calling out why the
| Germans are feeling pressure from their problems in the first
| place.
| somekyle2 wrote:
| Anecdotally, lots of people in SF tech hate AI too. _Most_ people
| out of tech do. But, enough of the people in tech have their
| future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters.
| tptacek wrote:
| It is not at all my experience working in local government
| (that is, in close contact with everybody else paying attention
| to local government) that non-tech people hate AI. It seems
| rather the opposite.
| kg wrote:
| EDIT: Removed part of my post that pissed people off for some
| reason. _shrug_
|
| It makes a lot of sense that someone casually coming in to
| use chatgpt for 30 minutes a week doesn't have any reason to
| think more deeply about what using that tool 'means' or where
| it came from. Honestly, they shouldn't have to think about
| it.
| tptacek wrote:
| The claim I was responding to implied that non-techies
| distinctively hate AI. You're a techie.
| wk_end wrote:
| Managers everywhere love the idea of AI because it means they
| can replace expensive and inefficient human workers with
| cheap automation.
|
| Among actual people (i.e. not managers) there seems to be a
| bit of a generation gap - my younger friends (Gen Z) are
| almost disturbingly enthusiastic about entrusting their every
| thought and action to ChatGPT; my older friends (young
| millennials and up) find it odious.
| tptacek wrote:
| The median age of people working local politics is probably
| 55, and I've met more people (non-family, that is) over 70
| doing this than in anything else, and all of them are (a)
| using AI for stuff and (b) psyched to see any new
| application of AI being put to use (for instance, a year or
| so ago, I used 4o to classify every minute spent in our
| village meetings according to broad subjects).
|
| Or, drive through Worth and Bridgeview in IL, where all the
| middle eastern people in Chicago live, and notice all the
| AI billboards. Not billboards for AI, just, billboards
| obviously made with GenAI.
|
| I think it's just not true that non-tech people are
| especially opposed to AI.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Mangers should realize that the thing AI might be best at
| is to replace them. Most of my managers don't understand
| the people they are managing and don't understand what the
| people they are managing are actually building. They job is
| to get a question from management that their reports can
| answer, format that answer for their boss and send the
| email. They job is to be the leader in a meeting to make
| sure it stays on track, not understand the content. AI can
| do all that shit without a problem.
| vasvir wrote:
| MANNA https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/132476
| 48/mannap...
| majormajor wrote:
| Non-technical people that I know have rapidly embraced it as
| "better google where i don't have to do as much work to
| answer questions." This is in a non-work context so i don't
| know how much those people are using it to do their day job
| writing emails or whatever. A lot of these people are tech-
| using boomers - they already adjusted to Google/the internet,
| they don't know how it works, they just are like "oh, the
| internet got even better."
|
| There's maybe a slow trend towards "that's not true, you
| should know better than to trust AI for that sort of
| question" in discussions when someone says something like "I
| asked AI how [xyz was done]" but it's definitely not enough
| yet to keep anyone from going to it as their first option for
| answering a question.
| somekyle2 wrote:
| I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF
| non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing
| vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the
| chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into
| every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on
| social media and enables cheating on school projects. But,
| sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I
| probably have a biased sample of people who don't really try
| to make productive use of AI.
| tptacek wrote:
| I can imagine reasons why non-tech people in SF would hate
| _all_ tech. I work in tech and living in the middle of that
| was a big part of why I was in such a hurry to get out of
| there.
| pesus wrote:
| Frankly, tech deserves its bad reputation in SF (and
| worldwide, really).
|
| One look at the dystopian billboards bragging about
| trying to replace humans with AI should make any sane
| human angry at what tech has done. Or the rising rents
| due to an influx of people working on mostly useless AI
| startups, 90% of which won't be around in 5 years. Or
| even how poorly many in tech behave in public and how
| poorly they treat service workers. That's just the tip of
| the iceberg, and just in SF alone.
|
| I say all this as someone living in SF and working in
| tech. As a whole, we've brought the hate upon ourselves,
| and we deserve it.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't agree with any of this. I just think it's
| aggravating to live in a company town.
| treis wrote:
| There's a long list of things that have "replaced" humans
| all the way back to the ox drawn plow. It's not sane to
| be angry at any of those steps along the way. GenAI will
| likely not be any different.
| pesus wrote:
| It is absolutely sane to be angry at people's livelihoods
| being destroyed and most aspects of life being worsened
| just so a handful of multi-billionaires that already
| control society can become even richer.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| The plough also made the rich richer, but in the long run
| the productivity gains it enabled drove improvements to
| common living standards.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| it's plenty sane to be angry when the benefits of those
| technical innovations are not distributed equally.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Anyone involved in government procurement loves AI,
| irrespective of what it even is, for the simple fact that
| they get to pointedly ask every single tech vendor for
| evidence that they have "leveraged efficiency gains from AI"
| in the form of a lower bid.
|
| At least, that's my wife's experience working on a contract
| with a state government at a big tech vendor.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| That's fair. The bad behavior in the name of AI definitely
| isn't limited to Seattle. I think the difference in SF is that
| there are people doing legitimately useful stuff with AI
| _keats wrote:
| I think this comment (and TFA) is really just painting with
| too broad of strokes. Of course there are going to be people
| in tech hubs that are very pro-AI, either because they are
| working with it directly and have had legitimately positive
| experiences or because they work with it and they
| begrudgingly see the writing on that wall for what it means
| for software professionals.
|
| I can assure you, living in Seattle I still encounter a lot a
| AI boosters just as much as I encounter AI haters/skeptics
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| What's so striking to me is these "vocal boosters" almost
| preach like televangelists the moment the subject comes up.
| It's very crypto-esque (not a hot take at all I know). I'm just
| tired of watching these people shout down folks asking
| legitimate questions pertaining to matters like health and
| safety.
| lambchoppers wrote:
| Health and safety seems irrelevant to me. I complain about
| cars, I point out "obscure" facts like that they are a major
| cause of lung related health problems for innocent
| bystanders, I don't actually ride in cars on any regular
| basis, I use them less in fact than I use AI. There were
| people at the car's introduction who made all the points I
| would make today.
|
| The world is not at all about fairness of benefits and
| impacts to all people it is about a populist mass and what
| amuses them and makes their life convenient, hopefully
| without attending the relevant funerals themselves.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > health and safety seems irrelevant to me
|
| Honestly I don't really know what to say to that, other
| than it seems rather relevant to me. I don't really know
| what to elaborate on given we disagree on such a
| fundamental level.
| lambchoppers wrote:
| Do you think the industry will stop because of your
| concern? If for example, AI does what it says on the box
| but causes goiters for prompt jockeys do you think the
| industry will stop then or offshore the role of AI
| jockey?
|
| It's lovely that you care about health, but I have no
| idea why you think you are relevant to a society that is
| very much willing to risk extinction to avoid the
| slightest upset or delay to consumer convenience measured
| progress.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I for one have no idea what you mean by health and safety
| with respect to AI. Do you have an OSHA concern?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Most of my FB contacts are not in tech. It is overwhelming
| viewed as a negative by them. To be clearer: I'm counting
| anyone who posts AI-generated pictures on FB as implicitly
| being pro-AI; if we neglect this portion the only non-negative
| posts about AI would be highly qualified "in some special cases
| it is useful" statements.
| themafia wrote:
| > enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI
| that there are lot of vocal boosters
|
| That's the presumption. There's no data on whether this is
| actually true or not. Most rational examinations show that it
| most likely isn't. The progress of the technology is simply too
| slow and no exponential growth is on the horizon.
| 65 wrote:
| Strangely I've found the only people who are super excited
| about AI are executive level boomers. My mom loves AI and uses
| it to do her job, which of course has poor results. All the
| younger people I know hate AI. Perhaps it's also a generational
| dofference.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| It's one of those "people hate noticing AI-generated stuff, but
| everyone and their mom is using ChatGPT to make their works
| easier". There are a lot of vocal boosters and vocal anti-
| boosters, but the general population is using it in a Google
| fashion and move on. Not everyone is thinking about AI-
| apocalypse every day.
|
| Personally, I'm in-between the opinions. I hate when I'm
| consuming AI-generated stuff, but can see the use for myself
| for work or asking bunch of not-so-important questions to get
| general idea of stuff.
| ispeaknumbers wrote:
| this reads like an ad for your project
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| You mean Wanderfugl???
| mips_avatar wrote:
| An iconic name
| exmadscientist wrote:
| It reads like it's AI-edited, which is deliciously ironic.
|
| (Protip: if you're going to use em--dashes--everywhere, either
| learn to use them appropriately, or be prepared to be blasted
| for AI--ification of your writing.)
| mips_avatar wrote:
| My creative writing teacher in college drilled the m dash
| into me. I can't really write without them now
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| I think the presence of em dashes is a very poor metric for
| determining if something is AI generated. I'm not sure why
| it's so popular.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| So the funny thing is m dashes have always been a great
| trick to help your writing flow better. I guess gpt4o
| figured this out in RLHF and now it's everywhere
| exmadscientist wrote:
| For me it is that they are wrongly used in this piece. Em
| dashes as appositives have the feel of interruption--like
| this--and are to be used very sparingly. They're a big
| bump in the narrative's flow, and are to be used only
| when you _want_ a big bump. Otherwise appositives should
| be set off with commas, when the appositive is critical
| to the narrative, or parentheses (for when it isn 't).
| Clause changes are similar--the em dash is the biggest
| interruption. Colons have a sense of finality: you were
| building up to this: and now it is here. Semicolons are
| for when you really can't break two clauses into two
| sentences with a full stop; a full stop is better most of
| the time. Like this. And so full stops should be your
| default clause splice when you're revising.
|
| Having em-dashes everywhere--but each one or pair is used
| correctly--smacks of AI writing--AI has figured out how
| to use them, what they're for, and when they fit--but has
| not figured out how to revise text so that the overall
| flow of the text and overall density of them is correct--
| that is, low, because they're heavy emphasis--real
| interruptions.
|
| (Also the quirky three-point bullet list with a three-
| point recitation at the end with bolded leadoffs to each
| bullet point and a final punchy closer sentence is
| totally an AI thing too.)
|
| But, hey, I guess I fit the stereotype!--I'm in Seattle
| and I hate AI, too.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Also, for sheer delightful perversity, I ran the above
| comment through Copilot/ChatGPT and asked it to revise,
| and this is what I got. Note the text structuring and how
| it has changed! (And how my punctuation games are gone,
| but we expected that.)
|
| >>>
|
| For me, the issue is that they're misused in this piece.
| Em dashes used as appositives carry the feel of
| interruption--like this--and should be employed
| sparingly. They create a jarring bump in the narrative's
| flow, and that bump should only appear when you _want_
| it. Otherwise, appositives belong with commas (when
| they're integral to the sentence) or parentheses (when
| they're not). Clause breaks follow the same logic: the em
| dash is the strongest interruption. Colons convey a sense
| of arrival--you've been building up to this: and now it's
| here. Semicolons are for those rare cases when two
| clauses can't quite stand alone as separate sentences;
| most of the time, a full stop is cleaner. Like this.
| Which is why full stops should be your default splice
| when revising.
|
| Sprinkling em dashes everywhere--even if each one is
| technically correct--feels like AI writing. The system
| has learned what they are, how they work, and when they
| fit, but it hasn't learned how to revise for overall flow
| or density. The result is too many dashes, when the right
| number should be low, because they're heavy emphasis--
| true interruptions.
|
| (And yes, the quirky three-point bullet list with bolded
| openers and a punchy closer at the end is another
| hallmark of AI prose.)
|
| But hey, I guess I fit the stereotype--I'm in Seattle,
| and I hate AI too.
| wrs wrote:
| Ironically, years ago I fell into the habit of using too
| many non-interrupting em dashes because people thought
| semicolons were pretentious.
|
| But introductory rhetorical questions? As sentence
| fragments? There I draw the line.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| OMG, beautifully described! (not sarcastic!)
| twodave wrote:
| > Semicolons are for when you really can't break two
| clauses into two sentences with a full stop; a full stop
| is better most of the time.
|
| IIRC (it's been a while) there are 2 cases where a semi-
| colon is acceptable. One is when connecting two closely-
| related independent clauses (i.e. they could be two
| complete sentences on their own, or joined by a
| conjunction). The other is when separating items in a
| list, when the items themselves contain commas.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I think it's because it is difficult to actually add an
| em dash when writing with a keyboard (except I heard on
| Macs). So it's either they 1)memorized the em dash alt
| code, 2)had a keyboard shortcut for the key, or 3)are
| using the character map to insert it every time, all of
| which are a stretch for a random online post.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| You just type hyphen twice in many programs... Or on
| mobile you hold hyphen for a moment and choose em dash. I
| don't use it, but it's very easy to use.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| Related article posted here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46133941 explains
| it: "Within the A.I.'s training data, the em dash is more
| likely to appear in texts that have been marked as well-
| formed, high-quality prose. A.I. works by statistics. If
| this punctuation mark appears with increased frequency in
| high-quality writing, then one way to produce your own
| high-quality writing is to absolutely drench it with the
| punctuation mark in question. So now, no matter where
| it's coming from or why, millions of people recognize the
| em dash as a sign of zero-effort, low-quality algorithmic
| slop."
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Ironic? The author is working on an AI project.
| npunt wrote:
| The irony is that AI writing style is pretty off-putting,
| and the story itself was about people being put off by the
| author's AI project.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| I don't think the phenomenon is limited to Seattle.
| jofla_net wrote:
| Its not. I know some ex bay area devs who are the same mind,
| and i'm not too far off.
|
| I think its definitely stronger in MS as my friend on the
| inside tells me, than most places.
|
| There are alot of elements to it, one being profits at all
| costs, the greater economy, FOMO, and a resentment of engineers
| and technical people who have been practicing, what execs i can
| guess only see as alchemy, for a long time. They've decided
| that they are now done with that and that everyone must use the
| new sauce, because reasons. Sadly until things like logon
| buttons dis-appear and customers get pissed, it won't self-
| correct.
|
| I just wish we could present the best version of ourselves and
| as long as deadlines are met, it'll all work out, but some have
| decided for scorched-earth. I suppose its a natural reaction to
| always want to be on the cutting edge, even before the cake has
| left the oven.
| nullbound wrote:
| 'If you could classify your project as "AI," you were safe and
| prestigious. If you couldn't, you were nobody. Overnight, most
| engineers got rebranded as "not AI talent."'
|
| It hits weirdly close to home. Our leadership did not technically
| mandate use, but 'strongly encourages' it. I did not even have my
| review yet, but I know that once we get to the goals part, use of
| AI tools will be an actual metric ( which is.. in my head
| somewhere between skeptic and evangelist.. dumb ).
|
| But the 'AI talent' part fits. For mundane stuff like data model,
| I need full committee approval from people, who don't get it
| anyway ( and whose entire contribution is: 'what other companies
| are doing' ).
| kg wrote:
| I know of at least one bigco that will no longer hire anyone,
| period, who doesn't have at least 6 months of experience using
| genai to code and isn't enthusiastic about genai. No
| exceptions. I assume this is probably true of other companies
| too.
|
| I think it makes some amount of sense if you've decided you
| want to be "an AI company", but it also makes me wary.
| Apocryphally Google for a long period of time struggled to hire
| some people because they weren't an 'ideal culture fit'. i.e.
| you're trying to hire someone to fix Linux kernel bugs you hit
| in production, but they don't know enough about Java or Python
| to pass the interview gauntlet...
| empressplay wrote:
| Like any tool, the longer you use it the better you learn
| where you can extract value from it and where you can't,
| where you can leverage it and where you shouldn't. Because
| your behaviour is linked to what you get out of the LLM, this
| can be quite individual in nature, and you have to learn to
| work with it through trial and error. But in the end
| engineers do appear to become more productive 'pairing' with
| an LLM, so it's no surprise companies are favouring LLM-savvy
| engineers.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > But in the end engineers do appear to become more
| productive 'pairing' with an LLM
|
| Quite the opposite: LLMs reduce productivity, they don't
| increase it. They merely give the illusion of productivity
| because you can generate code real fast, but that isn't
| actually useful when you spend time fixing all the mistakes
| it made. It is absolutely insane that companies are stupid
| enough to require people use something which cripples them.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| So far, for me, it's just an annoying tool that gets worse
| outcomes potentially faster than just doing it by hand.
|
| It doesn't matter how much I use it. It's still just an
| annoying tool that makes mistakes which you try to correct
| by arguing with it but then eventually just fix it
| yourself. At best it can get you 80% there.
| beloch wrote:
| The full quote from that section is worth repeating here.
|
| ---------
|
| "If you could classify your project as "AI," you were safe and
| prestigious. If you couldn't, you were nobody. Overnight, most
| engineers got rebranded as "not AI talent." And then came the
| final insult: everyone was forced to use Microsoft's AI tools
| whether they worked or not.
|
| Copilot for Word. Copilot for PowerPoint. Copilot for email.
| Copilot for code. Worse than the tools they replaced. Worse
| than competitors' tools. Sometimes worse than doing the work
| manually.
|
| But you weren't allowed to fix them--that was the AI org's
| turf. You were supposed to use them, fail to see productivity
| gains, and keep quiet.
|
| Meanwhile, AI teams became a protected class. Everyone else saw
| comp stagnate, stock refreshers evaporate, and performance
| reviews tank. And if your team failed to meet expectations?
| Clearly you weren't "embracing AI." "
|
| ------------
|
| On the one hand, if you were going to bet big on AI, there are
| aspects of this approach that make sense. e.g. Force everyone
| to use the company's no-good AI tools so that they become good.
| However, not permitting employees outside of the "AI org" to
| fix things neatly nixes the gains you might see while incurring
| the full cost.
|
| It sounds like MS's management, the same as many other tech
| corp's, has become caught up in a conceptual bubble of "AI as
| panacea". If that bubble doesn't pop soon, MS's products could
| wind up in a very bad place. There are some very real threats
| to some of MS's core incumbencies right now (e.g. from Valve).
| tasspeed wrote:
| textbook way to NOT rollout AI for your org. AI has genuine
| benefits to white collar workers, but they are not trained for
| the use-cases that would actually benefit them, nor are they
| trained in what the tech is actually good at. they are being
| punished for using the tools poorly (with no guidance on how to
| use them "good"), and when they use the tools well, they fear
| being laid off once an SOP for their AI workflows are written.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > My former coworker--the composite of three people for anonymity
| --now believes she's both unqualified for AI work and *that AI
| isn't worth doing anyway*. *She's wrong on both counts*, but the
| culture made sure she'd land there.
|
| I'm not sure they're as wrong as these statements imply?
|
| Do we think there's more or less crap out now with the advent and
| pervasiveness of AI? Not just from random CEOs pushing things top
| down, but even from ICs doing their own gig?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Oh but we're all supposed to swoon over the author's ability to
| make ANOTHER AI powered mapping solution! Probably vibecoded
| and bloated too. Just what we need, obviously all the haters
| are wrong! /s
| empressplay wrote:
| Honestly if it's using a swiss-army-knife framework it's
| already bloated.
| groos wrote:
| It's not just that AI is being pushed on to employees by the tech
| giants - this is true - but that the hype of AI as a life
| changing tech is not holding up and people within the industry
| can easily see this. The only life-changing thing it's doing is
| due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of eliminating jobs in the tech
| industry and outside by CEOs who have bet too much on AI.
| Everyone currently agrees that there is no return on all the
| money spent on AI. Some players may survive and do well in the
| future but for a majority there is only the prospect of pain, and
| this is what all the negativity is about.
| pnathan wrote:
| As a layoff justification and a hurryup tool, it is pretty
| loathesome. People use their jobs for their housing, food, etc.
| elzbardico wrote:
| More than this man. AI is making me re-appreciate part of the
| Marxist criticism of capitalism. The concept of worker
| alienation could be easily extended in new forms to the labor
| situation in an AI-based economy. FWIW, humans derive a lot
| of their self-evaluation as people from labor.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Marx was correct in his identification of the problem (the
| communist manifesto still holds up today). Marx went off
| the rails with his solution.
| vunderba wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _> I wanted her take on Wanderfugl , the AI-powered map I 've
| been building full-time._
|
| I can at least give you one piece of advice. Before you decide on
| a company or product name, take the time to _speak it out loud_
| so you can get a sense of how it sounds.
| epolanski wrote:
| Also, do it assuming different linguistic backgrounds. It could
| sound dramatically different by people that speak English but
| as second language, which are going to be a whole lot of your
| users, even if the application is in English.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| It's pronounced wanderfull in Norwegian
| epolanski wrote:
| And how many of your users are going to have Nordic
| backgrounds?
|
| I personally thought it was wander _fughel_ or something.
|
| Let alone how difficult it is to remember how to spell it
| and look it up on Google.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Just FYI, I would read it out loud in English as "wander
| fuggle". I would assume most Americans would pronounce the
| 'g'.
|
| I thought 'wanderfugl' was a throwback to ~15 years ago
| when it was fashionable to use a word but leave out vowels
| for no reason, like Flickr/ /Tumblr/Scribd/Blendr.
| hbosch wrote:
| "Wanderful" would be a better name.
| Ekaros wrote:
| If there is a g in there I will pronounce a g there. I have
| some standards and that is one. Pronouncing every single
| letter.
| basscomm wrote:
| > Pronouncing every single letter.
|
| Now I want to know how you pronounce words like: through,
| bivouac, and queue.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You don't pronounce all the letters?
| badc0ffee wrote:
| That's a gnarly standard you have there.
| paddleon wrote:
| obviously not a native French speaker
| efskap wrote:
| Maybe that's why they didn't go with the English cognate i.e.
| Wanderfowl, since being foul isn't great branding
| isomorphic wrote:
| What? You don't want travel tips from an itinerant swinger? Or
| _for_ itinerant swingers?
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I grew up in Norway and there's this idea in Europe of someone
| who breaks from corporate culture and hikes and camps a lot
| (called wandervogel in german). I also liked how when
| pronounced in Norwegian or Swedish it sounds like wander full.
| I like the idea of someone who is full of wander.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| Same in Danish FWIW.
|
| In English, I'd pronounce it very similar to "wonderful".
| adastra22 wrote:
| If OP dropped the g, it would be a MUCh better product
| name.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I actually own wanderfull.ai
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| Solid advice. Seeing how many here would pronounce it
| differently, I totally agree hahah
| 59nadir wrote:
| In Swedish the G wouldn't be silent so it wouldn't really be
| all that much like "wonderful"; "vanderfugel" is the closest
| thing I could come up with for how I'd pronounce it with some
| leniency.
| adastra22 wrote:
| And if you manage to say it outloud, say it to someone else and
| ask them to spell it. If they can't spell it, they can't type
| it into the url bar.
| littlekey wrote:
| The weird thing is that half of the uses of the name on that
| landing page spell it as "Wanderfull". All of the mock-up
| screencaps use it, and at the bottom with "Be one of the first
| people shaping Wanderfull" etc.
|
| So even the creator can't decide what to call it!
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Literally everyone I know is sick of AI. Sick of it being
| crowbar'd into tools we already use and find value in. Sick of it
| being hyped at us as though it's a tech moment it simply isn't.
| Sick of companies playing at being forward thinking and new
| despite selling the same old shit but they've bolted a chatbot to
| it, so now it's "AI." Sick of integrations and products that
| _just plain do not fucking work_.
|
| I wouldn't shit talk you to your face if you're making an AI
| thing. However I also understand the frustration and the
| exhaustion with it, and to be blunt, if a product advertises AI
| in it, I immediately do treat it more skeptically. If the
| features are opt-in, fine. If however it seems like the sort of
| thing that's going to start spamming me with Clippy-style "let
| our AI do your work for you!" popups whilst I'm trying to learn
| your fucking software, I will get aggravated extremely fast.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Oh, I will happily get in your face and tell you your AI
| garbage sucks. I'm not afraid of these people, and you
| shouldn't be, either. Bring back social pressure. We
| successfully shamed Google Glassholes into obscurity, we can do
| it again. This shit has infested entire _operating systems_
| now, all so someone can get another billion dollars, while the
| rest of us struggle to make rent. It 's made my career
| miserable, for so many reasons. It's made my daily life
| miserable. I'm so sick and tired of it.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The thing that stops me being outwardly hostile is that there
| are a minority, and it is a minor, minor minority, of
| applications for AI that are actually pretty interesting and
| useful. It's just catastrophically oversaturated with samey
| garbage that does nothing.
|
| I'm all for shaming people who just link to ChatGPT and call
| their whatever thing AI powered. If you're actually doing
| some work though and doing something interesting, I'll hear
| you out.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > This shit has infested entire operating systems now
|
| Well, it's not the fault on a random person doing some
| project that may even be cool.
|
| I'll certainly adjust my priors and start treating the person
| as probably an idiot. But if given evidence they are not, I'm
| interested on what they are doing.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _shamed Google Glassholes into obscurity_ "
|
| Except it didn't stick?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088369
| stego-tech wrote:
| This isn't just a Seattle thing, but I do think the outsized
| presence of specific employers there contributes to an outsized
| negativity around AI.
|
| Look, good engineers just want to do good work. We want to use
| good tools to do good work, and I was an early proponent of using
| these tools in ways to help the business function better at
| PriorCo. But because I was on the wrong team (On-Prem), and
| because I didn't use their chatbots constantly (I was already
| pitching agents before they were a defined thing, I just suck at
| vocabulary), I was ripe for being thrown out. That built a
| serious resentment towards the tooling for the actions of shitty
| humans.
|
| I'm not alone in these feelings of resentment. There's a lot of
| us, because instead of trusting engineers to do good work with
| good tools, a handful of rich fucks decided they knew technology
| better than the engineers building the fucking things.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| Our (on-the-way-out) mayor likes it!
|
| "I said, Imagine how cool would this be if we had like, a 10-foot
| wall. It's interactive and it's historical. And you could talk to
| Martin Luther King, and you could say, 'Well, Dr, Martin Luther
| King, I've always wanted to meet you. What was your day like
| today? What did you have for breakfast?' And he comes back and he
| talks to you right now."
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I'm stuck between feeling bad because this is my field-I spend
| most days worrying about not being able to pay my bills or get
| another job-and wanting to shake every last tech worker by the
| shoulders and yell "WAKE UP!" at them. If you are unhappy with
| what your employer is doing, because they have more power over
| you, you don't have to just sit there and take it. You can
| organize.
|
| Of course, you could also go online and sulk, I suppose. There
| are more options between "ZIRP boomtimes lol jobs for everyone!"
| and "I got fired and replaced with ELIZA". But are tech workers
| willing to expore them? That's the question.
|
| It just feels like it's in bad taste that we have the most money
| and privilege and employment left (despite all of the doom and
| gloom), and we're sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. If
| not now, when? And if not us, who?
| akomtu wrote:
| Good for them. It turns out, the common folk have more wisdom
| than tech bros with regard to AI.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| This article is about how the tech bros in Seattle hate AI.
| typs wrote:
| Ah yes. The big tech employees of Amazon and Microsoft, the
| common folk.
| arjie wrote:
| I wonder if I'm the guy in the bubble or if all these people are
| in the bubble. Everyone I know is really enjoying using these
| tools. I wrote a comment yesterday about how much my life has
| improved https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131280
|
| But also, it's not just my own. My wife's a graphic designer. She
| uses AI all the time.
|
| Honestly, this has been revolutionary for me for getting things
| done.
| empressplay wrote:
| I recently returned to the world of education and it's
| _everywhere_. I feel for those people who hate LLMs because
| they've already lost the war.
| toast0 wrote:
| > After a pause I tried to share how much better I've been
| feeling--how AI tools helped me learn faster, how much they
| accelerated my work on Wanderfugl. I didn't fully grok how tone
| deaf I was being though. She's drowning in resentment.
|
| Here's the deal. Everyone I know who is infatuated with AI shares
| things AI told them with me, unsolicited, and it's always so
| _amazingly_ garbage, but they don 't see it or they apologize it
| away [1]. And this garbage is being shoved in my face from every
| angle --- my browser added it, my search engine added it, my
| desktop OS added it, my mobile OS added it, some of my banks are
| pushing it, AI comment slop is ruining discussion forums
| everywhere (even more than they already were, which is
| impressive!). In the mean time, AI is sucking up all the GPUs,
| all the RAM, and all the kWH.
|
| If AI is _actually_ working for you, great, but you 're going to
| have to show it. Otherwise, I'm just going to go into my cave and
| come out in 5 years and hope things got better.
|
| [1] Just a couple days ago, my spouse was complaining to her
| friend about a change that Facebook made, and her friend pasted
| an AI suggestion for how to fix it with like 7 steps that were
| all fabricated. That isn't helpful at all. It's even less helpful
| than if the friend just suggested to contact support and/or
| delete the facebook account.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I've recently found that it can be a useful substitute for
| stackoverflow. It does occasionally make shit up, but
| stackoverflow and forums searching also has a decently high
| miss rate as well, so that doesn't piss me off too much. And
| it's usually immediately obvious when a method doesn't exist,
| so it doesn't waste a lot of time for each incident.
|
| Specifically I was using Gemini to answer questions about Godot
| specifically for C# (not gdscript or using the IDE, where
| documentation and forums support are stronger), and it was
| mostly quite good for that.
| cwillu wrote:
| It's like porn: use it privately if you have to, but don't make
| it my problem.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| To the extent that Microsoft pushes their employees to use all
| their other shitty products, Copilot seeks like just another one
| (it can't be more miserable/broken than Sharepoint).
| symbogra wrote:
| I honestly expected this to be about sanctimonious lefties
| complaining about a single chatgpt query using an Olympic
| swimming pool worth of water, but it was actually about Seattle
| big tech workers hating it due to layoffs and botched internal
| implementations which is a much more valid reason to hate it.
|
| My buddies still or until recently still at Amazon have
| definitely been feeling this same push. Internal culture there
| has been broken since the post covid layoffs, and layering "AI"
| over the layoffs leaves a bad taste.
| pkasting wrote:
| Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-
| Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the
| linked post.
|
| I haven't escaped this mindset myself. I'm convinced there are a
| small number of places where LLMs make truly effective tools
| (see: generation of "must be plausible, need not be accurate"
| data, e.g. concept art or crowd animations in movies), a large
| number of places where LLMs make apparently-effective tools that
| have negative long-term consequences (see: anything involving
| learning a new skill, anything where correctness is critical),
| and a large number of places where LLMs are simply ineffective
| from the get-go but will increasingly be rammed down consumers'
| throats.
|
| Accordingly I tend to be overly skeptical of AI proponents and
| anything touching AI. It would be nice if I was more rational,
| but I'm not; I want everyone working on AI and making money from
| AI to crash and burn hard. (See also: cryptocurrency)
| hectdev wrote:
| It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more
| existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of
| AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I
| talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some
| people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite
| having tangible examples of how it has been useful.
| throwout4110 wrote:
| Right this is what I can't quite understand. A lot of HN
| folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate
| or business ideas by non technical people that don't
| understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I
| never understand is the population of coders that don't see
| any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them,
| or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or
| hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is
| AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is
| almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. The
| progress has moved astoundingly fast and the sheer amount of
| capital and competition and pressure means the train is not
| slowing down. Predictions of "2025 is the year of coding
| agents" from a chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in
| fact absolutely true...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > What I never understand is the population of coders that
| don't see any value in coding agents or are aggressively
| against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be
| able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless
| and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what
| we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of
| 3 years ago.
|
| I don't recognize that because _it isn 't true_. I try the
| LLMs every now and then, and they still make the same
| stupid hallucinations that ChatGPT did on day 1. AI hype
| proponents love to make claims that the tech has improved a
| ton, but based on my experience trying to use it those
| claims are completely baseless.
| hectdev wrote:
| This fascinates me. Just observing but because it hasn't
| worked for you, everyone else must be lying? (I'm
| assuming that's what you mean by baseless)
|
| How does that bridge get built? I can provide tangible
| real life examples but I've found push back from that in
| other online conversations.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I try the LLMs every now and then, and they still make
| the same stupid hallucinations that ChatGPT did on day 1.
|
| One of the tests I sometimes do of LLMs is a geometry
| puzzle: You're on the equator facing
| south. You move forward 10,000 km along the surface of
| the Earth. You are rotate 90deg clockwise. You move
| another 10,000 km forward along the surface of the earth.
| Rotate another 90deg clockwise, then move another 10,000
| km forward along the surface of the Earth.
| Where are you now, and what direction are you facing?
|
| They all used to get this wrong all the time. Now the
| best ones sometimes don't. (That said, only one to succed
| just as I write this comment was DeepSeek; the first I
| saw succeed was one of ChatGPT's models but that's now
| back to the usual error they all used to make).
|
| Anecdotes are of course a bad way to study this kind of
| thing.
|
| Unfortunately, so are the benchmarks, because the models
| have quickly saturated most of them, including
| traditional IQ tests (on the plus side, this has
| demonstrated that IQ tests are definitely a learnable
| skill, as LLMs loose 40-50 IQ points when going from
| public to private IQ tests) and stuff like the maths
| olympiad.
|
| Right now, AFAICT the only open benchmarks are the METR
| time horizon metric, the ARC-AGI family of tests, and the
| "make me an SVG of ${...}" stuff inspired by Simon
| Willison's pelican on a bike.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| What have you tried? How much time have you spent? Using
| AI is it's own skill set separate from programming
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Predictions of "2025 is the year of coding agents" from a
| chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in fact absolutely
| true...
|
| ... but maybe not in the way that these CEOs had hoped.[0]
|
| Part of the AI fatigue is that busy, competent devs are
| getting swarmed with massive amounts of slop from not-very-
| good developers. Or product managers getting 5 paragraphs
| of GenAI bug reports instead of a clear and concise
| explanation.
|
| I have high hopes for AI and think generative tooling is
| extremely useful in the right hands. But it _is_ extremely
| concerning that AI is allowing some of the worst, least
| competent people to generate an order of magnitude more
| "content" with little awareness of how bad it is.
|
| [0] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
| elictronic wrote:
| AI is in a hype bubble that will crash just like every
| other bubble. The underlying uses are there but just like
| Dot Com, Tulips, subprime mortgages, and even Sir Isaac
| Newton's failings with the South Sea Company the financial
| side will fall.
|
| This will cause bankruptcies and huge job losses. The
| argument for and against AI doesn't really matter in the
| end, because the finances don't make a lick of sense.
| throwout4110 wrote:
| Ok sure the bubble/non-bubble stuff, fine, but in terms
| of "things I'd like to be a part of" it's hard to imagine
| a more transformative technology (not to again turn off
| the anti-hype crowd). But ok, say it's 1997, you don't
| like the valuations you see. But as a tech person you're
| not excited by browsers, the internet, the possibilities?
| You don't want to be a part of that even if it means a
| bubble pops? I also hear a lot of people argue "finances
| don't make a lick of sense" but i don't think things are
| that cut and dried and I don't see this as obvious. I
| don't think really many people know how things will
| evolve and what size a market correction or bubble would
| have.
| zdragnar wrote:
| What precisely about AI is transformative, compared to
| the internet? E-mail replaced so much of faxing, phoning
| and physical mail. Online shopping replaced going to
| stores and hoping they have what you want, and hoping it
| is in stock, and hoping it is a good price. It replaced
| travel agents to a significant degree and reoriented many
| industries. It was the vehicle that killed CDs and
| physical media in general.
|
| With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is
| helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's
| replacing anything for me aside from making google
| searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need
| a definitive answer for.
|
| It's popping up in my music streams now and then, and I
| generally hate it. Mushy-mouthed fake vocals over fake
| instruments. It pops up online and aside from the
| occasional meme I hate it there too. It pops up all over
| blogs and emails and I profoundly hate it there, given
| that it encourages the actual author to silence
| themselves and replaces their thoughts with bland drivel.
|
| Every single software product I use begs me to use their
| AI integration, and instead of "no" I'm given the option
| of "not now", despite me not needing it, and so I'm
| constantly being pestered about it by something.
|
| It has, thus far, made nearly everything worse.
| throwout4110 wrote:
| > With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is
| helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's
| replacing anything for me aside from making google
| searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need
| a definitive answer for.
|
| I think this is probably the disconnect, this seems so
| wildly different from my experience. Not only that, I'll
| grant that there are a ton of limitations still but
| surely you'd concede that there has been an incredible
| amount of progress in a very short time? Like I can't
| imagine someone who sits down with Claude like I do and
| gets up and says "this is crap and a fad and won't go
| anywhere".
|
| As for generated content, I again agree with you and
| you'd be surprised to learn that _execs_ agree with you
| but look at models from 1, 2, 3 years ago and tell me you
| don't see a frightening progression of quality. If you
| want to say "I'll believe it when I see it" that's fine
| but my god just look at the trajectory.
|
| For AI slop text, once again agree, once again I think we
| all have to figure out how to use it, but it is great for
| e.g. helping me rewrite a wordy message quickly, making a
| paper or a doc more readable, combining my notes into
| something polished, etc, and it's getting better and
| better and better.
|
| So I disagree it has made everything worse but I
| definitely agree that it has made a lot of things worse
| and we have a lot of Pets.com ideas that are totally not
| viable today, but the point I think people are maybe
| missing (?) is that it's not about where we are it's
| about the velocity and the future. You may be terrified
| and nauseated by $1T in capex on AI infra, fine but what
| that tells you is the scale is going to grow even further
| _in addition_ to the methodological / algorithmic
| improvements to tackle things like continual learning,
| robustness, higher quality multimodal generation with
| e.g. true narrative consistency, etc etc etc. in 5 years
| I don't think many people will think of "slop" so
| negatively
| aisengard wrote:
| There is zero guarantee that these tools will continue to
| be there. Those of us who are skeptical of the value of the
| tools may find them somewhat useful, but are quite wary of
| ripping up the workflows we've built for ourselves over
| decade(s)(+) in favor of something that might be 10-20%
| more useful, but could be taken away or charged greater
| fees or literally collapse in functionality at any moment,
| leaving us suddenly crippled. I'll keep the thing I know
| works, I know will always be there (because it's open
| source, etc), even if it means I'm slightly less productive
| over the next X amount of time otherwise.
| throwout4110 wrote:
| What would you imagine a plausible scenario would
| possibly be that your tools would be taken away or
| "collapse in functionality"? I would say Claude right now
| has probably made worse code and wasted time than if I
| had coded things myself, but it's because this is like
| the first few hundred days of this. Open weight models
| are also worse but they will never go away and improve
| steadily as well. I am all for people doing whatever
| works for them I just don't get the negativity or the
| skepticism when you look at the progress over what has
| been almost zero time. It's crappy now in many respects
| but it's like saying "my car is slow" in the one
| millisecond after I floor the gas pedal
| takluyver wrote:
| My understanding is that all the big AI companies are
| currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic
| Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get
| big, and then hope to make a profit later. So any service
| you depend on could crash out of the race, and if one
| emerges as a victorious monopoly and you rely on them,
| they can charge you almost whatever they like.
|
| To my mind, the 'only just started' argument is wearing
| off. It's software, it moves fast anyway, and all the
| giants of the tech world have been feverishly throwing
| money at AI for the last couple of years. I don't buy
| that we're still just at the beginning of some huge
| exponential improvement.
| ben_w wrote:
| My understanding is they make a loss overall due to the
| spending on training new models, that the API costs are
| profit making if considered in isolation. That said, this
| is based on guestimates based on hosting costs of open-
| weight models, owing to a lack of financial transparancey
| everywhere for the secret-weights models.
| blibble wrote:
| > that the API costs are profit making if considered in
| isolation.
|
| no, they are currently losing money on inference too
| watwut wrote:
| > What would you imagine a plausible scenario would
| possibly be that your tools would be taken away or
| "collapse in functionality"?
|
| Simple. The company providing the tool needs actual
| earning suddenly. Therefore, they need to raise the
| prices. They also need users to spend more tokens, so
| they will make the tool respond in a way that requires
| more refinement. After all, the latter is exactly what
| happened with google search.
|
| At this point, that is pretty normal software cycle - try
| to attract crowd by being free or cheap, then lock
| features behind paywall. Then simultaneously raise prices
| more and more while making the product worst.
|
| This literally NEEDS to happen, because these companies
| do not have any other path to profitability. So, it will
| happen at some point.
| throwout4110 wrote:
| Sure but you're forgetting that competition exists. If
| anthropic investors suddenly say "enough" and demand
| positive cash flow it wouldn't be that hard, everyone is
| capturing users for flywheels and capex for model
| improvements because if they don't they will be
| guaranteed to lose.
|
| It's going to definitely be crappy, remember Google in
| 2003 with relevant results and no endless SEO , or Amazon
| reviews being reliable, or Uber being simple and cheap,
| etc. once growth phase ends monetization begins and
| experience declines but this is guard railed by the fact
| that there are many players.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Maybe those people do different work than you do? Coding
| agents don't work well in every scenario.
| throwout4110 wrote:
| Yet people imply that because it doesn't work in their
| scenario that it's not good?
| suprjami wrote:
| I don't see it that way. Tabs, spaces, curly brace placement,
| Vim, Emacs, VSCode, etc are largely aesthetic choices with
| some marginal unproven cognitive implications.
|
| I find people mostly prefer what they are used to, and if
| your preference was so superior then how could so many people
| build fantastic software using the method you don't like?
|
| AI isn't like that. AI is a bunch of people telling me this
| product can do wonderful things that will change society and
| replace workers, yet almost every time I use it, it falls far
| short of that promise. AI is certainly not reliable enough
| for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it
| heavily.
| Loughla wrote:
| >AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize
| the quality of my work by using it heavily.
|
| I mean this in sincerity, and not at all snarky, but - have
| you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or
| effectively? I find that I can get what I need from
| chatbots (and refuse to call them AI until we have general
| AI just to be contrary) if I spend a couple of minutes
| considering constraints and being careful with my prompt
| language.
|
| When I've come across people in my real life who say they
| get no value from chatbots, it's because they're asking
| poorly formed questions, or haven't thought through the
| problem entirely. Working with chatbots is like working
| with a very bright lab puppy. They're willing to do
| whatever you want, but they'll definitely piss on the floor
| unless you tell them not to.
|
| Or am I entirely off base with your experience?
| dwoldrich wrote:
| It would be helpful if you would relate your own bad
| experiences and how you overcame them. Leading off with
| "do it better" isn't very instructive. Unfortunately
| there's no useful training for much of anything in our
| industry, much less AI.
|
| I prefer to use LLM as a sock puppet to filter out
| implausible options in my problem space and to help me
| recall how to do boilerplate things. Like you, I think, I
| also tend to write multi-paragraph prompts repeating
| myself and calling back on every aspect to continuously
| hone in on the true subject I am interested in.
|
| I don't trust LLM's enough to operate on my behalf
| agentically yet. And, LLM is uncreative and hallucinatory
| as heck whenever it strays into novel territory, which
| makes it a dangerous tool.
| kentm wrote:
| > have you considered that you haven't used the tools
| correctly or effectively?
|
| The problem is that this comes off just as tone-deaf as
| "you're holding it wrong." In my experience, when people
| promote AI, its sold as just having a regular
| conversation and then the AI does thing. And when that
| doesn't work, the promoter goes into system prompts, MCP,
| agent files, etc and entire workflows that are required
| to get it to do the correct thing. It ends up feeling
| like you're being lied to, even if there's some benefit
| out there.
|
| There's also the fact that all programming workflows are
| not the same. I've found some areas where AI works well,
| but a lot of my work it does not. Usually things that
| wouldn't show up in a simple Google search back before it
| was enshittified are pretty spotty.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| AI is okay (not great) at generating low- to mid-skill
| code. If you are working in a high-skill software domain
| that requires pervasive state-of-the-art or first-
| principles implementation then AI produces consistently
| terrible code. It frequently is flatly incorrect about
| esoteric technical details that really matter.
|
| It can't reason from first principles and there isn't
| training data for a lot of state-of-the-art computer
| science and code implementations. Nothing you can prompt
| will make it produce non-naive output because it doesn't
| have that capability.
|
| AI works for a lot of things because, if we are honest,
| AI generated slop is replacing human generated slop. But
| not all software is slop and there are software domains
| where slop is not even an option.
| hectdev wrote:
| I would say it is like that. No one HAS to use AI. But the
| shared goal is to get a change to the codebase to achieve a
| desired outcome. Some will outsource a significant part of
| that to AI, some won't.
|
| And its tricky because I'm trying not to appeal to emotion
| despite being fascinated with how this tool has enabled me
| to do things in a short amount of time that it would have
| taken me weeks of grinding to get to and improves my
| communication with stakeholders. That feels world changing.
| Specifically my world and the day-to-day roll I play when
| it comes to getting things done.
|
| I think it is fine that it fell short of your expectations.
| It often does for me as well but it's when it gets me 80%
| of the way there in less than a day's work, then my mind is
| blown. It's an imperfect tool and I'm sorry for saying this
| but so are we. Treat its imperfections in the same way you
| would with a JR developer- feedback, reframing,
| restrictions, and iterate.
| moduspol wrote:
| > But the shared goal is to get a change to the codebase
| to achieve a desired outcome.
|
| I'd argue that's not true. It's more of a _stated_ goal.
| The actual goal is to achieve the desired outcome in a
| way that has manageable, understood side effects, and
| that can be maintained and built upon over time by all
| capable team members.
|
| The difference between what business folks see as the
| "output" of software developers (code) and what (good)
| software developers actually deliver over time is
| significant. AI can definitely do the former. The latter
| is less clear. This is one of the fundamental disconnects
| in discussions about AI in software development.
| hectdev wrote:
| In my personal use case, I work at a company that has SO
| MUCH process and documentation for coding standards. I
| made an AI agent that knows all that and used it to
| update legacy code to the new standard in a day.
| Something that would have taken weeks if not more. If
| your desire is manageable code, make that a requirement.
|
| I'm going to say this next thing as someone with a lot of
| negative bias about corporations. I was laid off from
| Twitter when Elon bought the company and at a second
| company that was hemorrhaging users.
|
| Our job isn't to write code, it's to make the machine do
| the thing. All the effort for clean, manageable, etc is
| purely in the interest of the programmer but at the end
| of the day, launching the feature that pulls in money is
| the point.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| How did you verify that your AI agent performed the
| update correctly? I've experienced a number of cases
| where an AI agent made a change that seemed right at
| first glance, maybe even passed code review, but fell
| apart completely when it came time to build on top of it.
| hectdev wrote:
| Unit tests, manual testing the final product, PR with two
| approvals needed (and one was from the most anal
| retentive reviewer at the company who is heavily invested
| in the changes I made), and QA.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| > No one HAS to use AI.
|
| Well... That's no longer true, is it?
|
| My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a
| multinational big corporation, and she got told during a
| meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to
| become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing
| across the board.
|
| And have you called a large company for any reason
| lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public
| transport company, whatever. You call them, because
| online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to
| finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person
| who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been
| killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one
| nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for',
| where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably,
| and then shunt you to an actual person.
|
| AI is already unavoidable.
| hectdev wrote:
| It isn't a universal thing. I have no doubt there is a
| job out there that that isn't a requirement. I think the
| issue is the C-level folks are seeing how more productive
| someone might be and making it a demand. That to me is
| the wrong approach. If you demonstrate and build
| interest, the adoption will happen.
| kentm wrote:
| > where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably,
| and then shunt you to an actual person.
|
| If you're lucky. I've had LLMs that just repeatedly hang
| up on me when they obviously hit a dead end.
| palmotea wrote:
| > My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a
| multinational big corporation, and she got told during a
| meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to
| become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing
| across the board.
|
| My multinational big corporation employer has reporting
| about how much _each_ employee uses AI, with a naughty
| list of employees who aren 't meeting their quota of AI
| usage.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Nothing says "this product is useful" quite like forcing
| people to use it and punishing people who don't. If it
| was that good, there'd be organic demand to use it.
| People would be begging to use it, going around their
| boss's back to use it.
|
| The fact that companies have to force you to use it with
| quotas and threats is damning.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > And have you called a large company for any reason
| lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public
| transport company, whatever. You call them, because
| online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to
| finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person
| who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been
| killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one
| nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for',
| where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably,
| and then shunt you to an actual person
|
| All of this predates LLMs (what "AI" means today)
| becoming a useful product. All of this happened already
| with previous generations of "AI".
|
| It was just even shittier than the version we have today.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| You can vibe-code a throwaway UI for investigating some
| complex data in less than 30 minutes. The code quality
| doesn't matter, and it will make your life much easier.
|
| Rinse and repeat for many "one-off" tasks.
|
| It's not going away, you need to learn how to use it.
| _shrugs shoulders_
| dwaltrip wrote:
| It's kind of fun watching this comment go up and down :)
|
| There's so much evidence out there of people getting real
| value from the tools.
|
| Some questions you can ask yourself are "why doesn't it
| work me?" and "what can I do differently?".
|
| Be curious, not dogmatic. Ignore the hype, find people
| doing real work.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Most people don't have a problem with using genai for
| stuff like throwaway UI's. That's not even remotely
| relevant to the criticisms. People reject having it
| forced down their throats by companies who are desperate
| to make us totally reliant on it to justify their insane
| investments. And people reject the evangelicals who claim
| that it's going to replace developers because it can spit
| out mostly working boilerplate.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| They're good questions! The problem is that I've tried to
| talk to the people who are getting real value from it,
| and often the answer ends up being that the value is not
| as real as they think. One guy gave an excited
| presentation about how AI let him write 7k LOC per day,
| expounded for an entire session about how the rest of us
| should follow in his shoes, and then clarified only in
| Q&A that reviewers couldn't keep up so he exempted
| himself from code review.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I'm an AI skeptic. I like seeing what UIs it spits out,
| though, which defeats the blank page staring into my soul
| fear nicely. I don't even use the code, just take
| inspiration from the layouts.
| xorcist wrote:
| Perhaps. But does it matter? There is a million tools to
| investigate complex data already. Are you suggesting it
| is more useful to develop a new tool from scratch, using
| LLM-type tools, than it is to use a mature tool for data
| analysis?
|
| If you don't know how to analyze data, and flat out
| refuse to invest in learning the skill, then I guess that
| could be really useful. Those users are likely the ones
| most enthusiastic about AI. But are those users close to
| as productive as someone who learns a mature tool? Not
| even close.
|
| Lots of people appreciate an LLM to generate boiler plate
| code and establish frameworks for their data structures.
| But that's code that probably shouldn't be there in the
| first place. Vibe coding a game can be done impressively
| quick, but have you tried using a game construction kit?
| That's much faster still.
| icedchai wrote:
| I have found value for one off tasks. I forget the exact
| situation, but I wanted to do some data transformation,
| something that would normally take me a half hour of
| awk/sed/bash or python scripting. AI spit it out right
| away.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Most of the people against "AI" are not against it because
| they think it doesn't work.
|
| It's because they know it works better every day and the
| people controlling it are gleefully fucking over the rest of
| the world because they can.
|
| The plainly stated goal is TO ELIMINATE ALL HUMAN EMPLOYEES,
| with no plan for how those people will feed, clothe, or house
| themselves.
|
| The reactions the author was getting was the reaction of a
| horse talking to someone happily working for the glue
| factory.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I don't think you're qualified to speak for most of the
| people against AI.
| sulicat wrote:
| I'm probably one of the people that would say AI (at least
| LLMs) isn't all its cracked up to be and even I have examples
| where it has been useful to me.
|
| I think the feeling stems from the exaggeration of the value
| it provides combined with a large number of internal
| corporate LLMs being absolute trash.
|
| The overvaluation is seen in effect everywhere from the stock
| market, the price of RAM, the cost of energy as well as IP
| theft issues etc etc. AI has taken over and yet it still
| feels like just a really good fuzzy search. Like yeah I can
| search something 10x faster than before but might get a bad
| answer every now and then.
|
| Yeah its been useful (so have many other things). No it's not
| worth building trillion dollar data centers for. I would be
| happier if the spend went towards manufacturing or
| semiconductor fabs.
| rr808 wrote:
| Lol you made me think my power bill has gone up but I
| didn't get a pay rise for my increased productivity.
| postalrat wrote:
| I see LLM's as kinda the new hotness in IDEs. And some people
| will use vi forever.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| The thing that changed my view on LLMs was solo traveling for 6
| months after leaving Microsoft. There were a lot of points on
| the trip where I was in a lot of trouble (severe food sickness,
| stolen items, missed flights) where I don't know how I would
| have solved those problems without chatGPT helping.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Severe food sickness? I know WebMD rightly gets a lot of
| hate, but this is one thing where it would be good for.
| Stolen items? Depending on the items and the place, possibly
| police. Missed flights? Customer service agent at the airport
| for your airline or call the airline help line.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Well I got so weak I needed to go to the hospital, and that
| was tough.
| buildsjets wrote:
| This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on
| Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a
| human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of
| Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security,
| shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| IDK I got really sick in a foreign country, I wasn't sure
| how to get to the hospital and I was alone in a hotel room.
| I don't really know how using chatgpt to help me isn't
| actualizing.
| blibble wrote:
| did you try asking at the reception desk?
| ajkjk wrote:
| If you are operating under the constraint that talking to
| strangers is impossible then I could see why ChatGPT
| feels like a godsend...
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Idiocracy (movie) is being speedrun before our eyes here on
| HN
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| I saw a post on Reddit the other day where the user was
| posting screenshots from ChatGPT about how they were using
| ChatGPT as a "Human OS" and outsourcing all decisions and
| information to ChatGPT. It made me queasy.
| nostrademons wrote:
| This is what people used to use Google for; I remember so
| many times between 2000-2020 that Google saved my bacon for
| exactly those things (travel plans, self-diagnosis,
| navigating local bureaucracies, etc.)
|
| It's a sad commentary on the state of search results and the
| Internet now that ChatGPT is superior, particularly since
| pre-knowledge-panel/AI-overview Google was superior in
| several ways (not hallucinating, for one, and being able to
| triangulate multiple sources to tell the truth).
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| I also would like to see AI end up dying off except for a few
| niches, but I find myself using it more and more. It is not a
| productivity boost in the way I end up using it, interestingly.
| Actually I think it is actively harming my continued
| development, though that could just be me getting older, or
| perhaps massive anxiety from joblessness. Still, I can't help
| but ask it if everything I do is a good idea. Even in the SO
| era I would try to find a reference for every little choice I
| made to determine if it was a good or bad practice.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| That honestly sounds like addiction.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| My friends at Google are some of the most negative about the
| potential of AI to improve software development. I was always
| surprised by this and assumed internally at Google would be one
| of the first places to adopt these.
| gipp wrote:
| Engineers at Google are much less likely to be doing green-
| field generation of large amounts of code . It's much more
| incremental, carefully measured changes to mature, complex
| software stacks, and done within the Google ecosystem, which
| is heavily divergent from the OSS-focused world of startups,
| where most training data comes from
| karmasimida wrote:
| That is the problem.
|
| AI is optimized to solve a problem no matter what it takes.
| It will try to solve one problem by creating 10 more.
|
| I think long time/term agentic AI is just snake oil at this
| point. AI works best if you can segment your task into 5-10
| minutes chunks, including the AI generating time,
| correcting time and engineer review time. To put it another
| way, a 10 minute sync with human is necessary, otherwise it
| will go astray.
|
| Then it just makes software engineering into bothering
| supervisor job. Yes I typed less, but I didn't feel the
| thrill of doing so.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yeah but Google won't expect you to use AI tools developed
| outside Google and trained on primarily OSS code. It would
| expect you to use the Google internal AI tools trained on
| google3, no?
| groby_b wrote:
| There are plenty of good tasks left, but they're often one-
| off/internal tooling.
|
| Last one at work: "Hey, here are the symptoms for a bug,
| they appeared in <release XYZ> - go figure out the CL range
| and which 10 CLs I should inspect first to see if they're
| the cause"
|
| (Well suited to AI, because worst case I've looked at 10
| CLs in vain, and best case it saved me from manually
| scanning through several 1000 CLs - the EV is net positive)
|
| It works for code generation as well, but not in a "just do
| my job" way, more in a "find which haystack the needle is
| in, and what the rough shape of the new needle is". Blind
| vibecoding is a non-starter. But... it's a non-starter for
| greenfields too, it's just that the FO of FAFO is a bit
| more delayed.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Google has good engineers. Generally I've noticed the better
| someone is at coding the more critical they are of AI
| generated code. Which make sense honestly. It's easier to
| spot flaws the more expert you are. This doesn't mean they
| don't use AI gen code, just they are more careful with when
| an where.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Yes, because they're more likely to understand that the
| computer isn't this magical black box, and that just
| because we've made ELIZA marginally better, doesn't mean
| it's actually good. Anecdata, but the people I've seen be
| dazzled by AI the most are people with little to no
| programming experience. They're also the ones most likely
| to look on computer experts with disdain.
| josephg wrote:
| Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code
| chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs
| with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For
| beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can
| be incredible because it writes the same or better code
| they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the
| code it produces is consistently worse than what we can
| do. At best my pride demands I fix all its flaws before
| shipping. More commonly, it's a waste of time to ask it
| to help, and I need to code the solution from scratch
| myself anyway.
|
| I use it for throwaway prototypes and demos. And whenever
| I'm thrust into a language I don't know that well, or to
| help me debug weird issues outside my area of expertise.
| But when I go deep on a problem, it's often worse than
| useless.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| This is why AI is the perfect management Rorschach test.
|
| To management (out of IC roles for long enough to lose
| their technical expertise), it looks perfect!
|
| To ICs, the flaws are apparent!
|
| So inevitably management greenlights new AI projects* and
| behaviors, and then everyone is in the 'This was my idea,
| so it can't fail' CYA scenario.
|
| * Add in a dash of management consulting advice here, and
| note that management consultants' core product was
| already literally 'something that looks plausible enough
| to make execs spend money on it'
| agumonkey wrote:
| so would love to be a fly in there office and hear all their
| convos
| icedchai wrote:
| My experience is the productivity gains are negative to
| neutral. Someone else basically wrote that the total "work" was
| simply being moved from one bucket to another. (I can't find
| the original link.)
|
| Example: you might spend less time on initial development, but
| more time on code review and rework. That has been my personal
| experience.
| Xeronate wrote:
| Is it true that it's bad for learning new skills? My gut tells
| me it's useful as long as I don't use it to cheat the learning
| process and I mainly use it for things like follow up
| questions.
| bccdee wrote:
| > Engineers don't try because they think they can't.
|
| This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe,
| failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's
| causing the attitude they're pointing to.
|
| There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products
| (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving
| people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get
| investors excited, so they'll fork over more money). This isn't a
| strict dichotomy; often companies with real products will mix in
| tidbits of hype, such as Microsoft's "pivot to AI" which is
| discussed in the article. But moving toward one pole moves you
| away from the other.
|
| I think many engineers want to stay as far from hype-driven tech
| as they can. LLMs are a more substantive technology than
| blockchain ever was, but like blockchain, their potential has
| been greatly overstated. I'd rather spend my time delivering
| value to customers than performing "big potential" to investors.
|
| So, no. I don't think "engineers don't try because they think
| they can't." I think engineers KNOW they CAN and resent being
| asked to look pretty and do nothing of value.
| throwout4110 wrote:
| > There's a dichotomy in the software world between real
| products (which have customers and use cases and make money by
| giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist
| to get investors excited, so they'll fork over more money).
|
| AI is not both of these things? There are no real AI products
| that have real customers and make money by giving people what
| they need?
|
| > LLMs are a more substantive technology than blockchain ever
| was, but like blockchain, their potential has been greatly
| overstated.
|
| What do you view as the potential that's been stated?
| Fraterkes wrote:
| A way to state this point that you may find less uncharitable
| is that a lot of current LLM applications are just very thin
| shells around ChatGPT and the like.
|
| In those cases the actual "new" technology (ie, not the
| underlying ai necessarily) is not as substantive and novel
| (to me at least) as a product whose internals are not just an
| (existing) llm.
|
| (And I do want to clarify that, to me personally, this
| tendency towards 'thin-shell' products is kind of an inherent
| flaw with the current state of ai. Having a very flexible llm
| with broad applications means that you can just put Chatgpt
| in a lot of stuff and have it more or less work. With the
| caveat that what you get is rarely a better UX than what
| you'd get if you'd just prompted an llm yourself.
|
| When someone isn't using llms, in my experience you get more
| bespoke engineering. The results might not be better than an
| llm, but obviously that bespoke code is much more interesting
| to me as a fellow programmer)
| throwout4110 wrote:
| Yes ok then I definitely agree
| pydry wrote:
| Shells around chatgpt are fine if they provide value.
|
| Way better than AI jammed into every crevice for no reason.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Not OP but for starters LLMs != AI
|
| LLMs are not an intelligence, and people who treat them as if
| they are infallible Oracles of wisdom are responsible for a
| lot of this fatigue with AI
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Not OP but for starters LLMs != AI
|
| Please don't do this, make up your own definitions.
|
| Pretty much anything and everything that uses neural nets
| is AI. Just because you don't like how the definition has
| been since the beginning doesn't mean you get to reframe
| it.
|
| In addition, if humans are not infallible oracles of
| wisdom, they wouldn't be an intelligence in your
| definition.
| ponector wrote:
| Why then there is an AI-powered dishwasher, but no AI
| car?
| fedsocpuppet wrote:
| https://www.tesla.com/fsd ?
|
| I also don't understand the LLM [?] AI people. Nobody was
| whining about pathfinding in video games being called AI
| lol. And I have to say LLMs are a lot smarter than A*.
| ponector wrote:
| Cannot find any mention of AI there.
|
| Also it's funny how they add (supervised) everywhere. It
| looks like "Full self driving (not really)"
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It's because nobody was trying to take video game
| behavior scripts and declare them the future of all
| things technology.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I do assume that, I legitimately think it's the most important
| thing happening in the next decade in tech. There's going to be
| an incredible amount of traditional software written to make
| this possible (new databases, frameworks, etc.) and I think
| people should be able to see the opportunity, but the awful
| cultures in places like Microsoft are hindering this.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In European consulting agencies the trend now is to make AI
| part of each RFP reply, you won't go through the sales team, if
| AI isn't crammed there as part of the solution being delivered,
| and we get evaluated for it.
|
| This takes all the joy away, even traditional maintenance
| projects of big corps seems attractive nowadays.
| mr_toad wrote:
| I remember when everything had a have the word 'digital' in
| it. And I'm old enough to remember when 'multimedia' was a
| buzzword that was crammed into anywhere it would fit.
| Paianni wrote:
| or 'interactive' or 'cloud' (early 2010s).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same, doesn't make this hype phase more bearable though.
| Fordec wrote:
| You know what, this clarifies something for me.
|
| PC, Web and Smartphone hype was based on "we can now do
| [thing] never done before".
|
| This time out it feels more like "we can do existing
| [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing
| people"
|
| It all feels much more like a wealth grab for the
| corporations than a promise of improving a standard of
| living for end customers. Much closer to a Cloud or Server
| (replacing Mainframes) cycle.
| munificent wrote:
| 100%.
|
| "You should be using AI in your day to day job or you
| won't get promoted" is the 2025 equivalent of being
| forced to train the team that your job is being
| outsourced to.
| james_marks wrote:
| Yes and no. PC, Web, etc advancements were also about
| lowering cost. It's not that no one could do some thing,
| it's that it was too expensive for most people, e.g.
| having a mobile phone in the 80's.
|
| Or hiring a mathematician to calculate what is now done
| in a spreadsheet.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> This time out it feels more like "we can do existing
| [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing
| people"
|
| I was doing RPA (robotic process automation) 8 years ago.
| Nobody wanted it in their departments. Whenever we would
| do presentations, we were told to never, ever, ever talk
| about this technology replacing people - it only removes
| the mundane work so teams can focus more on the bigger
| scope stuff. In the end, we did dozens and dozens of
| presentations and only two teams asked us to do some
| automation work for them.
|
| The other leaders had no desire to use this technology
| because they were not only fearful of it replacing people
| on their teams, they were fearful it would impact their
| budgets negatively so they just quietly turned us down.
|
| Unfortunately, you're right because as soon as this stuff
| gets automated and you find out 1/3rd of your team is
| doing those mundane tasks, you learn very quickly you
| _can indeed_ remove those people since there won 't be
| enough "big" initiatives to keep everybody busy enough.
|
| The caveat was even on some of the biggest automations we
| did, you still needed a subset of people on the team you
| were working with to make sure the automations were
| running correctly and not breaking down. And when they
| did crash, since a lot of these were moving time
| sensitive data, it was like someone just stole the crown
| jewels and suddenly you need two war rooms and now you're
| ordering in for lunch.
| zzzeek wrote:
| the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM
| _agents_ (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having
| success with the tools but watching the tools change how they
| think about programming, continues to grow. The sudden
| appearance of LLMs has had a really destabilizing effect on
| everything, and a vast portion of what LLMs can do and /or are
| being used for runs from intellectually stifling (using LLMs to
| write your term papers) to revolting (all kinds of non-
| artists/writers/musicians using LLM to suddenly think they are
| "creators" and displacing real artists, writers, and musicians)
| to utterly degenerate (political / sexual deepfakes of real
| people, generation of antivax propaganda, etc). Put on top of
| that the way corporate America is absolutely doing the very
| familiar "blockchain" dance on this and insisting everyone has
| to do AI all the time everywhere is a huge problem that
| hopefully will shake out some in the coming years.
|
| But despite all that, for _writing, refactoring, and debugging
| computer code_ , LLM _agents_ are still completely game
| changing. All of these things are true at the same time. There
| 's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent
| an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away
| calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's
| not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is
| packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are
| letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering
| decisions. It's sad, I always thought of my fellow engineers
| as more open-minded.
| blibble wrote:
| > The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is
| packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are
| letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering
| decisions.
|
| so, people with experience?
| zzzeek wrote:
| ive been programming for more than 40 years
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Obviously. Turns out experience can be self-limiting in
| the face of paradigm-shifting innovation.
|
| In hindsight it makes sense, I'm sure every major shift
| has played out the same way.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face
| of paradigm-shifting innovation.
|
| It also turns out that experience can be what enables you
| to not waste time on trendy stuff which will never
| deliver on its promises. You are simply _assuming_ that
| AI is a paradigm shift rather than a waste of time. Fine,
| but at least have the humility to acknowledge that
| reasonable people can disagree on this point instead of
| labeling everyone who disagrees with you as some out of
| touch fuddy-duddy.
| averyvery wrote:
| Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've
| all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it -- you
| put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at
| some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and
| connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better
| wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are
| very easy for AI to do, others are impossible (but the AI lies
| about them).
|
| A lot of us tried it and just said, "huh, that's interesting"
| and then went back to work. We hear AI advocates say that their
| workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and
| it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next
| release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge
| isn't actionable or even accurate.
|
| There's just not much value in chasing the endless AI news
| cycle, constantly believing that I'll fall behind if I don't
| read the latest details of Gemini 3.1 and ChatGPT 6.Y (Game Of
| The Year Edition). The engineers I know who use AI don't seem
| to have any particular insights about it aside from an
| encyclopedic knowledge of product details, all of which are
| changing on a monthly basis anyway.
|
| New products that use gen AI are -- by default -- uninteresting
| to me because I know that under the hood, they're just sending
| text and getting text back, and the thing they're sending to is
| the same thing that _everyone_ is sending to. Sure, the wrapper
| is nice, but I 'm not paying an overhead fee for that.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This isn't "unfair", but you are intentionally underselling
| it.
|
| If you haven't had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you
| aren't doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs
| discovering new tech.
|
| I'm not making any case for anything, but it's just not that
| hard to get excited for something that sure does seem like
| magic sometimes.
|
| Edit: lol this forum :)
| ggerni wrote:
| post portfolio I wanna see your bags
| rconti wrote:
| > If you haven't had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you
| aren't doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs
| discovering new tech.
|
| Or your job isn't what AI is good at?
|
| AI seems really good at greenfield projects in well known
| languages or adding features.
|
| It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-
| known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of
| complex codebases.
| perardi wrote:
| > It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-
| known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of
| complex codebases.
|
| This is precisely my experience.
|
| Having the AI work on a large mono repo with a front-end
| that uses a fairly obscure templating system? Not great.
|
| Spinning up a greenfield React/Vite/ShadCN proof-of-
| concept for a sales demo? Magic.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-
| known languages
|
| Well, there's your problem. You should have selected
| React while you had the chance.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _If you haven't had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you
| aren't doing it right_
|
| I AM very impressed, and I DO use it and enjoy the results.
|
| The problem is the inconsistency. When it works it works
| great, but it is very noticeable that it is just a machine
| from how it behaves.
|
| Again, I am VERY impressed by what was achieved. I even
| enjoy Google AI summaries to some of the questions I now
| enter instead of search terms. This is definitely a huge
| step up in tier compared to pre-AI.
|
| But I'm already done getting used to what is possible now.
| Changes after that have been incremental, nice to have and
| I take them. I found a place for the tool, but if it wanted
| to match the hype another equally large step in actual
| _intelligence_ is necessary, for the tool to truly be able
| to replace humans.
|
| So, I think the reason you don't see more glowing reviews
| and praise is that the technical people have found out what
| it can do and can't, and are already using it where
| appropriate. It's just a tool though. One that has to be
| watched over when you use it, requiring attention. And it
| does not learn - I can teach a newbie and they will learn
| and improve, I can only tweak the AI with prompts, with
| varying success.
|
| I think that by now I have developed a pretty good feel for
| what is possible. Changing my entire workflow to using it
| is simply not useful.
|
| I am actually one of those _not_ enjoying coding as such,
| but wanting "solutions", probably also because I now work
| for an IT-using normal company, not for one making an IT
| product, and my focus most days is on actually
| accomplishing business tasks.
|
| I do enjoy being able to do some higher level descriptions
| and getting code for stuff without having to take care of
| all the gritty details. But this functionality is
| rudimentary. It IS a huge step, but still not nearly good
| enough to really be able to reliably delegate to the AI to
| the degree I want.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| This shit right here is why people hate AI hype proponents.
| It's like it never crosses their mind that someone who
| disagrees with them might just be an intelligent person who
| tried it and found it was lacking. No, it's always "you're
| either doing it wrong or weren't really trying". Do you not
| see how condescending and annoying that is to people?
| sydd wrote:
| The more I use AI for coding the more I realize that its a
| toy for vibe coding/fun projects. Its not for serious work.
|
| When you work with a large codebase which have a very high
| complexity level, then the bugs put in there by AI will not
| worth the cost of the easily added features.
| jandrese wrote:
| The big problem is AI is amazing at doing the rote
| boilerplate stuff that generally wasn't a problem to begin
| with, but if you were to point a codebot at your trouble
| ticket system and tell it to go fix the issues it will be
| hopeless. Once your system gets complex enough the AI
| effectiveness drops off rapidly and you as the engineer
| have to spend more and more time babysitting every step to
| make sure it doesn't go off the rails.
|
| In the end you can save like 90% of the development effort
| on a small one-off project, and like 5% of the development
| effort on a large complex one.
|
| I think too many managers have been absolutely blown away
| by canned AI demos and toy projects and have not been
| properly disappointed when attempting to use the tools on
| something that is not trivial.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom
| Cargill quote (even if we've never seen it attributed):
|
| _The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first
| 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10
| percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of
| the development time._
|
| It feels like a _gigantic_ win when it carves through
| that first 90%... like, _"wow, I'm almost done and I just
| started!"_. And it _is_ a genuine win! But for me it's
| dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip
| up experienced developers _really_ trip up LLMs and
| sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny
| pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than
| not having it.
|
| So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-
| counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling
| a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of
| tasks take up most of your dev time.
| Jblx2 wrote:
| I wonder if this issues isn't caused by people who aren't
| programmers, and now they can churn out AI generated stuff
| that they couldn't before. So to them, this is a magical
| new ability. Where as people who are already adept at their
| craft just see the slop. Same thing in other areas. In the
| before-times, you had to painstakingly handcraft your cat
| memes. Now a bot comes along and allows someone to make cat
| memes they didn't bother with before. But the real artisan
| cat memeists just roll their eyes.
| etempleton wrote:
| AI is better than you at what you aren't very good at.
| But once you are even mediocre at doing something you
| realize AI is wrong / pretty bad at doing most things and
| every once in awhile makes a baffling mistake.
|
| There are some exceptions where AI is genuinely useful,
| but I have employees who try to use AI all the time for
| everything and their work is embarrassingly bad.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > If you haven't had a mind blown moment with AI yet...
|
| Results are stochastic. Some people the first time they use
| it will get the best possible results by chance. They will
| attribute their good outcome to their skill in using the
| thing. Others will try it and will get the worst possible
| response, and they will attribute their bad outcome to the
| machine being terrible. Either way, whether it's amazing or
| terrible is kind of an illusion. It's both.
| antonvs wrote:
| > If you haven't had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you
| aren't doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs
| discovering new tech.
|
| Much of this boils down to people simply not understanding
| what's really happening. Most people, including most
| software developers, don't have the ability to understand
| these tools, their implications, or how they relate to
| their own intelligence.
|
| > Edit: lol this forum :)
|
| Indeed.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I've been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small
| companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas
| company.
|
| There are many valid critiques of AI, but "there's not much
| there" isn't one of them.
|
| To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and
| says "huh, that's interesting" and then "gets back to work"
| is completely failing at their _actual_ job, which is using
| technology to solve problems. Maybe AI isn't the right tool
| for the job, but that kind of shallow dismissal indicates a
| closed mind, or perhaps a fear-based reaction. Either way,
| the market is going to punish them accordingly.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > There are many valid critiques of AI, but "there's not
| much there" isn't one of them.
|
| "There's not much there" is a totally valid critique of a
| lot of the current AI ecosystem. How many startups are
| simple prompt wrappers on top of ChatGPT? How many AI
| features in products are just "click here to ask
| Rovo/Dingo/Kingo/CutesyAnthropomorphizedNameOfAI" text
| boxes that end up spitting out wrong information?
|
| There's certainly potential but a lot of the market _is_
| hot air right now.
|
| > Either way, the market is going to punish them
| accordingly.
|
| I doubt this, simply because the market has never really
| punished people for being less efficient at their jobs,
| especially software development. If it did, people
| proficient in vim would have been getting paid more than
| anyone else for the past 40 years.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > simply because the market has never really punished
| people for being less efficient at their jobs
|
| In fact, it tends to be the opposite. You being more
| efficient just means you get "rewarded" with more work,
| typically without an appropriate increase in pay to match
| the additional work either.
|
| Especially true in large, non-tech companies/bureaucratic
| enterprises where you are much better off not making
| waves, and being deliberately mediocre (assuming you're
| not a ladder climber and aren't trying to get promoted
| out of an IC role).
|
| In a big team/org, your personal efficiency is
| irrelevant. The work can only move as fast as the slowest
| part of the system.
| eschaton wrote:
| Or maybe it indicates that the person looking at the LLM
| and deciding there's not much there knows more than you do
| about what they are and how they work, and you're the one
| who's wrong about their utility.
| spamizbad wrote:
| > To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and
| says "huh, that's interesting" and then "gets back to work"
| is completely failing at their actual job,
|
| I don't understand why people seem so impatient about AI
| adoption.
|
| AI is the future, but many AI products aren't fully mature
| yet. That lack of maturity is probably what is dampening
| the adoption curve. To unseat incumbent tools and practices
| you either need to do so seamlessly OR be 5-10x better
| (Only true for a subset of tasks). In areas where either of
| these cases apply, you'll see some really impressive AI
| adoption. In areas where AI's value requires more effort,
| you'll see far less adoption. This seems perfectly natural
| to me and isn't some conspiracy - AI needs to be a better
| product and good products take time.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Well said!
| bluGill wrote:
| I use AI all the time, but the only gain they have is
| better spelling and grammar than me. Spelling and grammar
| has long been my weak point. I can write the same code they
| write just as fast without - typing has never been the
| bottleneck in writing code. The bottleneck is thinking and
| I still need to understand the code AI writes since it is
| incorrect rather often so it isn't saving any effort, other
| than the time to look up the middle word of some long
| variable name.
| afavour wrote:
| > that kind of shallow dismissal indicates a closed mind,
| or perhaps a fear-based reaction
|
| Or, and stay with me on this, it's a reaction to the actual
| experience they had.
|
| I've experimented with AI a bunch. When I'm doing something
| utterly formulaic it delivers (straightforward CRUD type
| stuff, or making a web page to display some data). But when
| I try to use it with the core parts of my job that actually
| require my specialist knowledge they fall apart. I spend
| more time correcting them than if I just write it myself.
|
| Maybe you haven't had that experience with work you do. But
| I have, and others have. So please don't dismiss our
| reaction as "fear based" or whatever.
| handstitched wrote:
| > To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and
| says "huh, that's interesting" and then "gets back to work"
| is completely failing at their actual job, which is using
| technology to solve problems.
|
| I would argue that the "actual job" is simply to solve
| problems. The client / customer ultimately do not care what
| technology you use. Hell, they don't really care if there's
| technology at all.
|
| And a lot of software engineers have found that using an
| LLM doesn't actually help solve problems, or the problems
| it _does_ solve are offset by the new problems it creates.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Again, AI isn't the right tool for every job, but that's
| not the same thing as a shallow dismissal.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| What you described _isn 't_ a shallow dismissal. They
| tried it, found it to not be useful in solving the
| problems they face, and moved on. That's what any
| reasonable professional should do if a tool isn't
| providing them value. Just because you and they disagree
| on whether the tool provides value doesn't mean that they
| are "failing at their job".
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I mean, this is the other extreme to the post being replied
| to (either you think it's useless and walk away, or you're
| failing at your job for not using it)
|
| I personally use it, I find it helpful at times, but I also
| find that it gets in my way, so much so it can be a
| hindrance (think losing a day or so because it's taken a
| wrong turn and you have to undo everything)
|
| FTR The market is currently punishing people that DO use it
| (CVs are routinely being dumped at the merest hint of AI
| being used in its construction/presentation, interviewers
| dumping anyone that they think is using AI for "help", code
| reviewers dumping any take home assignments that have even
| COMMENTS massaged by AI)
| gishh wrote:
| > There are many valid critiques of AI, but "there's not
| much there" isn't one of them.
|
| I have solved more problems with tools like sed and awk,
| you know, actual tools, more than I've entered tokens into
| an LLM.
|
| Nobody seemed to give a fuck as long as the problem was
| solved.
|
| This it getting out of hand.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Just because you can solve problems with one class of
| tools doesn't mean another class is pointless. A whole
| new class of problems just became solvable.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Punishment eh? Serves them right for being skeptical.
|
| I've been around long enough that I have seen _four_ hype
| cycles around AI like coding environments. If you think
| this is new you should have been there in the 80 's (Mimer,
| anybody?), when the 'fourth generation' languages were
| going to solve all of our coding problems. Or in the 60's
| (which I did not personally witness on account of being a
| toddler), when COBOL, the language for _managers_ was all
| the rage.
|
| In between there was LISP, the AI language (and a couple of
| others).
|
| I've done a bit more than looking at this and saying 'huh,
| that's interesting'. It _is_ interesting. It is mostly
| interesting in the same way that when you hand an expert a
| very sharp tool they can probably carve wood better than
| with a blunt one. But that 's not what is happening.
| Experts are already pretty productive and they might be a
| little bit more productive but the AI has it's own envelope
| of expertise and the closer you are to the top of the field
| the smaller your returns in that particular setting will
| be.
|
| In the hands of a beginner there will be blood all over the
| workshop and it will take an expert to sort it all out
| again, quite possibly resulting in a net negative ROI.
|
| Where I do get use out of it: to quickly look up some
| verifiable fact, to tell me what a particular acronym
| stands for in some context, to be slightly more functional
| than wikipedia for a quick overview of some subfield (but
| you better check that for gross errors). So yes, it is
| useful. But it is not so useful that competent engineers
| that are not using AI are failing at their job, and it is
| at best - for me - a very mild accelerator in some use
| cases. I've seen enough AI driven coding projects strand
| hopelessly by now to know that there are downsides to that
| golden acorn that you are seeing.
|
| The few times that I challenged the likes of ChatGPT with
| an actual engineering problem to which I already knew the
| answer by way of verification the answers were so laughably
| incorrect that it was embarrassing.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I'm not a big llm booster, but I will say that they're
| really good for proof of concepts, for turning detailed
| pseudocode into code, sometimes for getting debugging
| ideas. I'm a decade younger than you, but I've programmed
| in 4GLs (yuch), lived through a few attempts at visual
| programming (ugh), and ... LLM assistance is different.
| It's not magic and it does really poorly at the things
| I'm truly expert at, but it does quite well with boring
| stuff that's still a substantial amount of programming.
|
| And for the better. I've honestly not had this much fun
| programming applications (as opposed to students stuff
| and inner loops) in years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > but it does quite well with boring stuff that's still a
| substantial amount of programming.
|
| I'm happy that it works out for you, and probably this is
| a reflection of the kind of work that I do, I wouldn't
| know how to begin to solve a problem like designing a
| braille wheel or a windmill using AI tools even though
| there is plenty of coding along the way. Maybe I could
| use it to make me faster at using OpenSCAD but I am never
| limited by my typing speed, much more so by thinking
| about what it is that I actually want to make.
| josephg wrote:
| It really depends on what you're doing. AI models are great
| at kind of junior programming tasks. They have very broad
| but often shallow knowledge - so if your job involves
| jumping between 18 different tools and languages you don't
| know very well, they're a huge productivity boost. "I don't
| write much sql, or much Python. Make a query using
| sqlalchemy which solves this problem. Here's our schema
| ..."
|
| AI is terrible at anything it hasn't seen 1000 times before
| on GitHub. It's bad at complex algorithmic work. Ask it to
| implement an order statistic tree with internal run length
| encoding and it will barely be able to get off the starting
| line. And if it does, the code will be so broken that it's
| faster to start from scratch. It's bad at writing rust.
| ChatGPT just can't get its head around lifetimes. It can't
| deal with really big projects - there's just not enough
| context. And its code is always a bit amateurish. I have
| 10+ years of experience in JS/TS. It writes code like
| someone with about 6-24 months experience in the language.
| For anything more complex than a react component, I just
| wouldn't ship what it writes.
|
| I use it sometimes. You clearly use it a lot. For some jobs
| it adds a lot of value. For others it's worse than useless.
| If some people think it's a waste of time for them, it's
| possible they haven't really tried it. It's also possible
| their job is a bit different from your job and it doesn't
| help them.
| gedy wrote:
| Maybe not what the OP or article is talking about, but it's
| super frustrating recently dealing with non/less technical
| mgrs, PMs, etc who now think they have this Uno card to
| bypass technical discussion just because they vibe coded some
| UI demo. Like no shit, that wasn't the hard part. But since
| they don't see the real/less visible past like
| data/auth/security, etc they act like engineers "aren't
| trying", less innovative, anti-AI or whatever when you bring
| up objections to their "whole app" they made with their AI
| snoopy snow cone machine.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| My experience too. They are so convinced that AI is magical
| that pushing back makes you look bad.
|
| Then things don't turn out as they expected and you have to
| deal with a dude thinking his engineers are messing with
| him.
|
| It's just boring.
| anonymars wrote:
| It reminds me of how we moved from "mockups" to
| "wireframes" -- in other words, deliberately making the
| appearance _not_ look like a real UI, because that could
| give the impression that the project was nearly done
|
| But now, to your point: they can vibe-code their own
| "mockups" and that brings us back to that problem
| palmotea wrote:
| > We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing,
| but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look
| that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is
| about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't
| actionable or even accurate.
|
| There's a lot of disconnected-from-reality hustling (a.k.a
| lying) going on. For instance, that's practically Elon Musk's
| entire job, when he's actually doing it. A lot of people see
| those examples, think it's normal, and emulate it. There are
| a lot of unearned superlatives getting thrown around
| automatically to describe tech.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement.
| We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to
| it -- you put text in, you get text back out.
|
| "Engineers don't try" doesn't refer to trying out AI in the
| article. It refers to trying to do something constructive and
| useful outside the usual corporate churn, but having given up
| on that because management is single-mindedly focused on AI.
|
| One way to summarize the article is: The AI engineers are
| doing hype-driven AI stuff, and the other engineers have lost
| all ambition for anything else, because AI is the only thing
| that gets attention and helps the career; and they hate it.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| "Lost all ambition for anything else" is a funny way for
| the article to frame "hate being forced to run on the
| hampster wheel on ai, because an exec with the power to
| fire everyone is foaming at the mouth about ai and
| seemingly needs everyone to use it"
| badbird33 wrote:
| To add another layer to it, the reason execs are foaming
| at the mouth is because they are hoping to fire the as
| many people as possible. Including those who implemented
| whatever AI solution in the first place.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| > the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything
| else
|
| Worse, they've lost all funding for anything else.
| zwnow wrote:
| Industries are built upon shit people built in their
| basements, get hacking
| r14c wrote:
| I think it should be noted that a garage or basement in
| California costs like a million dollars.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| > There's a dichotomy in the software world between real
| products (which have customers and use cases and make money by
| giving people things they need) and hype product
|
| I think there is a broader dichotomy between the people-
| persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane. In the
| people-persuation plane, it is all about convincing someone of
| something, and hype plays here, and marketing, religion and
| political persuation too. In the real world plane, it is all
| about tangible outcomes, and working code or results play here,
| and gravity and electromagnetism too. Sometimes there is a
| reflex loop between the two. I chose the engineering career
| because, what i produce is tangible, but I realize that a lot
| of my work is in the people-plane.
| balamatom wrote:
| >a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and
| the real-world-facts plane
|
| This right here is the real thing which AI is deployed to
| upset.
|
| The Enlightenment values which brought us the Industrial
| Revolution imply that the disparity between the people-
| persuasion-plane and the real-world-facts-plane should
| naturally _decrease_.
|
| The implicit expectation here is that as civilization as a
| whole learns more about how the universe works, people would
| naturally become more rational, and thus more persuadable by
| reality-compliant arguments and less persuadable by reality-
| denying ones.
|
| That's... not really what I've been seeing. That's not really
| what most of us have been seeing. Like, _devastatingly_ not
| so.
|
| My guess is that something became... _saturated_? I 'd place
| it sometime around the 1970s, same time Bretton Woods ended,
| and the productivity/wages gap began to grow. Something
| pertaining to the shared-culture-plane. Maybe there's only so
| much "informed" people can become before some sort of phase
| shift occurs and the driving force behind decisions becomes
| some vague, ethically unaccountable ingroup intuition
| ("vibes", yo), rather than the kind of explicit, systematic
| reasoning which actually is available to any human, except
| for the weird fact how nobody seems to trust it very much any
| more.
| saubeidl wrote:
| This sounds a lot like the Marxist concept of alienation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
| binary132 wrote:
| Bitcoin is at 93k so I don't think it's entirely accurate to
| say blockchain is insubstantive or without value
| airstrike wrote:
| If you can't point to real use cases at scale, it's hard to
| argue it has intrisinc value even though it may have
| speculative value.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other
| various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that
| doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive
| either.
| ejoso wrote:
| Uh... So the argument here is that anticipated future value
| == meaningful value today?
|
| The whole cryptocurrency world requires evangelical buy-in.
| But there is no directly created functional value other than
| a historic record of transactions and hypothetical
| decentralization. It doesn't directly create value. It's a
| store of it - again, assuming enough people continue to buy
| into the narrative so that it doesn't dramatically deflate
| when you need to recover your assets. States and other
| investors are helping make stability happen to maintain it as
| a value store, but you require the story propagating to
| achieve those ends.
| mgaunard wrote:
| very little of the trading actually happens on the
| blockchain, it's only used to move assets between trading
| venues.
|
| The values of bitcoin are:
|
| - easy access to trading for everyone, without institutional
| or national barriers
|
| - high leverage to effectively easily borrow a lot of money
| to trade with
|
| - new derivative products that streamline the process and
| make speculation easier than ever
|
| The blockchain plays very little part in this. If anything it
| makes borrowing harder.
| blibble wrote:
| I agree with "easy access to trading for everyone, without
| institutional or national barriers"
|
| how on earth does bitcoin have anything to do with
| borrowing or derivatives?
|
| in a way that wouldn't also work for beanie babies
| senordevnyc wrote:
| You're wasting your breath. Bitcoin will be at a million in
| 2050 and you'll still get downvoted here for suggesting it's
| anything other than a stupid bubble that's about to burst any
| day now.
| skybrian wrote:
| This seems to be almost purely bandwagon value, like
| preferring Coca-Cola to some other drink. There are other
| blockchains that are better technically along a bunch of
| dimensions, but they don't have the mindshare.
|
| Bitcoin is probably unkillable. Even if were to crash, it
| won't be hard to round up enough true believers to boost it
| up again. But it's technically stagnant.
| OvidNaso wrote:
| True, but then so is a lot of "tech". There were certainly,
| at least equivalent, social applications before and all
| throughout Facebooks dominance, but like Bitcoin the
| network effect becomes primary, after a minimum feature
| set.
| skybrian wrote:
| For Bitcoin, it doesn't exactly seem to be a network
| effect? It's not like choosing a chat app because that's
| what your friends use.
|
| Many other cryptocurrencies are popular enough to be
| easily tradable and have features to make them work
| better for trade. Also, you can speculate on different
| cryptocurrencies than your friends do.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Beanie Babies were trading pretty well, too, although it
| wasn't quite "solving sudokus for drugs", so I guess that's
| why they didn't have as much staying power.
| adastra22 wrote:
| With almost zero fundamentals. That's the part you are
| glossing over.
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder if objectively Seattle got hit harder than SF in the
| last bust cycle. I don't have a frame of comparison. But if the
| generational trauma was bigger then so too would the backlash
| against new bubbles.
| balamatom wrote:
| >So, no. I don't think "engineers don't try because they think
| they can't." I think engineers KNOW they CAN and resent being
| asked to look pretty and do nothing of value.
|
| Spot. Fucking. On.
|
| Thank you.
| layer8 wrote:
| > So, no. I don't think "engineers don't try because they think
| they can't." I think engineers KNOW they CAN and resent being
| asked to look pretty and do nothing of value.
|
| I understood "they think they can't" to refer to the engineers
| thinking that management won't allow them to, not to a lack of
| confidence in their own abilities.
| antonvs wrote:
| > often companies with real products will mix in tidbits of
| hype
|
| The wealthiest person in the world relies entirely on his
| ability to convince people to accept hype that surpasses all
| reason.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > But moving toward one pole moves you away from the other.
|
| My assumption detector twigged at that line. I think this is
| just replacing the dichotomy with a continuum between two
| states. But the hype proponents always hope - and in some cases
| they are right - that those two poles overlap. People make and
| lose fortunes on placing those bets and you don't necessarily
| have to be right or wrong in an absolute sense, just long
| enough that someone else will take over your load and hopefully
| at a higher valuation.
|
| Engineers are not usually the ones placing the bets, which is
| why they're trying to stay away from hype driven tech (to them
| it is neutral with respect to the outcome but in case of a
| failure they lose their job, so better to work on things that
| are not hyped, it is simply safer). But as soon as engineers
| are placing bets they are just as irrational as every other
| class of investor.
| bartread wrote:
| I've never worked at Microsoft. However, I do have some
| experience with the company.
|
| I worked building tools within the Microsoft ecosystem, both on
| the SQL Server side, and on the .NET and developer tooling
| side, and I spent some time working with the NTVS team at
| Microsoft many years ago, as well as attending plenty of
| Microsoft conferences and events, working with VSIP contacts,
| etc. I also know plenty of people who've worked at or partnered
| with Microsoft.
|
| And to me this all reads like classic Microsoft. I mean, the
| article even says it: whatever you're doing, it needs to align
| with whatever the current key strategic priority is. Today that
| priority is AI, 12 years ago it was Azure, and on and on. And,
| yes, I'd imagine having to align everything you do to a single
| priority regardless of how natural that alignment is (or not)
| gets pretty exhausting, and I'd bet it's pretty easy to burn
| out on it if you're in an area of the business where this is
| more of a drag and doesn't seem like it delivers a lot of
| value. And you'll have to dogfood everything (another longtime
| Microsoft pattern) core to that priority even if it's crap
| compared with whatever else might be out there.
|
| But I don't think it's new: it's simply part and parcel of
| working at Microsoft. And the thing is, as a strategy it's
| often served them well: Windows[0], Xbox, SQL Server, Visual
| Studio, Azure, Sharepoint, Office, etc. Doesn't always work, of
| course: Windows Phone went really badly, but it's striking that
| this kind of swing and a miss is relatively rare in Microsoft's
| history.
|
| And so now, of course, they're doing it with AI. And, of
| course, they're a massive company, so there will be plenty of
| people there who really aren't having a good time with it. But,
| although it's far from a foregone conclusion, it would not be a
| surprise for Microsoft to come from behind and win by repeating
| their usual strategy... again.
|
| _[0] Don 't overread this: I'm not necessarily saying I'm a
| huge fan. In fact I think Windows, at is core, is these days a
| decent operating system. On the back end it works well. But I
| viscerally despise Windows 11 as a desktop operating system.
| That's right: DESPISE. VISCERALLY. AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL._
| vessenes wrote:
| Thanks for the post - it's work to write and synthesize, and I
| always appreciate it!
|
| My first reaction was "replace 'AI' with the word 'Cloud'" ca
| 2012 at MS; what's novel here?
|
| With that in mind, I'm not sure there is anything novel about how
| your friend is feeling or the organizational dynamics, or in fact
| how large corporations go after business opportunities; on those
| terms, I think your friends' feelings are a little boring, or at
| least don't give us any new market data.
|
| In MS in that era, there was a massive gold rush inside the org
| to Cloud-ify everything and move to Azure - people who did well
| at that prospered, people who did not, ... often did not. This
| sort of internal marketplace is endemic, and probably a good
| thing at large tech companies - from the senior leadership side,
| seeing how employees vote with their feet is valuable - as is,
| often, the directional leadership you get from a Satya who has
| MUCH more information than someone on the ground in any mid-level
| role.
|
| While I'm sure there were many naysayers about the Cloud in 2012,
| they were wrong, full stop. Azure is immensely valuable. It was
| right to dig in on it and compete with AWS.
|
| I personally think Satya's got a really interesting hyper scaling
| strategy right now -- build out national-security-friendly
| datacenters all over the world -- and I think that's going to pay
| -- but I could be wrong, and his strategy might be much more
| sophisticated and diverse than that; either way, I'm pretty sure
| Seattleites who hate how AI has disrupted their orgs and changed
| power politics and winners and losers in-house will have to roll
| with the program over the next five years and figure out where
| they stand and what they want to work on.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| It does feel like without a compelling AI product Microsoft
| isn't super differentiated. Maybe Satya is right that scale is
| a differentiation, but I don't think people are as trapped in
| an AI ecosystem as they were in Azure.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Lol. You don't think that Microsoft has _a_ compelling AI
| product? The new version of 365 Copilot is objectively
| compelling, even if it is a work in progress. And Github
| Copilot is also objectively compelling.
| hexator wrote:
| Moving to the Cloud proved to be a pretty nice moneymaker far
| faster and more concretely than AI has been for these
| companies. It's a fair comparison regarding corporate pushes
| but not anything more than that.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite:
|
| 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about
| the layoffs.
|
| 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using
| AI as an excuse for layoffs.
|
| 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere
| else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype
| being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the
| whatever Uber-for-pets-AI-ly idea pops up won't happen.
|
| 4. I don't think people hate AI, they hate the hype.
|
| Anyways, your app actually does sound interesting so I signed up
| for it.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I think these companies would benefit from honesty, if they're
| right and their new AI capabilities are really powerful then
| poisoning their workforce against AI is the worst thing they
| could do right now. Like a generous severance approach and
| compassionate layoffs would go a long way right now.
| hexator wrote:
| Some people really do hate AI, it's not entirely about the
| layoffs. This is a well insulated bubble but you can find tons
| of anti-AI forums online.
| side_up_down wrote:
| There's a great non-AI point in this article - Seattle has great
| engineers. In pursuing startups, Seattle engineers are relatively
| unambitious compared to the Bay Area. By that I mean there's less
| "shooting for unicorns" and a comparatively more reserved startup
| culture and environment.
|
| I'm not sure why. I don't think it's access to capital, but I'd
| love to hear thoughts.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| My pet theory is that most of the investor class in seattle is
| ex microsoft and ex amazon. Neither microsoft nor amazon are
| really big splashy unicorns. Amazon's greatest innovation (aws)
| isn't even their original line of business and is now 'boring'.
| No doubt they've innovated all over their business in both
| little and big ways, but not _splashy_ ways, hell every time
| amazon tries to _splash_ they seem to fall on their ass more
| often than not (look at their various cancelled hardware lines,
| their game studios, etc. Alexa still chugs on, but she 's not
| getting appreciably better to the end user over even the last
| 10 years).
|
| Microsoft is the same, a generally very practical company just
| trying to practical company stuff.
|
| All the guys that made their bones, vested and rested and now
| want to turn some of that windfall into investments likely
| don't have the kind of risk tolerance it takes to fund a
| potential unicorn. All smart people I'm sure, smart enough to
| negotiate big windfalls from ms/az but far less risk tollerant
| than a guy in SF who made their investment nestegg building
| some risky unicorn.
| sirreal14 wrote:
| As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the
| time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a
| few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching
| mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large
| suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include
| large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test
| framework for no reason, and I've even seen unit tests that mock
| the actual function under test. New features that actually
| already exist with more sane APIs. Code that is a tangled web of
| spaghetti. These people largely think AI is improving their speed
| but then their code isn't making it past code review. I worry
| about teams with less stringent code review cultures, modifying
| or improving these systems is going to be a major pain.
| jfalcon wrote:
| I see it like the hype of js/node and whatever module tech is
| glued to it when it was new from the perspective of someone who
| didn't code js. Sum of F's given is still zero.
|
| -206dev
| mips_avatar wrote:
| My hot take is that the evangelical people don't really like AI
| either they're just scared. I think you have to be outside of
| big tech to appreciate AI
| elzbardico wrote:
| If AI replaces software engineers, people outside tech
| doesn't have much chance of surviving it too.
| psyclobe wrote:
| > and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function
| > under test.
|
| Yup. Ai is so fickle it'll do anything to accomplish the task.
| But ai is just a tool it's all about what you allow it to do.
| Can't blame ai really.
| dpark wrote:
| In fairness I've seen humans make that mistake. We had a
| complete outage in the testing of a product once and a couple
| of tests were still green. Turns it they tested nothing and
| never had.
| sirreal14 wrote:
| > In fairness I've seen humans make that mistake
|
| These were (formerly) not the kinds of humans who regularly
| made these kinds of mistakes.
| mehagar wrote:
| If a tool makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, then
| it's not a good tool. See C++.
| jahsome wrote:
| I'm no apologist but this statement doesn't ring for me.
| It's easy to shock yourself with electricity, is it a bad
| tool?
| lbrito wrote:
| Leverage.
|
| Those slops already existed, but AI scales them by an order
| of magnitude.
|
| I guess the same can be said of any technology, but AI is
| just a more powerful tool overall. Using languages as an
| example - lets say duck typing allowed a 10% productivity
| boost, but also introduced 5% more mistakes/problems. AI
| (claims to) allow a 10x productivity boost, but also ~10x
| mistakes/problems.
| doyougnu wrote:
| I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several
| examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find
| that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI
| loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to.
| I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due
| diligence from some coworkers.
|
| I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the
| practitioners of AI-as-coding-agent are running away from the
| real work. How can you tell me about the system you say you
| have created if you don't have the patience to make it or think
| about it deeply in the first place?
| teej wrote:
| Your coworkers were probably writing subtle bugs before AI
| too.
| munificent wrote:
| Would you rather consume a bowl of soup with a fly in it,
| or a 50 gallon drum with 1,000 flies in it? In which
| scenario are you more likely to fish out all the flies
| before you eat one?
| teej wrote:
| Easier to skim 1000 flies from a single drum than 100
| flies from 100 bowls of soup.
| munificent wrote:
| Alas, the flies are not floating on the surface. They are
| deeply mixed in, almost as if the machine that generated
| the soup wanted desperately to appear to be doing an
| excellent job making fly-free soup.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| No, I think it would be far easier to pick 100 flies each
| from a single bowl of soup than to pick all 1000 flies
| out of a 50 gallon drum.
|
| You don't get to fix bugs in code by simply pouring it
| through a filter.
| sudoshred wrote:
| As someone on a team with a less stringent code review culture,
| AI generated code creates more work when used indiscriminately.
| Good enough to get approved but full of non-obvious errors that
| cause expensive rework which only gets prioritized once the
| shortcomings become painfully obvious (usually) months after
| the original work was "completed" and once the original author
| has forgotten the details, or worse, left the team entirely.
| Not to say AI generated code is not occasionally valuable, just
| not for anything that is intended to be correct and
| maintainable indefinitely by other developers. The real
| challenge is people using AI generated code as a mechanism to
| avoid fully understanding the problem that needs to be solved.
| AstroBen wrote:
| I'm not surprised you're getting bad reactions from people who
| aren't already bought-in. You're starting from a firm "I'm right!
| They're wrong!" with no attempt to understand the other side. I'm
| sure that comes across not just in your writing
| 0_____0 wrote:
| My 2C/... LLMs are kind of amazing for structured text output
| like code. I have a completely different experience using LLMs
| for assistance writing code (as a relative novice) than I do in
| literally every other avenue of life.
|
| Electricl engineering? Garbage.
|
| Construction projects? Useless.
|
| But code is code everywhere, and the immense amount of training
| data available in the form of working code and tutorials, design
| and style guides, means that the output as regards software
| development doesn't really resemble what anybody working in any
| other field sees. Even adjacent technical fields.
| knollimar wrote:
| I'm experimenting with the gemini 3 and will do opus 4.5 soon,
| but I've seen huge jumps doing EE for construction over the
| last batch of models.
|
| I'm working on a harness but I think it can do some basic revit
| layouts with coaxing (which with a good harness should be
| really useful!)
|
| Let me know what you've experienced. Not many construction EE
| on HN.
| lateforwork wrote:
| I love AI but I find Microsoft AI to be mostly useless. You'd
| think that anything called Copilot can do things for you, but
| most of the time it just gives you text answers. Even when it is
| in the context of the application it can't give you better
| answers than ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. What is the point of
| that?
|
| Satya has completely wasted their early lead in AI. Google is now
| the leader.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| The article reports _Microsoft_ SDEs complaining about Copilot
| and being forced to use it. It 's "worse than competitors'
| tools."
|
| No shit. But that's hardly everyone is Seattle. I'd imagine
| people at Amazon aren't upset about being forced to use Copilot,
| or Google folks.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Unlike Seattle, in Los Angeles there are few software engineers
| but I would not utter AI at all here
|
| Its an infinite moving goalpost of hate, if its an actor,
| "creative", writer, AI is a monolithic doom, next its theoretical
| public policy or the lack thereof, and if they have nothing that
| affects them about it then it's about the energy use and
| environment
|
| nobody is going to hear about what your AI does, so don't mention
| anything about AI unless you're trying to earn or raise money.
| Its a double life
| BGyss wrote:
| I was just about to post that this entire story could have been
| completely transposed to almost every conversation I've had in
| Los Angeles over the past year and a half. Looks like you beat
| me to it!
| yieldcrv wrote:
| the only difference is that I don't have the conversation ha,
| I don't tell people about anything I do that's remotely close
| to that, rarely even mention anything in tech. I listen to
| enough other conversations to catch on to how it goes, very
| easy to get roped into an AI doomer conversation that's hard
| to get out of
| par wrote:
| I think reading the room is required here. You and your friend
| can both be right at the same time. You want to build an AI-
| enabled app, and indeed there's plenty of opportunity for it I'm
| sure. And your friend can hate what it's done to their job
| stability and the industry. Also, totally unrelated, but is the
| meaning or etymology behind the app name Wanderfugl? I initially
| read it as Wanderfungl.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| It's wandering bird in Norwegian
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I "spoke" it to myself while reading, and instantly heard
| "Wonderfuckle".
| cvsswebshit wrote:
| Slop.
| tombert wrote:
| I got a thread on SomethingAwful gassed [1] because it was about
| an AI radio station app I was working on. People on that forum
| _do not like_ AI.
|
| I think some of the reasons that they gave were bullshit, but in
| fairness I have grown pretty tired of how much low-effort AI slop
| has been ruining YouTube. I use ChatGPT all the time, but I am
| growing more than a little frustrated how much shit on the
| internet is clearly just generated text with no actual human
| contribution. I don't inherently have an issue with "vibe
| coding", but it is getting increasingly irritating having to dig
| through several-thousand-line pull requests of obviously-AI-
| generated code.
|
| I'm conflicted. I think AI is very cool, but it is so perfectly
| designed to exploit natural human laziness. It's a tool that
| _can_ do tremendous good, but like most things, it requires
| people use it with _effort_ , which does seem to be the outlier
| case.
|
| [1] basically the hall of shame for bad threads.
| piljoong wrote:
| This isn't really a common-folk-vs-tech-bros story. It's about
| one specific part of Seattle's tech culture reacting to AI hype.
| People outside that circle often have very different incentives.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _AI-powered map_
|
| > _none of it had anything to do with what I built. She talked
| about Copilot 365. And Microsoft AI. And every miserable AI tool
| she 's forced to use at work. My product barely featured. Her
| reaction wasn't about me at all. It was about her entire
| environment._
|
| She was given two context clues. AI. And maps. Maps work, which
| means all the information in an "AI-powered map" descriptor rests
| on the adjective.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The product website isn't convincing either. It's only in
| private beta, and the first example shows 'A scenic walking
| tour of Venice' as the desired trip. I'll readily believe LLMs
| will gladly give you some sort of itinerary for walking in
| Venice, including all highlights people write and post about a
| lot on social media to show how great their life is. But if you
| asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that region, the
| counter questions would be 'Why Venice specifically? I thought
| you hated crowds -- have you considered less crowded
| alternatives where you will be appreciated more as a tourist?
| Have you actually been to Italy at all?'.
|
| LLMs are always going to give you the most plausible thing for
| your query, and will likely just rehash the same destinations
| from hundreds of listicles and status signalling social media
| posts.
|
| She probably understood this from the minimal description
| given.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I 'll readily believe LLMs will gladly give you some sort
| of itinerary for walking in Venice_
|
| I tried this in Crotone in September. The suggested walking
| tour was shit. The facts weren't remarkable. The stops were
| stupid and stupidly laid out. The whole experience was dumb
| and only redeeming because I was vacationing with a friend
| who founded on the of the AI companies.
|
| > _if you asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that
| region, the counter questions would be 'Why Venice
| specifically?_
|
| In the region? Because it's a gorgeous city with beautiful
| architecture, history and festivals?
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| If it's your first time going to Italy you absolutely should
| visit Venice. The crowds are unpleasant, but so what? Are you
| going to avoid Rome too? Only go to little provincial
| villages?
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| AI is in the Radium phase of its world-changing discovery life
| cycle. It's fun and novel, so every corporate grifter in the
| world is cramming it into every product that they can, regardless
| of it making sense. The companies being the most reckless will
| soon develop a cough, if they haven't already.
| watwut wrote:
| The author has unquestioning assumption that the only innovation
| possible is the one with AI. That is genuinely weird. Even if one
| believes in AI, innovation in non-AI space should be possible,
| no?
|
| Second, engineering and innovation are two different categories.
| Most of engineering is about ... making things work. Fixing bugs,
| refactoring fragile code, building new features people need or
| want. Maybe AI products would be hated less if they were just a
| little less about being able to pretend they are an innovation
| and just a little more about making things works.
| inshard wrote:
| Seattle hits a doom (helped by the gloom) loop every winter. This
| too shall pass.
| palmotea wrote:
| > But then I realized this was bigger than one conversation.
| Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the
| same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in
| Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco--people were curious,
| engaged, wanted to understand what I was building. But in
| Seattle? Instant hostility the moment they heard "AI."
|
| So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Does
| Seattle have more employee-workers and San Francisco has more
| people hustling for their startup?
|
| I assume Bali (being a vacation destination) is full people who
| are wealthy enough to feel they're insulated from whatever will
| happen.
| wrs wrote:
| Seattle has always been a second-mover when it comes to hype
| and reality distortion. There is a lot more echo chamber fervor
| (and, more importantly, lots of available FOMO money to burn)
| in SF around whatever the latest hotness is.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| My SF friends think they have a shot at working at a company
| whose AI products are good (cursor, anthropic, etc.), so that
| removes a lot of the hopelessness.
|
| Working for a month out of Bali was wonderful, it's mostly
| Australians and Dutch people working remotely. Especially those
| who ran their own businesses were super encouraging (though
| maybe that's just because entrepreneurs are more supportive of
| other entrepreneurs).
| Klonoar wrote:
| I live in Seattle now, and have lived in San Francisco as well.
|
| Seattle has more "normal" people and the overall rhetoric about
| how life "should be" is in many ways resistant to tech. There's
| a lot to like about the city, but it absolutely does _not_ have
| a hustle culture. I've honestly found it depressing coming from
| the East Coast.
|
| Tangent aside, my point is that Seattle has far more of a
| comparison ground of "you all are building shit that doesn't
| make the world better, it just devalues the human". I think
| LLMs have (some) strong use cases, but it is impossible to
| argue that some of the societal downsides we see aren't ripe
| for hatred - and Seattle will latch on to that in a heartbeat.
|
| _Edit: are - > aren't. Stupid autocorrect._
| hoppersoft wrote:
| This person crafts quite the straw man!
|
| > This belief system--that AI is useless and that you're not good
| enough to work on it anyway--hurts three groups
|
| I don't know anyone who thinks AI is _useless_. In fact, I 've
| seen quite a few places where it can be quite useful. Instead, I
| think it's massively overhyped to its own detriment. This article
| presents the author as the person who has the One True Vision,
| and all us skeptics are just tragically undereducated.
|
| I'm a crusty old engineer. In my career, I've seen RAD tooling,
| CASE tools, no/low-code tools, SGML/XML, and Web3 not live up to
| the lofty claims of the devotees and therefore become radioactive
| despite there being some useful bits in there. I suspect AI is
| headed down the same path and see (and hear of) more and more
| projects that start out looking really impressive and then
| crumble after a few promising milestones.
| kentm wrote:
| This person wrote a blog post admitting to tone-deafness in
| cheerleading AI and talking about all the ways AI hype has
| negatively impacted peoples' work environment. But then they
| wrap up by concluding that its the anti-AI people that are the
| problem. Thats a really weird conclusion to come to at the end
| of that blog post. My expectation was that the end result was
| "We should be measured and mindful with our advocacy, read the
| room, and avoid aggressively pushing AI in ways that negatively
| impact peoples' lives."
| ben_w wrote:
| > I don't know anyone who thinks AI is useless.
|
| By my reading, there are several people on this discussion
| thread right now who think it (in the form of LLMs) is useless?
| qoez wrote:
| It's probably good if some portion of the engineering culture is
| irrationally against AI and like refuses to adopt it sort of
| amish style. There's probably a ton still good work that can only
| be done if every aspect of a product/thing is given focused human
| attention to it, some that might out-compete AI aided ones.
| ktzar wrote:
| I think you hit the nail in the head there. There's absolutely
| nothing we can do with AI that we can't do without it. And the
| level of understanding of a large codebase that a solid group
| of engineers has is paramount to moving fast once the product
| is live.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > level of understanding of a large codebase that a solid
| group of engineers has is paramount to moving fast once the
| product is live.
|
| Trying hiring and retaining that solid group of engineers if
| you are a small/mid sized company without FAANG-level
| resources to offer.
| exasperaited wrote:
| It's like you saw all the evidence and drew the conclusion you
| were most comfortable with, despite what the evidence suggests.
| itg wrote:
| Was this written by AI? It sounds like the writing style of an
| elementary school student. Almost entirely made of really simple
| sentence structures, and for whatever reason I find it really
| annoying to read.
| atarian wrote:
| It has all the signs. Em-dashes. That distinct way of using
| short sentences to drive a point. Like this.
| jfalcon wrote:
| 206dev here...
|
| Oh yeah, call out a tech city and all the butt-hurt-ness comes
| out. Perfect example of "Rage Bait".
|
| People here aren't hurt because of AI - people here are hurt
| because they learned they were just line items in a budget.
|
| When the interest rates went up in 2022/2023 and the cheap money
| went away, businesses had to pivot their taxes while appeasing
| the shareholder.
|
| Remember that time when Satya went to a company sponsored rich
| people thing with Aerosmith or whomever playing while announcing
| thousands of FTE's being laid off? Yeah, that...
|
| If your job can be done by a very small shell script, why wasn't
| it done before?
| thorum wrote:
| People hate what the corporations want AI to be and people hate
| when AI is used the way corporations seem to think it should be
| used, because the executives at these companies have no taste and
| no vision for the future of being human. And that is what people
| think of when they hear "AI".
|
| I still think there's a third path, one that makes people's lives
| better with thoughtful, respectful, and human-first use of AI.
| But for some reason there aren't many people working on that.
| lukev wrote:
| Interesting that this talks about people in tech who hate AI;
| it's true, tech seems actually fairly divided with respect to AI
| sentiment.
|
| You know who's NOT divided? Everyone outside the tech/management
| world. Antipathy towards AI is extremely widespread.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| And yet there are multiple posts ITT (obviously from tech-
| oriented people) proclaiming that large swaths of the non-tech
| world love AI.
|
| An opinion I've personally never encountered in the wild.
| lukev wrote:
| I think they exist as a "market segment" (i.e, there are
| people out there who will use AI), but in terms of how people
| talk about it, sentiment is overwhelmingly negative in most
| circles. Especially folks in the arts and humanities.
|
| The only non-technical people I know who are excited about
| AI, as a group, are administrator/manager/consultant types.
| ajkjk wrote:
| > like building an AI product made me part of the problem.
|
| It's not about their careers. It's about the injustice of the
| whole situation. Can you possibly perceive the injustice? That
| the thing they're pissed about is the injustice? You're part of
| the problem because you can't.
|
| That's why it's not about whether the tools are good or bad. Most
| of them suck, also, but occasionally they don't--but that's not
| the point. The point is the injustice of having them shoved in
| your face; of having everything that could be doing good work
| pivot to AI instead; of everyone shamelessly bandwagoning it and
| ignoring everything else; etc.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I feel like this is a textbook example of how people talk past
| each other. There are people in this world who operate under
| personal utility maximization, and they think everyone else
| does also. Then there are people who are maximizing for
| justice: trying to do the most meaningful work themselves while
| being upset about injustices. Call it scrupulosity, maybe.
| Executives doing stupid pointless things to curry favor is
| massively unjust, so it's infuriating.
|
| If you are a utilitarian person and you try to parse a
| scrupulous person according to your utilitarianism of course
| their actions and opinions will make no sense to you. They are
| not maximizing for utility, whatsoever, in any sense. They are
| maximizing for justice. And when injustices are perpetrated by
| people who are unaccountable, it creates anger and complaining.
| It's the most you can do. The goal is to get other people to
| also be mad and perhaps organize enough to do something about
| it. When you ignore them, when you fail to parse anything they
| say as about justice, then yes, you are part of the problem.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > like [being involved in creation of the problem] made me a
| part of the problem.
|
| Yeah, that's weird. Why would anyone think that? /s
| basscomm wrote:
| > It's not about their careers.
|
| That's the thing, though, it _is_ about their careers.
|
| It's not just that people are annoyed that someone who spends
| years to decades learning their craft and then someone who put
| a prompt into a chatbot that spit out an app that mostly works
| without understanding any of the code that they 'wrote'.
|
| It's that the executives are _positively giddy_ at the prospect
| that they can get rid of some number their employees and the
| rest will use AI bots to pick up the slack. Humans need things
| like a desk and dental insurance and they fall unconscious for
| several hours every night. AI agents don 't have to take lunch
| breaks or attend funerals or anything.
|
| Most employees that have figured this out resent AI getting
| shoved into every facet of their jobs because they know exactly
| what the end goal is: that lots of jobs are going to be going
| away and nothing is going to replace them. And then what?
| 1zael wrote:
| I don't think the root cause here is AI. It's the repeated
| pattern of resistance to massive technological change by system-
| level incentives. This story has happened again and again
| throughout recent history.
|
| I expect it to settle out in a few years where: 1. The fiduciary
| duties of company shareholders will bring them to a point of
| stopping to chase AI hype and instead derive an understanding of
| whether it's driving real top-line value for their business or
| not. 2. Mid to senior career engineers will have no choice but to
| level up their AI skills to stay relevant in the modern
| workforce.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Wanderfugl is a strange for an "AI" powered map. The Wandervogel
| movement was against industrialization and pro nature. I'm sure
| they would have looked down on iPhones and centralized "AI" that
| gives them instructions where to go.
|
| Again a somewhat positive term (if you focus on "back to nature"
| and ignore the nationalist parts) is taken, assimilated and
| turned on its head.
| lisp2240 wrote:
| I'm all for neurodivergent acceptance but it has caused
| monumentally obnoxious people like this to assume everyone else
| is the problem. A little self awareness would solve a lot of
| problems.
| ragnoroct wrote:
| HN guidelines ask commenters to avoid name-calling. You can
| critique the article without slurs.
| etempleton wrote:
| Everyone who has been told AI is a panacea by executive
| leadership who barely understand it feels this way.
| jmull wrote:
| It's almost like the hype of AI is massively ahead of the
| reality, and the people being directly squeezed by that dynamic
| don't like how it feels.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| As a place with a high density of people with agency to influence
| the outcome, I think it's important for people here to
| acknowledge that much of what the negative people think is
| probably 100% true.
|
| There will absolutely some cases where AI is used well. But
| probably the larger fraction will be where AI does not give
| better service, experience or tool. It will be used to give a
| cheaper but shittier one. This will be a big win for the company
| or service implementing it, but it will suck for literally
| everybody else involved.
|
| I really believe there's huge value in implementing AI
| pervasively. However it's going to be really hard work and
| probably take 5 years to do it well. We need to take an
| engineering and human centred approach and do it steadily and
| incrementally over time. The current semi-religious fervour about
| implementing it rapidly and recklessly is going to be very
| harmful in the longer term.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Finance and HR are supposed to demoralize parts of organizations
| asking for too many resources.
| paxys wrote:
| All big corporate employees hate AI because it is incessantly
| pushed on them by clueless leadership and mostly makes their job
| harder. Seattle just happens to have a much larger percent of big
| tech employees than most other cities (>50% work for Microsoft or
| Amazon alone). In places like SF this gloom is balanced by the
| wide eyed optimism of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia,
| Google etc. and the thousands of startups piggybacking off of
| them hoping to make it big.
| mips_avatar wrote:
| That's probably the difference
| pnathan wrote:
| AI the hype beast product and the club for workers is a plague
| that I frankly hate.
|
| AI the manual algorithm to generate code and analyze images is
| quite an interesting underlying tech.
| whoamiopa wrote:
| Very new ex-MSFT here. I couldn't relate more with your friend.
| That's exactly what happened. I left Microsoft about 5 weeks ago
| and it's been really hard to detox from that culture.
|
| AI pushed down everywhere. Sometimes shitty-AI that needed to be
| proved at all cost because it should live up to the hype.
|
| I was in one of such AI-orgs and even there several teams felt
| the pressure from SLT and a culture drift to a dysfunctional
| environment.
|
| Such pressure to use AI at all costs, as other fellows from
| Google mentioned, has been a secret ingredient to a bitter
| burnout. I'm going to therapy and under medication now to recover
| from it.
| droopybuns wrote:
| Hey man- hang in there.
|
| FWIW: I realized this year that there are whole cohorts of
| management people who have absolutely zero relationship with
| the words that they speak. Literal tabula rasas who convert
| their thoughts to new words with no attachment to past
| statements/goals.
|
| Put another way: Liars exist and operate all around you in the
| top tier of the FAANGS rn.
| medhir wrote:
| wow -- this hit me hard.
|
| I live in Seattle, and got laid off from Microsoft as a PM in Jan
| of this year.
|
| Tried in early 2024 to demonstrate how we could leverage smaller
| models (such as Mixtral) to improve documentation and tailor code
| samples for our auth libraries.
|
| The usual "fiefdom" politics took over and the project never
| gained steam. I do feel like I was put in a certain "non-AI"
| category and my career stalled, even though I took the time to
| build AI-integrated prototypes and present them to leadership.
|
| It's hard to put on a smile and go through interviews right now.
| It feels like the hard-earned skills we bring to the table are
| being so hastily devalued, and for what exactly?
| rr808 wrote:
| There has always been a lot of Microsoft hate, but now its a
| whole new level. Windows now really sucks, My new laptop is all
| Linux for the first time ever. I dont see why this company is
| still so valuable. Most people only use a browser now and some
| ios apps, there is no need for Windows or Microsoft (and of
| course Azure is never anyone's first choice). Steam makes the
| gamers happy to leave too.
| w4yai wrote:
| Gaming.
| blairanderson wrote:
| Seattle is going to tax the fuck out of big-tech, for better or
| worse.
| wavemode wrote:
| My previous software job was for a Seattle-based team within
| Amazon's customer support org.
|
| I consider it divine intervention that I departed shortly before
| LLMs got big. I can't imagine the unholy machinations my former
| team has been tasked with working on since I left.
| mgaunard wrote:
| The only clear applications for AI in software engineering are
| for throwaway code, which interestingly enough isn't used in
| software engineering at all, or for when you're researching how
| to do something, for which it's not as reliable as reading the
| docs.
|
| They should focus more on data engineering/science and other
| similar fields which is a lot more about those, but since there
| are often no tests there, that's a bit too risky.
| decimalenough wrote:
| The name "Wanderfugl" is wanderfully fugly.
|
| Oddly, the screenshots in the article show the name as
| "Wanderfull".
| excalibur wrote:
| Always amazed to see people who don't hate AI.
| neutronicus wrote:
| It's satisfying to hear that Microsoft engineers hate Microsoft's
| AI offerings as much as I do.
|
| Visual Studio is great. IntelliSense is great. Nothing open-
| source works on our giant legacy C++ codebase. IntelliSense does.
|
| Claude is great. Claude can't deal with millions of lines of C++.
|
| You know what would be great? If Microsoft gave Claude the
| ability to semantic search the same way that I can with Ctrl-, in
| Visual Studio. You know what would be even better? If it could
| also set breakpoints and inspect stuff in the Debugger.
|
| You know what Microsoft has done? Added a setting to Visual
| Studio where I can replace the IntelliSense auto-complete UI,
| that provides real information determined from semantic analysis
| of the codebase and allows me to cycle through a menu of
| possibilities, with an auto-complete UI that gives me a single
| suggestion of complete bullshit.
|
| Can't you put the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a
| fucking room together? Figure out how LLMs can augment your
| already-really-good-before-AI product? How to leverage your
| existing products to let Claude do stuff that Claude Code _can
| 't_ do?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the
| world-so sometimes they actually do."
|
| ? For the better, or for the worse ?
| cwillu wrote:
| "I didn't fully grok how tone deaf I was being though.
|
| [...]
|
| Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco,
| people still believe they can change the world--so sometimes they
| actually do."
|
| Nope, still completely fucking tone deaf.
| themafia wrote:
| Instead of admitting you built the wrong thing you denigrate a
| friend and someone whom you admire. Instead of reconsidering the
| value of AI you immediately double down.
|
| This is a product of hurt feelings and not solid logic.
| decimalenough wrote:
| While everybody else is ranting about AI, I'll rant about
| something else: trip planning apps. There have been literally
| thousands of attempts at this and AFAICT precisely zero have ever
| gotten any traction. There are two intractable problems in this
| space.
|
| 1) A third party app simply cannot compete with Google Maps on
| coverage, accuracy and being up to date. Yes, there are APIs you
| can use to access this, but they're expensive and limited, which
| leads us to the second problem:
|
| 2) You can't make money off them. Nobody will pay to use your app
| (because there's so much free competition), and the monetization
| opportunities are very limited. It's too late in the flow to sell
| flights, you can't compete with Booking etc for hotel search, and
| big ticket attractions don't pay commissions for referrals. That
| leaves you with referrals for tours, but people who pay for tours
| are not the ones trying to DIY their trip planning in the first
| place.
| debesyla wrote:
| It's just another business/service niche that is solved until
| the current Big Provider becomes Evil or goes under.
|
| Similar to "made for everyone" social networks and video upload
| platforms.
|
| But there are niches that are trip planning + there are no one
| solving the pain! For example Geocaching. I always dreamed
| about an easy way to plan Geocaching routes to travel and find
| interesting caches on the way. Currently you gotta filter them
| out and then eyeball the map what seems to be nearby, despite
| there, maybe, not being any real roads there, or the cache is
| probably maybe actually lost or has to be accessed at specific
| time of day.
|
| So... No one wants apps that are already solved + boring.
| brokencode wrote:
| I use and pay for Wanderlog. Idk how their business is doing,
| but I love it as a user. They use an embedded Google Maps
| viewer for locations, so there is no problem for coverage.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| I've lived in Seattle my whole life, and have worked in tech for
| 12+ years now as a SWE.
|
| I think the SEA and SF tech scenes are hard to differentiate
| perfectly in a HN comment. However, I think any "Seattle hates
| AI" has to do more with the incessant pushing of AI into all the
| tech spaces.
|
| It's being claimed as the next major evolution of computing,
| while also being cited as reasons for layoffs. Sounds like a
| positive for some (rich people) and a negative for many other
| people.
|
| It's being forced into new features of existing products, while
| adoption of said features is low. This feels like cult-like
| behavior where you must be in favor of AI in your products, or
| else you're considered a luddite.
|
| I think the confusing thing to me is that things which are
| successful don't typically need to be touted so aggressively. I'm
| on the younger side and generally positive to developments in
| tech, but the spending and the CEO group-think around "AI all the
| things" doesn't sit well as being aligned with a naturally
| successful development. Also, maybe I'm just burned out on ads in
| podcasts for "is your workforce using Agentic AI to optimize ..."
| adverbly wrote:
| Some massive bait in this article. Like come on author - do you
| seriously have these thoughts and beliefs?
|
| > It felt like the culture wanted change. > > That world is gone.
|
| Ummm source?
|
| > This belief system--that AI is useless and that you're not good
| enough to work on it anyway
|
| I actually don't know anyone with this belief system. I'm pretty
| slow on picking up a lot of AI tooling, but I was slow to pick up
| JS frameworks as well.
|
| It's just smart to not immediately jump on a bandwagon when
| things are changing so fast because there is a good chance you're
| backing the wrong horse.
|
| And by the way, you sound ridiculous when you call me a dinosaur
| just because I haven't started using a tool that didn't even
| exist 6 months ago. FOMO sales tactics don't work on everyone,
| sorry to break it to you.
|
| When the singularity hits in who knows how many years from now,
| do you really think it's one of these llm wrapper products that's
| going to be the difference maker? Again, sorry to break it to you
| but that's a party you and I are not going to get invited to. 0%
| chance governments would actually allow true super intelligence
| as a direct to consumer product.
| neilv wrote:
| Lots of creators (e.g., writers, illustrators, voice actors)
| _hate_ "AI" too.
|
| Not only because it's destroying creator jobs while also ripping
| off creators, but it's also producing shit that's offensively bad
| to professionals.
|
| One thing that people in tech circles might not be aware of is
| that people outside of tech circles _aren 't_ thinking that tech
| workers are smart. They haven't thought that for a long time.
| They are generally thinking that tech workers are dimwit
| exploiter techbros, screwing over everyone. This started before
| "AI", but now "AI" (and tech billionaires backing certain
| political elements) has poured gasoline on the fire. Good luck
| getting dates with people from outside our field of employment.
| (You could try making your dating profile all about enjoying
| hiking and dabbling with your acoustic guitar, but they'll
| quickly know you're the enemy, as soon as you drive up in a
| Tesla, or as soon you say "actually..." before launching into a
| libertarian economics spiel over coffee.)
| assemblyman wrote:
| I am not in Seattle. I do work in AI but have shifted more
| towards infrastructure.
|
| I feel fatigued by AI. To be more precise, this fatigue includes
| several factors. The first one is that a lot of people around me
| get excited by events in the AI world that I find distracting.
| These might be new FOSS library releases, news announcements from
| the big players, new models, new papers. As one person, I can
| only work on 2-3 things at a given interval in time. Ideally I
| would like to focus and go deep in those things. Often, I need to
| learn something new and that takes time, energy and focus. This
| constant Brownian motion of ideas gives a sense of progress and
| "keeping up" but, for me at least, acts as a constantly tapped
| brake.
|
| Secondly, there is a sentiment that every problem has an AI
| solution. Why sit and think, run experiments, try to build a
| theoretical framework when one can just present the problem to a
| model. I use LLMs too but it is more satisfying, productive,
| insightful when one actually thinks hard and understands a topic
| before using LLMs.
|
| Thirdly, I keep hearing that the "space moves fast" and "one must
| keep up". The fundamentals actually haven't changed that much in
| the last 3 years and new developments are easy to pick up. Even
| if they did, trying to keep up results in very shallow and broad
| knowledge that one can't actually use. There are a million things
| going on and I am completely at peace with not knowing most of
| them.
|
| Lastly, there is pressure to be strategic. To guess where the
| tech world is going, to predict and plan, to somehow get ahead. I
| have no interest in that. I am confident many of us will adapt
| and if I can't, I'll find something else to do.
|
| I am actually impressed with and heavily use models. The tiresome
| part now are some of the humans around the technology who
| participate in the behaviors listed above.
| redwood wrote:
| He describes his startup as an ai-oriented map... to me that
| sounds amazing and totally at my alley. But then it's actually
| about trip planning... to me is too constrained and specific.
| What I would love is a map type experience that gives me an AI
| type interface for interesting things in any given area that
| might be near me and worth checking out.
|
| And not just for travel by the way... I love just exploring maps
| and seeing a place.. I'd love to learn more about a place kind of
| like a mesh between Wikipedia and a map and AI could help
| zjp wrote:
| I like AI to the extent that it can quickly solve well-worn, what
| I've taken to calling "embarrassingly solved problems", in your
| environment, like "make an animation subsystem for my program". A
| Qt timeline is not hard, but it is tedious, so the AI can do it.
|
| And it turns out that there are some embarrassingly solved
| problems, like rudimentary multiplayer games, that look more
| impressive than they really are when you get down to it.
|
| More challenging prompts like "change the surface generation
| algorithm my program uses from Marching Cubes to Flying Edges",
| for which there are only a handful of toy examples, VTK's
| implementation, and the paper, result in an avalanche of shit.
| Wasted hours, quickly becoming wasted days.
| pton_xd wrote:
| > More challenging prompts like "change the surface generation
| algorithm my program uses from Marching Cubes to Flying Edges",
| for which there are only a handful of toy examples, VTK's
| implementation, and the paper, result in an avalanche of shit.
| Wasted hours, quickly becoming wasted days.
|
| The real danger is when it actually works. Then suddenly you've
| got a program for which you no longer understand the details of
| how things work; the nuances of the algorithm, the trade-offs
| made with the implementation, the alternate approaches worth
| considering. Now you're at the mercy of the AI and no longer in
| control of what you're creating. Thinking is no longer useful
| and instead you're left pleading with the AI to move forward.
|
| Maybe that's just the inevitable future, though.
| groos wrote:
| My esteem of Seattle area engineers compared to Silicon Valley
| engineers has just gone up.
| aiono wrote:
| I think treating AI as the best possible field for everyone smart
| and capable is itself very narrow minded and short sighted. Some
| people just aren't interested in that field, what's so hard to
| accept it? World still needs experts in other fields even within
| computing.
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| Whenever I see "everyone", and broad statements that try to paint
| an entire geography based on one company "Microsoft" I'm suspect
| of the motives of the author at worst, or just dismissive of the
| premise at best.
|
| I see what the author is saying here, but they're painting with
| an overly broad brush. The whole "San Francisco still thinks it
| can change the world" also is annoying.
|
| I am from the Seattle area, so I do take it a bit personally, but
| this isn't exactly my experience here.
| runarberg wrote:
| I live in Seattle (well a 20 min ferry from Seattle) and I too
| hate AI. In fact I have a Kanji learning app which I am trying to
| push on to people, and I brand it as AI free. No AI was used to
| develop it, no AI used to write content, no AI is there to "help
| you learn".
|
| When I see apps like Wanderfugl, I get the same sense of disgust
| as OPs ex coworker. I don't want to try this app, I don't want to
| see it, just get it away from me.
| gverrilla wrote:
| Tech professionals that depend on their work to survive and have
| not been thinking about capital vs labor are on delulu land.
| Animats wrote:
| A sizable fraction of current AI results are wrong. The key to
| using AI successfully is imposing the costs of those errors on
| someone who can't fight back. Retail customers. Low-level
| employees. Non-paying users.
|
| A key part of today's AI project plan is clearly identifying the
| dump site where the toxic waste ends up. Otherwise, it might be
| on top of you.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| "everyone"? Clickbait.
| tomlockwood wrote:
| I don't know if anyone has been reading cover letters recently
| but it seems that people are prompting the LLMs with the same
| shit, dusting their hands and thinking "done" and what the reader
| then sees is the same repetitive, uncreative and instantly
| recognizable boilerplate.
|
| The people prompting don't seem to realize what's coming out the
| other end is boilerplate dreck, and you've got to think - if
| you're replaceable with boilerplate dreck maybe your skills
| weren't all that, anyway?
|
| The hate is justified. The hype, is not.
| keeda wrote:
| As I've said before: AI mandates, like RTO mandates, are just
| another way to "quiet fire" people, or at least "quiet
| renegotiate" their employment.
|
| That said, AI resistance is real too. We see it on this forum.
| It's understandable because the hype is all about replacing
| people, which will naturally make them defensive, whereas the
| narrative should be about amplifying them.
|
| A well-intentioned AI mandate would either come with a) training
| and/or b) dedicated time to experiment and figuring out what
| works well for _you_. Instead what we 're seeing across the
| industry is "You MUST use AI to do MORE with LESS while we layoff
| even more people and move jobs overseas."
|
| My cynical take is, this is an intentional strategy to continue
| culling headcount, except overindexing on people seen as
| unaligned with the AI future of the company.
| a1exyz wrote:
| There are a few clashing forces. One is the power of startups -
| what people love is what will prevail. It made macs and iphones
| grab marketshare back from "corporate" options like windows and
| palm pilot. Its what keeps tiktok running.
|
| An opposing force is corporate momentum. Its unfortunately true
| that people are beholden to what companies create. If there are
| only a few phones available, you will have to pick. If there are
| only so many shows streaming, you'll probably end up watching the
| less disgusting of the options.
|
| They are clashing. The ppl's sentiment is AI bad. But if tech
| keeps making it and pushing it long enough, ppl will get older,
| corporate initiatives will get sticky, and it will become
| ingrained. And once its ingrained, its gonna be here forever.
| coliveira wrote:
| The problem with AI is that the media and the tech hype machine
| wants everyone to believe that it is more than a glorified
| randomized text generator. Yes, for many problems this is just
| what you need, but not to create reliable software. Somehow, they
| want everyone to go into a state of disbelief and agree that it
| is a superior intelligence or at least the clear sign of
| something of this sorts, and that we should stop everything we're
| doing right now to give more money and attention to this
| endeavor.
| officeplant wrote:
| Seattle sounds kinda nice now. AI fatigue is real. I just had to
| swap eye doctors because they changed their medical records to
| some AI powered bullshit and wanted me to re-enter all my info
| into the new system in order to check-in for my appointment. A
| website that when I looked at their EULA page redirected to an
| empty page, no clear mention of HIPAA anywhere on the website's
| other pages. The eye doctor seemed confused why I wanted to stop
| using them after ten years as a patient even after I pointed out
| the flaws. It's madness.
| kizer wrote:
| In my opinion, the issue in AI is similar to the issue in self
| driving cars. I think the last "five percent" of functionality
| for agents etc. will be much, much more difficult to nail down
| for production use, just like snow weather and strange roads
| proved to be much more difficult for self-driving car technology
| rollout. They got to 95% and assumed they were nearing completion
| but it turned out there was even more work to be done to get to
| 100%. That's kind of my take on all the AI hype. It's going to
| take a lot more work to get the final five percent done.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| The thing about dismissing AI in 2025 is that it's on par with
| dismissing the wearable computing group at MIT in the 1980s.
|
| But admittedly, if one had tried to productize their stuff in the
| 1980s it would have been hilarious. So the rewards here are going
| to go to the people who read the right tea leaves and follow the
| right path to what's inevitable.
|
| In the short term, a lot of not so smart, people are going to
| lose a lot of money believing some of the ludicrous short-term
| claims. But when has that not been the case?
|
| This is not the right time of year to pitch in Seattle. The days
| are short and the people are cranky. But if they want to keep
| hating on AI as a technology because of Microsoft and Amazon, let
| them, and build your AI technology somewhere else. San Francisco
| thinks the AGI is coming any day now so it all balances out, no?
| umanwizard wrote:
| This is making me gain significant respect for Seattle.
| raincole wrote:
| > Instead, she reacted to it with a level of negativity I'd never
| seen her direct at me before.
|
| A few months ago, a friend of mine showed a poem she wrote for
| her newborn. Or more specifically, she asked ChatGPT to write for
| her newborn.
|
| I almost acted like this ex-Microsoft senior. Tbh if I didn't
| know it was for her own child, I would have acted this way.
|
| I (thought that I) managed ignoring my opinions about whether
| writing poems is a good use of AI and steering the topic to baby
| formula milk instead.
| rr808 wrote:
| We have these weekly rah rah AI meetings where we swap tips on
| what we've achieved with copilot and devin. Mostly crickets but
| everyone is talking with lots of enthusiasm. Its starting to get
| silly though now, most people can't even get the tools to do
| anything useful more than trivial things we used to see on stack
| overflow.
| mrandish wrote:
| > But you weren't allowed to fix them--that was the AI org's
| turf. You were supposed to use them, fail to see productivity
| gains, and keep quiet.
|
| Yep, big orgs doing big org things. Don't miss it a bit.
| aviel wrote:
| False.
|
| - The entire community @ https://seattlefoundations.org
| comeondude wrote:
| I live in seattle and I love AI lol.
|
| But yea, AI companies should pay into a UBI fund. The value of
| collective creative output of humanity should go back to the
| living not the select few.
| adastra22 wrote:
| UBI will never make financial sense.
| comeondude wrote:
| I live in seattle and I love AI lol.
|
| My main problem is that at this point, the value of entire
| collective creative output of humanity should go to the living
| not the select few.
|
| IMHO AI companies should pay into some kind of UBI fund/
| Sovergeign fund.
|
| Time for capitalism to evolve, yo!
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about
| how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment
| thread.
|
| I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into
| every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are
| reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless
| incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it
| every day for.
|
| I need to write about some absolutely life changing scenarios,
| including: got me thousands of dollars after it drafted a legal
| letter quoting laws I knew nothing about, saved me countless
| hours troubleshooting an RV electrical problem, found bugs in
| code that I wrote that were missed by everyone around me, my wife
| was impressed with my seemingly custom week long meal plan that
| fit her short term no soy/dairy allergy diet, helped me solve an
| issue with my house that a trained professional completely missed
| the mark on, completely designed and wrote code for a halloween
| robot decoration I had been trying to build for years, saves my
| wife hundreds of hours as an audio book narrator summarize
| characters for her audio books so she doesn't have to read the
| entire book before she narrates the voices.
|
| I'm worried about some of the problems LLMs will create for
| humanity in the future but those are problems we can solve in the
| future too. Today it's quite amazing to have these tools at our
| disposal and as we add them in smart ways to systems that exist
| today, things will only get better.
|
| Call me glass half full... but maybe it's because I don't live in
| Seattle
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| the author makes the connection, people see AI as Asbestos,
| shoved in everything by profit hungry corps that don't care about
| what damage it will do in the long term.
|
| Seattle has been screwed over so many times in the last 20 years
| that its a shell of itself.
| pdovj wrote:
| Is it that everyone in Seattle hates AI, or that Seattle is the
| only place you know people well enough they'll tell you the
| truth? The bar for that is much lower in Seattle too, compared to
| say, Japan. And the author seems tone deaf enough to not know the
| difference.
| evil-olive wrote:
| in the first paragraph, he drops a link to the startup he's
| working on:
|
| > I wanted her take on Wanderfugl, the AI-powered map I've been
| building full-time.
|
| this seems to me like pretty obvious engagement-bait / stealth
| marketing - write a provocative blog post that will get shared
| widely, and some fraction of those people will click through to
| see what the product is all about.
|
| but, apparently it's working because this thread is currently at
| 400+ comments after 3 hours.
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