Everyone in Seattle hates AI

https://jonready.com/blog/posts/everyone-in-seattle-hates-ai.html

by mips_avatar • 8 months ago

967 1063 8 months ago

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

Author here if anyone has thoughts

nickff• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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_3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

jfalcon5• 8 months ago

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.

smikhanov2• 8 months ago

"Grabbed lunch" is an awful phrase

smikhanov2• 8 months ago

Oh, and there's also "grok" just few paragraphs later!

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

It kind of is

rawgabbit2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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?

cosmicgadget4• 8 months ago

Would love to hear more anecdotes from former colleagues.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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.

chankstein382• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

I guess in conclusion I'm saying that it's hard to build in Seattle, and that's really unfortunate.

throwaway_dang• 8 months ago

Out of curiosity, is this piece just some content that you created in the hopes of boosting your company's mindshare?

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

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_af2• 8 months ago

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.

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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.

caconym_3• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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.

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

Nope, no one does. This thread is devoid of opinion on the topic.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

I think people just have a lot of frustration to get off their chest, which is fine.

jfalcon5• 8 months ago

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.

evil-olive2• 8 months ago

from your post:

Bring up AI in a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you're advocating asbestos.

can you please share the methodology you used to reach this conclusion?

in other words - what is the sample size? how many Seattle coffee shops did you walk into and yell out "hey, what do people think about AI?" (or did you gather the data in a different way, such as by approaching individual people at the coffee shop?)

what is your control group? in other words, how many SF coffee shops did you visit and conduct the same experiment?

somekyle22• 8 months ago

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.

tptacek6• 8 months ago

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.

kg2• 8 months ago

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.

wk_end• 8 months ago

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.

majormajor• 8 months ago

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.

somekyle22• 8 months ago

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.

neutronicus2• 8 months ago

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.

exasperaited2• 8 months ago

I live in a medium-sized British town of 100,000 people or so. It may be a slightly more creative town than most — lots of arts and music and a really surprisingly cool music scene — but I can tell you that AI pleases (almost) nobody.

I think actually a lot about it is the sort of crass, unthinking, default-American-college-student manner about the way ChatGPT speaks. It's so American and we can feel it. But AI generated art and music is hugely unpopular, AI chatbots replacing real customer service is something we loathe.

Generally speaking I would say that AI feels like something that is being done to us by a handful of powerful Americans we profoundly distrust (and for good reason: they are untrustworthy and we can see through their bullshit).

I can tell you that this is so different to the way the internet was initially received even by older people. But again, perhaps this is in part due to our changing perspectives on America. It felt like an exciting thing to be part of, and it helped in the media that the Web was the brainchild of a British person (even if twenty years later that same media would have liked to pretend he wasn't at a European research institution when he did it).

The feeling about AI is more like the feeling we have about what the internet eventually did to our culture: destroying our high streets. We know what is coming will not be good for what makes us us.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

Forgeties798• 8 months ago

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.

lambchoppers3• 8 months ago

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.

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

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.

themafia2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

slashdave• 8 months ago

You mean "_Most_ people out of tech that write social media posts I read".

ispeaknumbers• 8 months ago

this reads like an ad for your project

cosmicgadget4• 8 months ago

You mean Wanderfugl???

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

An iconic name

exmadscientist3• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

My creative writing teacher in college drilled the m dash into me. I can’t really write without them now

cosmicgadget4• 8 months ago

Ironic? The author is working on an AI project.

not_the_fda• 8 months ago

I don't think the phenomenon is limited to Seattle.

jofla_net• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

'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' ).

kg2• 8 months ago

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...

empressplay3• 8 months ago

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.

beloch• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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?

chankstein382• 8 months ago

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

empressplay3• 8 months ago

Honestly if it's using a swiss-army-knife framework it's already bloated.

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

Getting a real Jonathan Coulton "Skullcrusher Mountain" vibe here from the author (where vibe has its traditional meaning)...

"I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you

But I get the feeling that you don't like it

What's with all the screaming?

You like monkeys, you like ponies

Maybe you don't like monsters so much

Maybe I used too many monkeys

Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony

Making a gift for you?

groos2• 8 months ago

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.

pnathan2• 8 months ago

As a layoff justification and a hurryup tool, it is pretty loathesome. People use their jobs for their housing, food, etc.

elzbardico4• 8 months ago

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.

int_19h8• 8 months ago

humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.

We're conditioned to do so, in large part because this kind of work ethic makes exploitation easier. Doesn't mean that's our natural state, or a desirable one for that matter.

"AI-based economy" is too broad a brush to be painting with. From the Marxist perspective, the question you should be asking is: who owns the robots? and who owns the wealth that they generate?

vunderba• 8 months ago

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.

epolanski2• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

It's pronounced wanderfull in Norwegian

Ekaros• 8 months ago

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.

efskap• 8 months ago

Maybe that's why they didn't go with the English cognate i.e. Wanderfowl, since being foul isn't great branding

isomorphic• 8 months ago

What? You don't want travel tips from an itinerant swinger? Or for itinerant swingers?

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

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-qqqqq3• 8 months ago

Same in Danish FWIW.

In English, I’d pronounce it very similar to “wonderful”.

59nadir3• 8 months ago

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.

adastra2217• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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!

sleazebreeze• 8 months ago

AI probably generated all of that and the OP didn't even review its output.

Barrin92• 8 months ago

I think the more pressing advice here is, limit yourself to one name (https://wanderfugl.com/images/guides.png)

this must be one of the incredible AI innovations the folks in Seattle are missing out on

svth• 8 months ago

What's wrong with wahn-der-fyoo-gull?

ToucanLoucan2• 8 months ago

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.

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

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.

ToucanLoucan2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

"shamed Google Glassholes into obscurity"

Except it didn't stick? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088369

stego-tech• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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."

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Good for them. It turns out, the common folk have more wisdom than tech bros with regard to AI.

RandallBrown• 8 months ago

This article is about how the tech bros in Seattle hate AI.

typs• 8 months ago

Ah yes. The big tech employees of Amazon and Microsoft, the common folk.

arjie• 8 months ago

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.

empressplay3• 8 months ago

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.

toast02• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

cwillu2• 8 months ago

It's like porn: use it privately if you have to, but don't make it my problem.

jonners00• 8 months ago

It's even less helpful than if the friend just suggested to contact support and/or delete the facebook account.

To be fair, pretty much all advice in life is less helpful than 'delete the facebook account'

lazystar2• 8 months ago

speaking of caves...

I just picked up an old gamecube. it's refreshing to play purely offline content from an age without any AI art of any kind. some games, like animal crossing, will break in 2031 though, so there's only a good 5 more years left to enjoy it.

toast02• 8 months ago

Well, the Gamecube is probably fine, but the Dreamcast was thinking, so watch out :P

I know Animal Crossing is sensitive to the RTC, but could you set the clock back 28 years and go from there? You'll have the same days of the week and what not, just the year number will be wrong.

cosmicgadget4• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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)

hectdev8• 8 months ago

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.

throwout41109• 8 months ago

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…

suprjami2• 8 months ago

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.

jimbokun• 8 months ago

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.

sulicat• 8 months ago

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.

postalrat• 8 months ago

I see LLM's as kinda the new hotness in IDEs. And some people will use vi forever.

gaigalas• 8 months ago

I think it's more a continuation of IDE versus pure editor.

More precisely:

In one side, it's the "tools that build up critical mass" philosophy. AI firmly resides here.

On the other, it's the "all you need is brain and plain text" philosophy. We don't see much AI in this camp.

One thing I learned is that you should never underestimate the "all you need is brain and plain text" camp. That philosophy survived many, many "fatal blows" and has come up on top several times. It has one unique feature: resilience to bloat, something that the current smart tools camp is obviously overlooking.

the__alchemist• 8 months ago

Similar experience. I think it's become an identity politics concept. To those who consider themselves to be anti AI, the concept of the tool having any use is haram.

It feels awkward living in the "LLMs are a useful tool for some tasks" experience. I suspect this is because the two tribes are the loudest.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

buildsjets• 8 months ago

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.

nostrademons• 8 months ago

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).

johnnienaked2• 8 months ago

That's pretty sad tbh

WhyOhWhyQ• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

That honestly sounds like addiction.

CSMastermind• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

yoyohello13• 8 months ago

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.

agumonkey• 8 months ago

so would love to be a fly in there office and hear all their convos

3vidence• 8 months ago

Googler, opinion is my own.

Working on our mega huge code basis with lots of custom tooling and bleeding edge stuff hasn't been the best for for AI generated code compared to most companies.

I do think AI as a rubber ducky / research assistant type has been overall helpful as a SWE.

fogj094j0923j4• 8 months ago

I notice that expert tends to be pretty bimodal. e.g. chef either enjoy really well made food or some version of scrappy fast food comfort they grew up eating.

nilkn5• 8 months ago

People who've spent their life perfecting a craft are exactly the people you'd expect would be most negative about something genuinely disrupting that craft. There is significant precedent for this. It's happened repeatedly in history. Really smart, talented people routinely and in fact quite predictably resist technology that disrupts their craft, often even at great personal cost within their own lifetime.

xoogthrowkappa• 8 months ago

Excuse the throwaway. It's not even just the employees, but it doesn't even seem like the technical leadership seriously cares about internal AI use. Before I left all they pushed was code generation, but my work was 80% understanding 5-20 year old code and 20% actual development. If they put any noticeable effort into an LLM that could answer "show me all users of Proto.field that would be affected by X", my life would've been changed for the better, but I don't think the technical leadership understands this, or they don't want to spare the TPUs.

When I started at my post-Google job, I felt so vindicated when my new TL recommended that I use an LLM to catch up if no one was available to answer my questions.

anukin• 8 months ago

You cannot trust someone’s judgement on something if that something can result in them being unemployed.

volf_• 8 months ago

because autocorrect and predictive text doesn't help when half your job is revisions

crystal_revenge3• 8 months ago

I've generally found an inverse correlation between "understands AI" and "exuberance for AI".

I'm the only person at my current company who has had experience at multiple AI companies (the rest have never worked on it in a production environment, one of our projects is literally something I got paid to deliver customers at another startup), has written professionally about the topic, and worked directly with some big names in the space. Unsurprisingly, I have nothing to do with any of our AI efforts.

One of the members of our leadership team, who I don't believe understands matrix multiplication, genuinely believes he's about to transcend human identity by merging with AI. He's publicly discussed how hard it is to maintain friendship with normal humans who can't keep up.

Now I absolutely think AI is useful, but these people don't want AI to be useful they want it to be something that anyone who understands it knows it can't be.

It's getting to the point where I genuinely feel I'm witnessing some sort of mass hysteria event. I keep getting introduced to people who have almost no understanding of the fundamentals of how LLMs work who have the most radically fantastic ideas about what they are capable of on a level I have ever experienced in my fairly long technical career.

nunez• 8 months ago

Makes sense to me.

From the outside, the AI push at Google very closely resembles the death march that Google+ but immensely more intense from the entire tech ecosystem following suit.

Arainach2• 8 months ago

Being forced to adopt tools regardless of fit to workflow (and being smart enough to understand the limitations of the tools despite management's claims) correlates very well to being negative on them.

icedchai2• 8 months ago

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.

Xeronate2• 8 months ago

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.

deaux6• 8 months ago

It is, it can be an enormous learning accelerator for new skills, for both adults and genuinely curious kids. The gap between low and high performancer will explode. I can tell you that if I had LLMs I would've finished schooling at least 25% quicker, while learning much more. When I say this on HN some are quick to point out the fallibility of LLMs, ignoring that the huge majority of human teachers are many times more fallible. Now this is a privileged place where many have been taught by what is indeed the global top 0.1% of teachers and professors, so it makes more sense that people would respond this way. Another source of these responses is simply fear.

In e.g. the US, it's a huge net negative because kids aren't probably taught these values and the required discipline. So the overwhelming majority does use it to cheat the learning process.

I can't tell you if this is the same inside e.g. China. I'm fairly sure it's not nearly as bad though as kids there derive much less benefit from cheating on homework/the learning process, as they're more singularly judged on standardized tests where AI is not available.

Aerroon• 8 months ago

I found it useful for learning to write prose. There's nothing quite like instantaneous feedback when learning. The downside was that I hit the limit of the LLM's capabilities really quickly. They're just not that good at writing prose (overly flowery and often nonsensical).

LLMs were great for getting started though. If you've never tried writing before, then learning a few patterns goes a long way. ("He verbed, verbing a noun.")

loveparade• 8 months ago

I think what it comes down to, and where many people get confused, is separating the technology itself from how we use it. The technology itself is incredible for learning new skills, but at the same time it incentivizes people to not learn. Just because you have an LLM doesn't mean you can skip the hard parts of doing textbook exercises and thinking hard about what you are learning. It's a bit similar to passively watching youtube videos. You'd think that having all these amazing university lectures available on youtube makes people learn much faster, but in reality in makes people lazy because they believe they can passively sit there, watch a video, do nothing else, and expect that to replace a classroom education. That's not how humans learn. But it's not because youtube videos or LLMs are bad learning tools, it's because people use them as mental shortcut where they shouldn't.

xg15• 8 months ago

Not sure if that's also category #2 or a new one, but also: Places where AI is at risk of effectively becoming a drug and being actively harmful for the user: Virtual friends/spouses, delusion-confirming sycophants, etc.

wkat4242• 8 months ago

I also hoped it would crash and burn. The real value added usecases will remain. The overhyped crap won't.

But the shockwave will cause a huge recession and all those investors that put up trillions will not take their losses. Rich people never get poorer. One way or another us consumers will end up paying for their mistakes. Either by huge inflation, job losses, energy costs, service enshittification whatever. We're already seeing the memory crisis having huge knock on effects with next year's phones being much more expensive. That's one of the ways we are going to be paying for this circus.

I really see value in it too, sure. But the amount of investment that goes into it is insane. It's not that valuable by far. LLMs are not good for everything and the next big thing is still a big question mark. AI is dragged in by the hair into usecases where it doesn't belong. The same shit we saw with blockchains, but now on a world crashing scale. It's very scary seeing so much insanity.

But anyway whatever I think doesn't matter. Whatever happens will happen.

jliptzin• 8 months ago

My friends and I have always wondered as we've gotten older what's going to be the new tech that the younger generation seems to know and understand innately while the older generations remain clueless and always need help navigating (like computers/internet for my parents' generation and above). I am convinced that thing is AI.

Kids growing up today are using AI for everything, whether or not that's sanctioned or if it's ultimately helpful or harmful to their intellectual growth. I think the jury is still out on that. But I do remember growing up in the 90s, spending a lot of time on the computer, older people would remark how I'll have no social skills, I won't be able to write cursive or do arithmetic in my head, won't learn any real skills, etc, turns out I did just fine and now those same people always have to call me for help when they run into the smallest issue with technology.

I think a lot of people here are going to become roadkill if they refuse to learn how to use these new tools. I just built a web app in 3 weeks with only prompts to Claude Code, I didn't write a single line of code, and it works great. It's pretty basic, but probably would have taken me 3+ months instead of 3 weeks doing it the old fashioned way. If you tried it once a year ago and have written it off, a lot has changed since then and the tools continue to improve every month. I really think that eventually no one will be checking code just like hardly anyone checks the assembly output of a compiler anymore.

You have to understand how the context window works, how to establish guardrails so you're not wasting time repeating the same things over and over again, force it to check its own work with lots of tests, etc. It's really a game changer when you can just say in one prompt "write me an admin dashboard that displays users, sessions, and orders with a table and chart going back 30 days" or "wire up my site for google analytics, my tag code is XXXXXXX" and it just works.

queenkjuul7• 8 months ago

The thing is, Claude Code is great for unimportant casual projects, and genuinely very bad at working in big, complex, established projects. The latter of course being the ones most people actually work on.

Well either it's bad at it, or everyone on my team is bad at prompting. Given how dedicated my boss has been to using Claude for everything for the past year and the output continuing to be garbage, though, i don't think it's a lack of effort on the team's part, i have to believe Claude just isn't good at my job.

mark_l_watson• 8 months ago

I basically agree. OK: Small focused models for specific use cases, small models like the new mistral-3-3B that I found today to be good at tool use I and thus for building narrow ranged applications.

I have been mostly been paid to work on AI projects since 1982, but I want to pull my hair out and scream over the big push in the USA to develop super-AGI. Such a waste of resources and such a hit on society that needs resources used for better purposes.

eru3• 8 months ago

[...] a large number of places where LLMs make apparently-effective tools that have negative long-term consequences (see: anything involving learning a new skill, [...]

Don't people learn from imperfect teachers all the time?

sfink5• 8 months ago

Yes, they do. In fact, imperfect teachers can sometimes induce more learning than more perfect ones. And that's what is insidious about learning from AI. It looks like something we've seen before, something where we know how to make it useful and take advantage even of the gaps and inadequacies.

AI can be effective for learning a new skill, but you have to be constantly on your guard to prevent it from hacking your brain and making you helpless and useless. AI isn't the parent holding your bicycle and giving you a push and letting go when you're ready. It's the welded-on training wheels that become larger and more structurally necessary until the bike can't roll forward at all without them. It feeds you the lie that all you need is the theory, you don't ever need to apply it because the AI will do that for you so don't worry your pretty little head over it. AI teaches you that if something requires effort, you're just not relying on the AI enough. The path to success goes only through AI, and those people who try to build their own skills without it are suckers because the AI can effortlessly create things 100x bigger and better and more complex.

Personally, I still believe that human + AI hybrids have enormous potential. It's just that using AI constantly pushes away from beneficial hybridization and towards dependency. You have to constantly fight against your innate impulses, because it hacks them to your detriment.

I'd actually like to see an AI trained to not give answers, but to search out the point where they get you 90% of the way there and then steadfastly refuse to give you the last 10%. An AI built with the goal not of producing artifacts or answers, but of producing learning and growth in the user. (Then again, I'd like to see the same thing in an educational system...)

forgotoldacc• 8 months ago

As a gamedev, there's nothing I hate more than AI concept art. It's always soulless. The best thing about games is there's no limit to human imagination, and you can make whatever you want. But when we leave the imagination stage to a computer then leave the final brushing up to humans, we're getting the order completely backwards. It's bonkers and just disgusting to me.

That said, game engine documentation is often pretty hard to navigate. Most of the best information is some YouTube video recorded by some savant 15 year old with a busted microphone. And you need to skim through 30 minutes of video until you find what you need. The biggest problem is not knowing what you don't know, so it's hard to know where to begin. There are a lot of things you may think you need to spend 2 days implementing, but the engine may have a single function and a couple built in settings to do it.

Where LLMs shine is that I can ask a dumb question about this stuff, and can be pointed in the right direction pretty quickly. The implementation it spits out is often awful (if not unusable), but I can ask a question and it'll name drop the specific function and setting names that'll save me a lot of work. And from there, I know what to look up and it's a clear path from there.

And gamedev is a very strong case of not needing a correct solution. You just need things to feel right for most cases. Games that are rough around the edges have character. So LLM assistance for implementation (not art) can be handy.

KPGv2• 8 months ago

must be plausible, need not be accurate

This includes IME the initial stages of art creation (the planning, not generating, stage). It's kind of like having someone to bounce ideas off of at 3am. It's a convenient way of trigging your own brain to be inspired.

bccdee• 8 months ago

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.

throwout41109• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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)

mingus88• 8 months ago

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

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

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.

pjmlp6• 8 months ago

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_toad2• 8 months ago

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.

zzzeek4• 8 months ago

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.

senordevnyc7• 8 months ago

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.

59nadir3• 8 months ago

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.

I've tried implementing features with Claude Code Max and if I had let that go on for a week instead of just a couple of days I would've lost a week's worth of work (it was pretty immediately obvious that it was too slow at doing pretty much everything, and even the slightest interaction with the LLM caused very long round-trips that would add additional time, over and over and over again). It's possible people simply don't do the kind of things I do. On the extreme end of that, had I spent my days making CRUD apps I probably would've thought it was magic and a "game changer"... But I don't.

I actually don't have a problem believing that there are people who basically only need to write 25% of their code now; if all you're doing for work is gluing together libraries and writing boilerplate then of course an LLM is going to help with that, you're probably the 1000th person that day to ask for the same thing.

The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12.

P.S.:

I have found that very short completions, 1-3 lines, is a lot more productive for me personally than any kind of "generate this feature", or even function-sized generation. The reason is likely that LLMs just suck at the things I do, but they can figure out that a pattern exists in the pretty immediate context and just spit out that pattern with some context clues nearby. That remains my best experience with any and all LLM-assisted coding. I don't use it often because we don't allow LLMs for work, but I have a keybind for querying for a completion when I do side projects.

sensanaty2• 8 months ago

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.

My company is basically writing blank cheques for "AI" (aka LLM, I hate the way we've poisoned AI as a term))tooling so that people can use any and all tooling they want and see what works and doesn't. This is a company with ~1500ish engineers, ranging from hardware engineers building POS devices to the junior frontenders building out our simplest UIs. There's also a whole lot more people who aren't technical, and they're also encouraged to use any and all AI tooling they can.

Despite the entire company trying to figure out how to use these effectively precisely because we're trying to look at things objectively and separate out the hype from the reality, the only people I've seen with any kind of praise so far (and this has been going on since the early ChatGPT days) have been people in Marketing and Sales, because for them it doesn't matter if the AI hallucinates some pure bullshit since that's 90% of their job anyway.

We have spent god knows how much time and resources trying to get these tools doing anything more useful than simple demos that get thrown out immediately, and it's just not there. No one is pushing 100x the code or features they were before, projects aren't finishing any faster than they were before, and nobody even bothers turning on the meeting transcription tools either anymore because more often than not it'll interpret things said in the meeting just plain wrong or even make up entire discussion points that were never had.

Just recently, like last week recently, we had some idiotic PR review bot from coderabbit or some other such company be activated. I've never seen so many people complain all at once on Slack, there was a thread with hundreds of individuals all saying how garbage it was and how much it was distracting from reviews. I didn't see a single person say they liked the tool, not 1 single person had anything good to say about it.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's just a MASSIVE fucking hype bubble that will ultimately spawn some tooling that is sorta useful for generating unimportant scripts, but little else.

averyvery• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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 :)

senordevnyc7• 8 months ago

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.

gedy• 8 months ago

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.

palmotea3• 8 months ago

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.

layer82• 8 months ago

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.

shahbaby• 8 months ago

The most ironic part is that AI skills won't really help you with job security.

You touched on some of the reasons; it doesn't take much skill to call an API, the technology is in a period of rapid evolution, etc.

And now with almost every company trying to adopt "AI" there is no shortage of people who can put AI experience on their resume and make a genuine case for it.

bwfan1232• 8 months ago

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.

balamatom6• 8 months ago

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.

binary1322• 8 months ago

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

airstrike• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

mgaunard3• 8 months ago

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.

senordevnyc7• 8 months ago

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.

skybrian2• 8 months ago

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.

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

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.

adastra2217• 8 months ago

With almost zero fundamentals. That’s the part you are glossing over.

hinkley• 8 months ago

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.

balamatom6• 8 months ago

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.

layer82• 8 months ago

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.

antonvs2• 8 months ago

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.

jacquesm9• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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 do think Windows, at is core, is a decent operating system, and has been for a very long time. On the back end it works well, and I have no complaints. But I viscerally despise Windows 11 as a desktop operating system. That's right: DESPISE. VISCERALLY. AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL.

pico303• 8 months ago

This somewhat reflects my sentiment to this article. It felt very condescending. This "self-limiting beliefs" and the implication that Seattle engineers are less than San Francisco engineers because they haven't bought into AI...well, neither have all the SF engineers.

One interesting take away from the article and the discussion is that there seem to be two kinds of engineers: those that buy into the hype and call it "AI," and those that see it for the fancy search engine it is and call it an "LLM." I'm pretty sure these days when someone mentions "AI" to me I roll my eyes. But if they say, "LLM," ok, let's have a discussion.

vessenes2• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

vessenes2• 8 months ago

Their hyper scale data centers are super compelling. And they get OpenAI IP for some time. I don’t think we’ve really seen what they want to launch on the product side yet.

Satya mentioned recently that computer use agents use like 5x the windows license time on azure over a single person - they see a lotttt of inference growth coming and its multiplicative in that it uses their compute and azure infra.

hexator2• 8 months ago

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.

shepardrtc2• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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.

hexator2• 8 months ago

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.

zubiaur• 8 months ago

Some people take find their life meaning through craft and work. When that craft is suddenly less scarce, less special, so does that craft-tied meaning.

I wonder if these feelings are what scribes and amanuenses felt when the printing press arrived.

I do enjoy programming, I like my job and take pride on it, but I actively try for it not to be the life-mean giving activity. I'm a just mercenary of my trade.

nateglims4• 8 months ago

Outside of tech, I think the opinion is generally negative. AI has lost a lot the narrative due to things like energy prices and layoffs.

abustamam3• 8 months ago

Yeah, as a gamer I get a lot of game news in my feeds. Apparently there's a niche of indie games that claim to be AI-free. [0]

And I read a lot of articles about games that seem to love throwing a dig at AI even if it's not really relevant.

Personally, I can see why people dislike Gen AI. It takes people's creations without permission.

That being said, morality of the creation of AI tooling aside, there are still people who dislike AI-generated stuff. Like, they'd enjoy a song, or an image, or a book, and then suddenly when they find out it's AI suddenly they hate it. In my experience with playing with comfy ui to generate images, it's really easy to get something half decent, it's really hard to get something very high quality. It really is a skill in itself, but people who hate AI think it's just type a prompt and get image. I've seen workflows with 80+ nodes, multiple prompts, multiple masks, multiple loras, to generate one single image. It's a complex tool to learn, just like photoshop. Sure you can use Nano-Banana to get something but even then it can take dozens of generations and prompt iterations to get what you want.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/827650/indie-develope...

jama211• 8 months ago

Emphasis on ‘some’. Compare that to the article title!

isodev2• 8 months ago

I don’t think people hate models. They hate that techbros are putting LLMs in places they don’t belong … and then trying to anthropomorphize the thing finding what best rhymes with your prompt as “reasoning” and “intelligence” (which it isn’t).

utopiah4• 8 months ago

Some people really do hate AI

That's probably me for a lot of people. The reality is a bit finer than this namely :

- I hate VC funded AI which is actually super shallow (basically OpenAI/Claude wrappers)

- I hate VC funded genuine BigAI that sells itself as the literal opposite of what it is, e.g. OpenAI... being NOT open.

- I hate AI that hides it's ecological cost. Generating text, videos, etc is actually fascinating, but not if making the shittiest video with the dumbest script is taking the same amount of energy I'd need to fly across the globe.

- I hate AI that hides it's human cost, namely using cheap labor from "far away" where people have to label atrocities (murders, rape, child abuse, etc) without being provided proper psychological support.

- I hate AI that embodies capitalist principles of exploitation. If somehow your entire AI business relies on an entire pyramid of everything listed above to capture a market then hike the price once dependency is entrenched you might be a brilliant business man but you suck as a human being.

etc... I could go on but you get the idea.

I do love open source public AI research though. Several of my very good friends are researchers in universities working on the topic. They are smart, kind and just great human beings. Not fucking ghouls riding the hype with 0 concern for our World.

So... yes maybe AI haters have a slightly more refined perspective but of course when one summarize whatever text they see in 3 words via their favorite LLM, it's hard to see.

thefz3• 8 months ago

Some people really do hate AI

AGI? No, although it's not there. LLMs? Yes, lots. The main benefit they can give is to sort-of-speed-up internet search, but I have to go and check the sources anyway so I'll revert back to 20+ years of experience of doing it myself. Any other application of machine learning such almost instant speech to text? No, it's useful.

skwirl• 8 months ago

On this topic I think it’s pretty off base to call HN a “well insulated bubble” - AI skepticism and outright hate is pretty common here and AI negative comments often get a lot of support. This thread itself offers plenty of examples.

crote4• 8 months ago

I'd extend that to "very few people love AI".

In real life, I don't know anyone who genuinely wants to use AI. Most of them think it's "meh", but don't have any strong feelings about using it if it's more convenient - like Google shoving it in their face during a search. But would they pay for it, or miss it if it's gone? Nope, not a chance.

pier253• 8 months ago

It’s not only the hype though.

What about the complete lack of morality some (most?) AI companies exhibit?

What about the consequences in the environment?

What about the enshitification of products?

What about the usage of water and energy?

Etc.

parineum3• 8 months ago

Is your "etc." keep repeating the same two points you did in your list of four?

abustamam3• 8 months ago

Not to diminish your overall point, but enshittification has been happening well before AI, AI just made it much easier and faster to enshittify everything.

Karrot_Kream• 8 months ago

I was an early employee at a unicorn and I saw this culture take hold once we started hiring from Big Tech talent pools and offering Big Tech comp packages, though before AI hype took off. There's a crazy lack of agency that kicks in for Big Tech folks that's really hard to explain. This feeling that each engineer is this mercenary trying really hard to not get screwed by the internal system.

Most of it is because there's little that ties actual output to organizational outcomes. AI mandates after all are just a way to bluntly for e engineers to use AI, where if you were at a startup or smaller company you would probably organically find how much an LLM helps you where. It may not even help your actual work even if it helps your coworkers. That market feedback is sorely missing from the Big Techs and so hamfisted engineering mandates have to do in order to for e engineers to become more efficient.

In these cases I always try to remind friends that you can always leave a Big Tech. The thing is, from what I can tell, a lot of these folks have developed lifestyle inflation from working in Big Tech and some of their anger comes from feeling trapped in their Big Tech role due to this. While I understand, I'm not particularly sympathetic to this viewpoint. At the end of the day your lifestyle is in your hands.

didibus5• 8 months ago

You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs.

I think there is no "her", the article ends with saying:

My former coworker—the composite of three people for anonymity—now believes she's [...]

I think it's just 3 different people and they made up a "she" single coworker as a kind of example person.

I don't know, that's my reading at least, maybe I got it wrong.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

I hate to be cagey here but I just really don’t want to make anyone’s life harder than it needs to be by revealing their identity. Microsoft is a really tough place to be an employee right now.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

Thanks for signing up. I’m going to try really hard to open up some beta slots next week so more people can try it. There’s some embarrassingly bad bugs in prod right now…

johnnyanmac8• 8 months ago

FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs.

Close. We're in a recession and they are using AI as an excuse for another wave of outsourcing.

I don't think people hate AI, they hate the hype.

I hate the grift. I hate having it forced on me after refusing multiple times. That's pretty much 90% of AI right now.

ozfive• 8 months ago

The layoffs are due to tax incentives in the tax cut bills that financially incentivize offshoring work.

shepardrtc2• 8 months ago

That makes sense. And its even worse of a reason. At least for people living in the US.

iamkonstantin• 8 months ago

The hate starts with the name. LLMs don't have the I in AI. It's like marketing a car as self-driving while all it can do is lane assist.

dekoidal• 8 months ago

See also hoverboards

ACCount375• 8 months ago

Then what do they have?

Is the siren song of "AI effect" so strong in your mind that you look at a system that writes short stories, solves advanced math problems and writes working code, and then immediately pronounce it "not intelligent"?

wongarsu• 8 months ago

That's because there are at least 5 different definitions of AI.

- At it's inception in 1955 it was "learning or any other feature of intelligence" simulated by a machine [1] (fun fact: both neural networks and computers using natural language were on the agenda back then)

- Following from that we have the "all machine learning is AI" which was the prevalent definition about a decade ago

- Then there's the academic definition that is roughly "computers acting in real or simulated environments" and includes such mundane and algorithmic things as path finding

- Then there's obviously AGI, or the closely related Hollywood/SciFi definition of AI

- Then there's just "things that the general public doesn't expect computers to be able to do". Back when chess computers used to be called AI this was probably the closest definition that fits. Clever sales people also used to love to call prediction via simple linear regression AI

Notably four out of five of them don't involve computers actually being intelligent. And just a couple years ago we still sold simple face detection as AI

1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...

KptMarchewa3• 8 months ago

It's the opposite. It is doing the driving but you really have to provide lane assist, otherwise you hit the tree, or start driving in the opposite direction.

Many people claim it's doing great because they have driven hundreds of kilometers, but don't particularly care whether they arrived at the exact place, and are happy with the approximate destination.

conartist6• 8 months ago

Why would you not hate AI. What is there to like.

It's the closing trash compactor of soullessness and hate of the human, described vividly as having affected Microsoft culture as thoroughly as intergranular corrosion can turn a solid block of aluminum to dust.

Fuck Microsoft for both hating me and hating their own people. Fuck. That. Shit.

NoGravitas• 8 months ago

It's the closing trash compactor of soullessness and hate of the human, described vividly as having affected Microsoft culture as thoroughly as intergranular corrosion can turn a solid block of aluminum to dust.

That's a great way to describe it. There's a good article that points out AI is the new aesthetic of fascism. And, of course, in Miyazaki's words, "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."

nektro• 8 months ago

4. I don't think people hate AI, they hate the hype.

except a lot of people really do hate AI

side_up_down• 8 months ago

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.

sleepybrett4• 8 months ago

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.

ajkjk6• 8 months ago

one reason is that startup culture is cringe as hell

I'm being course, but like... it is though.

sirreal142• 8 months ago

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.

jfalcon5• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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

elzbardico4• 8 months ago

If AI replaces software engineers, people outside tech doesn't have much chance of surviving it too.

psyclobe• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

mehagar• 8 months ago

If a tool makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, then it's not a good tool. See C++.

lbrito• 8 months ago

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.

insane_dreamer• 8 months ago

I've had Claude try to pull the same trick on me just yesterday. It will also try to cheat and apply a "fix" that just masks the real problem.

doyougnu• 8 months ago

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?

teej2• 8 months ago

Your coworkers were probably writing subtle bugs before AI too.

andrei_says_4• 8 months ago

I wonder if there’s a way to measure the cost of such code and associate it with the individuals incurring it. Unless this shows on reports, managers will continue believing LLMs are magic time saving machines writing perfect code.

sudoshred• 8 months ago

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.

arresin• 8 months ago

Exactly it’s the non-obvious errors that are easy to miss—doubly so if you are just scanning the code. Those errors can create very hard to find bugs.

So between the debugging and many times you need to reprompt and redo (if you bother at all, but then that adds debugging time) is any time actually saved?

I think the dust hasn’t settled yet because no one has shipped mostly AI generated code for a non-trivial application. They couldn’t have with its current state. So it’s still unknown whether building on incredibly shaky ground will actually work in real life (I personally doubt it).

openasocket2• 8 months ago

Pretty much. Someone on our team put out a code review for some new feature and then bounced for a 2 week vacation. One of our junior engineers approved it. Despite the fact that it was in a section of dead code that wasn’t supposed to even be enabled yet, it managed to break our test environment. Took senior engineers a day to figure out how that was even possible before reverting. We had another couple engineers take a look to see what needs to be done to fix the bug. All of them came away with the conclusion that it was 1,000 lines of pure AI-generated slop with no redeemable value. Trying to fix it would take more work than just re-implenting from scratch.

justatdotin3• 8 months ago

One of our junior engineers approved it.

pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges.

so your process seems inadequate to me, agents or not.

also, was it tagged as generated? that seems like an obvious safety feature. As a junior, I might be thinking: 'my senior colleague sure knows lots of this stuff', but all it would take to dispel my illusion is an agent tag on the PR.

nikkwong3• 8 months ago

As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight was using this in the real world—but my experience on a few teams over the last two years has been exactly the opposite—people are often embarrassed to admit it but they are using it all the time. There are many engineers at Meta that "no longer code" by hand and do literally all of their problem solving with AI.

I remember last year or even earlier this year feeling like the models had plateau'd and I was of the mindset that these tools would probably forever just augment SWEs without fully replacing them. But with Opus 4.5, gemini 3, et al., these models are incredibly powerful and more and more SWEs are leaning on them more and more—a trend that may slow down or speed up—but is never going to backslide. I think people that don't generally see this are fooling themselves.

Sure, there are problem areas—it misses stuff, there are subtle bugs, it's not good for every codebase, for every language, for every scenario. There is some sloppiness that is hard to catch. But this is true with humans too. Just remember, the ability of the models today is the worst that it will ever be—it's only going to get better. And it doesn't need to be perfect to rapidly change the job market for SWE's—it's good enough to do enough of the tasks for enough mid-level SWEs at enough companies to reshape the market.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted to hell for this comment; but I think SWEs (and everyone else for that matter) would best practice some fiscal austerity amongst themselves because I would imagine the chance of many of us being on the losing side of this within the next decade is non-trivial. I mean, they've made all of the progress up to now in essentially the last 5 years and the models are already incredibly capable.

YZF3• 8 months ago

I keep getting blown away by AI (specifically Claude Code with the latest models). What it does is literally science fiction. If you told someone 5 years ago that AI can find and fix a bug in some complex code with almost zero human intervention nobody would believe you, but this is the reality today. It can find bugs, it can fix bugs, it can refactor code, it can write code. Yes, not perfect, but with a well organized code base, and with careful prompting, it rivals humans in many tasks (certainly outperforms them in some aspects).

As you're also saying this is the worst it will ever be. There is only one direction, the question is the acceleration/velocity.

Where I'm not sure I agree is with the perception this automatically means we're all going to be out of a job. It's possible there would be more software engineering jobs. It's not clear. Someone still has to catch the bad approaches, the big mistakes, etc. There is going to be a lot more software produced with these tools than ever.

throw2342342343• 8 months ago

I think whether you are right or wrong it makes sense to hedge your bets. I suspect many people here are feeling some sense of fear (career, future implications, etc); I certainly do on some of these points and I think that's a rational response to be aware of the risk of the future unknown.

In general I think -> if I was not personally invested in this situation (i.e. another man on the street) what would be my immediate reaction to this? Would I still become a software engineer as an example? Even if it is doesn't come to past, given what I know now, would I take that bet with my life/career?

I think if people were honest with themselves sadly the answer for many would probably be "no". Most other professions wouldn't do this to themselves either; SWE is quite unique in this regard.

kevin9482• 8 months ago

This has been exactly my mindset as well (another Seattle SWE/DS). The baseline capability has been improving and compounding, not getting worse. It'd actually be quite convenient if AI's capabilities stayed exactly where they are now; the real problems come if AI does work.

I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that this will end up creating jobs just like other technological advances did. I'm sure that will happen around the edges, but this is the first time thinking itself is being commodified, even if it's rudimentary in its current state. It feels very different from automating physical labor: most folks don't dream of working on an assembly line. But I'm not sure what's left if white collar work and creative work are automated en masse for "efficiency's" sake. Most folks like feeling like they're contributing towards something, despite some people who would rather do nothing.

To me it is clear that this is going to have negative effects on SWE and DS labor, and I'm unsure if I'll have a career in 5 years despite being a senior with a great track record. So, agreed. Save what you can.

zeroonetwothree2• 8 months ago

People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be

I've been reading this since 2023 and yet it hasn't really improved all that much. The same things are still problems that were problems back then. And if anything the improvement is slowing down, not speeding up.

I suspect unless we have real AGI we won't have human-level coding from AIs.

LaFolle• 8 months ago

code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here.

I'm also of the mindset that even if this is not true, that is, even if current state of LLMs is best that it ever will be, AI still would be helpful. It is already great at writing self contained scripts, and efficiency with large codebases has already improved.

I would imagine the chance of many of us being on the losing side of this within the next decade is non-trivial.

Yes, this is worrisome. Though its ironic that almost every serious software engineer at some point in time in their possibly early childhood / career when programming was more for fun than work, thought of how cool it would be for a computer program to write a computer program. And now when we have the capability, in front of our eyes, we're afraid of it.

But, one thing humans are really good at is adaptability. We adapt to circumstances / situation -- good or bad. Even if the worst happens, people loose jobs, for a short term it will be negatively impactful for the families, however, over a period of time, humans will adapt to the situation, adapt to coexist with AI, and find next endeavour to conquer.

Rejecting AI is not the solution. Using it as any other tool, is. A tool that, if used correctly, by the right person, can indeed produce faster results.

didibus5• 8 months ago

I mean, they've made all of the progress up to now in essentially the last 5 years

I have to challenge this one, the research on natural language generation and machine learning dates back to the 50s, it just it only recently came together at scale in a way that became useful, but tons of the hardest progress was made over many decades, and very little innovation happened in the last 5 years. The innovation has mostly been bigger scale, better data, minor architectural tweaks, and reinforcement learning with human feedback and other such fine tuning.

Animats2• 8 months ago

People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here.

I sure hope so. But until the hallucination problem is solved, there's still going to be a lot of toxic waste generated. We have got to get AI systems which know when they don't know something and don't try to fake it.

dragonwriter• 8 months ago

Just remember, the ability of the models today is the worst that it will ever be—it's only going to get better.

This is the ultimate hypester’s motte to retreat to whenever the bailey of claimed utility of a technology falls. It’a trivially true of literally any technology, but also completely meaningless on its own.

AstroBen• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

My 2¢... 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.

knollimar2• 8 months ago

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.

alexeischiopu• 8 months ago

EE on HN and from construction!

I use to draft in AutoCad and Revit before switching to software.

Saw your comment around using Gemini. I’d love to chat with you. I started building something for the build side of the electrical world, but eventually want to make the jump to the design side of the house.

lateforwork• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

yieldcrv2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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!

yieldcrv2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

It's wandering bird in Norwegian

gizzlon• 8 months ago

no..?

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

I "spoke" it to myself while reading, and instantly heard "Wonderfuckle".

cvsswebshit• 8 months ago

Slop.

tombert• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross2• 8 months ago

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_NL4• 8 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

watwut4• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Seattle hits a doom (helped by the gloom) loop every winter. This too shall pass.

palmotea3• 8 months ago

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.

wrs2• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

klardotsh• 8 months ago

Western Washington is very much a "work to live" place, and in a lot of ways there's a feedback loop to ensure it stays that way: surrounded by fellow "work to live" folks who would far rather just get our work done well and head out to the mountains, forests, and seas, the hustle bros will usually leave within a few years. I've watched it happen with quite a number of type-A folks. Exceptions for folks who make it into certain orgs in Amazon or into startup leadership, those seem to be safe places for hustlers around here.

Anyway. I think you're spot on with the "you all are building shit that doesn't make the world better, it just devalues the human" vibe. Regardless of what employers in WA may force folks to build, that's the mentality here, and AI evangelists don't make many friends... nor did blockchain evangelists, or evangelists of any of the spin-off hype trains ("Web3", NFTs, etc). I guess the "cloud" hype train stuck here, but that happened before I moved out west.

hoppersoft• 8 months ago

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.

kentm3• 8 months ago

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_w4• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

exasperaited2• 8 months ago

It’s like you saw all the evidence and drew the conclusion you were most comfortable with, despite what the evidence suggests.

itg• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

It has all the signs. Em-dashes. That distinct way of using short sentences to drive a point. Like this.

jfalcon5• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

sph2• 8 months ago

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.

I am thinking about this third path a lot, but the reality is that it wouldn't make AI more interesting than any other tool humans use to go about their daily lives. Does one get this obsessed about screwdrivers?

The issue is that a human-first world where technology is subservient to our needs is very incompatible with our current society. The AI hype is part and parcel of the capitalistic mode of production where humans are ultimately judged for their ability to produce more commodities; the goal has always been to improve productivity to make more for cheaper — this time, the quest for efficiency has found a viable replacement for many humans activities.

lukev2• 8 months ago

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.

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

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.

lukev2• 8 months ago

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.

ajkjk6• 8 months ago

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.

ajkjk6• 8 months ago

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.

IAmBroom8• 8 months ago

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

basscomm4• 8 months ago

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?

ajkjk6• 8 months ago

disagree completely. You're doing the thing I described: assuming it's all ultimately about personal benefit when they're telling you directly that it's not. The same people could trivially capitalize on the shifting climate and have a good career in the new world. But they'd still be pissed about it.

I'm one of these people. So is everyone I know. The grievance is moral, not utilitarian. I don't care about executives getting rid of people. I care that they're causing obviously stupid things to happen, based on their stupid delusions, making everyone's lives worse, and they're unaccountable for it. And in doing so they devalue all of the things I consider to be good about tech, like good software that works and solves real problems. Of course they always did that but it's especially bad now.

1zael• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

etempleton2• 8 months ago

Everyone who has been told AI is a panacea by executive leadership who barely understand it feels this way.

ponector3• 8 months ago

But AI takes job of average "western" IT employee. Like in meme AI stands for Actually Indians.

jmull• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Finance and HR are supposed to demoralize parts of organizations asking for too many resources.

paxys• 8 months ago

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_avatar44• 8 months ago

That's probably the difference

artifaxx• 8 months ago

Definitely, AI sentiment is positive among most people at the small startup I work at in the Seattle area. I do see the "AI fatigue" too, I bet the majority is from using AI as a repeated layoff rationalization. Personally AI is a tool, one of the more useful ones (e.g. Claude and Gemini thinking models make quite helpful code reviewers once given a checklist) The hype often overshadows these benefits.

pnathan2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

ch_fr2• 8 months ago

Reminded me of: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today...

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

Best of luck with this transition. I had a really hard time when I left Microsoft. It’s took longer than I expected to feel better but I do now.

sph2• 8 months ago

Jesus, is it actually a thing to grieve after leaving a job? (doesn't sound like you were laid off)

DaiPlusPlus• 8 months ago

(Fellow ex-msftie here too; but I left for a startup almost exactly 10 years ago, and I miss how that older culture is apparently gone).

What I don't understand is where the AI irrationality is coming from: the C-suite (still in B37?) are all incredibly smart people who must surely be aware of the damage this top-down policy is having on morale, product-quality, and how the company is viewed by its own customers - and yet, they do.

I'm not going to pretend things were being run perfectly when I was at MS: there were plenty of slow-motion mistakes playing-out right in front of us all[1] - and as I look back, yes, I was definitely frustrated at these clear obvious mistakes and their resultant unimaginable waste of human effort and capital investment.

Actually, come to think about it... maybe perhaps things really haven't changed as much? Clearly something neurotoxic got into the Talking Rain cans sometime around 2010-2011 - then was temporarily abated in 2014-2015; then came back twice as hard in 2022.

-------

[1]: Windows 8 and the Start Screen; the SurfaceRT; Visual Studio 2012 with SHOUTY MENUS and monochrome toolbar icons; the laggy and sluggish Office 2013; the crazy simultaneous development of entirely separate new reimplementations of the Office apps for iOS, Android, WinRT, the web. While ignoring the clear market-demand for cloud-y version of Active Directory without on-prem DCs (instead we got Entra, then InTune).

medhir• 8 months ago

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?

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

I’m glad it resonated. I’ve found a lot of people in Microsoft have some shared struggles right now. It’s really hard get excited about jobs after that, but you only need one job to be the right fit. It sounds like you were working on some great stuff and you should keep pursuing that interest in the meantime. You never know where it might lead you.

rr8083• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Gaming.

Havoc• 8 months ago

They do seem to be collecting a lot of self inflicted Ls lately

blairanderson• 8 months ago

Seattle is going to tax the fuck out of big-tech, for better or worse.

wavemode• 8 months ago

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.

mgaunard3• 8 months ago

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.

decimalenough2• 8 months ago

The name "Wanderfugl" is wanderfully fugly.

Oddly, the screenshots in the article show the name as "Wanderfull".

excalibur• 8 months ago

Always amazed to see people who don't hate AI.

neutronicus2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

"But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world-so sometimes they actually do."

? For the better, or for the worse ?

cwillu2• 8 months ago

“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.

themafia2• 8 months ago

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.

decimalenough2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

brokencode3• 8 months ago

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.

cube00• 8 months ago

They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations

If they become popular they'll have to move to OSM, Google's steep charging for their Maps API at high usage that has brought companies to their knees is well known [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089776

Esophagus42• 8 months ago

Love Wanderlog!

But I use it as a glorified notes app to keep track of flights, reservations, rental cars, confirmation numbers, etc, in one place, not for trip planning.

b_e_n_t_o_n• 8 months ago

There just isn't much friction between having a few tabs open (maps, booking site, airplane site, google search) and a notepad. The friction of searching for an app, downloading it, and then learning how to use it is just higher.

So many products are like this - it sounds good on paper to consolidate a bunch of tasks in one place but it's not without costs and the benefit is just not very high.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

That’s why I built all my geo infrastructure from scratch from osm, there’s still some issues but for AI location grounding it outperforms google places for $300/mo

coolThingsFirst2• 8 months ago

Google has monopoly of places API, I tried foursquare and their public dataset and got tons of wrong locations of the places. It even got the location of the Eiffel tower wrong.

captainkrtek• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

neilv2• 8 months ago

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.)

int_19h8• 8 months ago

You have a very cartoon villain image of tech workers in your head. While Tesla-driving libertarian techbros are certainly a thing, this doesn't even accurately represent the majority of employees in Big Tech, nevermind the industry as a whole.

neilv2• 8 months ago

What impression do you think non-tech workers have of tech workers, these days.

assemblyman• 8 months ago

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.

mkoubaa• 8 months ago

I get excited by new model releases, try it, switch it to default if I feel it's better, and then I move on. I don't understand why any professional SWE should engage in weird cultish behavior about these models, it's a better mousetrap as far as I'm concerned

agobineau• 8 months ago

its just the old pc vs mac cultism. nobody who actually has work to do cares. much like authors obsessed with typewriters, transport companies with auto brands, etc

checker659• 8 months ago

The fundamentals actually haven't changed that much in the last 3 years

Even said fundamentals don't have much in the way to foundations. It's just brute forcing your way using a O(n^3) algorithm using a lot of data and compute.

tech_ken• 8 months ago

O(n^(~2.8)) because fast matrix mult?

1x_engineer• 7 months ago

Brute force!? Language modeling is a factorial time and memory problem. Someone comes up with a successful method that’s quadratic in the input sequence length and you’re complaining…?

viking123• 8 months ago

I hate scammers like many of the Anthropic employees that post every other week "brooo we have this model that can break out of the system bro!"

"broo it's so dangerous let me tell you how dangerous it is! you don't want to get this out! we have something really dangerous internally!"

Those are the worst, Dario included there btw, almost a worse grifter than Altman.

The models themselves are fine except Claude that calls the police if you say the word boob.

jordanb• 8 months ago

Dario wishes he was the grifter Altman is. He's like a kirland brand grifter compared to Altman. Altman is a generational level talent when it comes to grifting.

red-iron-pine2• 8 months ago

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.

the AI just an LLM and it just does what it is told to.

no limit to human greed though

redwood2• 8 months ago

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

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

So actually that’s what I’ve been working on. It’s been taking so long because I’ve been building my own ai focused geocoder to do just that

redwood2• 8 months ago

Look forward to trying it!

zjp• 8 months ago

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.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

I feel the same way about those embarrassingly solved problems! Though oftentimes the trick is knowing what to ask for. I remember grinding for weeks on a front end but until I realized what the problem was (not the exact bug just what the general concept should be) Claude then fixed it in 10 seconds.

groos2• 8 months ago

My esteem of Seattle area engineers compared to Silicon Valley engineers has just gone up.

aiono• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

runarberg4• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Tech professionals that depend on their work to survive and have not been thinking about capital vs labor are on delulu land.

Animats2• 8 months ago

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.

ElijahLynn2• 8 months ago

"everyone"? Clickbait.

geldedus2• 8 months ago

author doesn't like unpleasant truths and downvotes them

tomlockwood• 8 months ago

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.

keeda6• 8 months ago

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.

charles_f• 8 months ago

AI mandates, like RTO mandates, are just another way to "quiet fire" people

That's a recurring argument, and I don't believe it, especially in large tech companies. They have no problem doing multiple large non-quiet lay-offs, why would they need moustache-twirling level schemes to get people to quit.

I don't believe companies to be well intentioned, but the simplest explanation is often the best:

1. RTO are probably driven by people in power who either like to be in the office, believe being in the office is the most efficient way to work (be that it's true or not), or have financial stakes in having people occupy said offices.

2. "AI" mandate is probably driven by people in power who either do see value in AI, think it's the most efficient way to work (be that it's true or not), have FOMO on AI, or have financial stakes in having people use it.

keeda6• 8 months ago

They have no problem doing multiple large non-quiet lay-offs, why would they need moustache-twirling level schemes to get people to quit.

So the thing about all large layoffs is that there is actually some non-obvious calculus behind them.

One thing for instance, is that typically in the time period soon after layoffs, there is some increased attrition in the surviving employees, for a multitude of reasons. So if you layoff X people you actually end up with X + Y lower headcount shortly after. There are also considerations like regulations.

What this means is that planning layoffs has multiple moving parts:

1) The actual monetary amount to cut -- it all starts with $$$;

2) The absolute number of headcount that translates to;

3) The expected follow-on attrition rate;

4) The severance (if any) to offer;

5) The actual headcount to cut with a view of the attrition and severance;

6) Local labor regulations (e.g. WARN) and their impact, monetary or otherwise;

7) Consideration, impact on internal morale and future recruitment.

So it's a bit like tuning a dynamic system with several interacting variables at play

Now the interesting bit of tea here is that in the past couple of years, the follow-on (and all other) attrition has absolutely plummeted, which has thrown the standard approaches all out of whack. So companies are struggling a bit to "tune" their layoffs and attrition.

I had an exec frankly tell me this after one of the earliest waves of layoffs a couple years ago, and I heard from others that this was happening across the industry. Sure enough, there have been more and more seemingly haphazard waves of layoffs and the absolute toxicity this has introduced into corporate culture.

Due to all this and the overal economy and labor market, employee power has severely weakened, so things like morale and future recruitment are also lower priorities.

Given all this calculus, a company can actually save quite some money (severance) and trouble if people quit by themselves, with minimal negative repercussions.

Not quite moustache-twirling but not quite savory either.

a1exyz• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

LogicFailsMe2• 8 months ago

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?

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

I might have written in broad strokes but I was really annoyed. Like I want to get out of the Amazon/Microsoft bubble. And yeah everyone is cranky rn

LogicFailsMe2• 8 months ago

Microsoft and Amazon people in Seattle are as annoying as Hollywood people in LA. I feel your disenchantment with the monoculture.

umanwizard• 8 months ago

This is making me gain significant respect for Seattle.

raincole• 8 months ago

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.

rr8083• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

False.

- The entire community @ https://seattlefoundations.org

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

Are they good?

comeondude2• 8 months ago

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.

adastra2217• 8 months ago

UBI will never make financial sense.

waterTanuki• 8 months ago

UBI isn't about making financial sense it's about keeping the last traces of society duct taped together before it all collapses. Remove all pathways to a middle-class life and you're left with a populace on the precipice of violent revolts.

comeondude2• 8 months ago

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!

r0m4n03• 8 months ago

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

Esophagus42• 8 months ago

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

Yep.

I feel like actually, being negative on AI is the common view now, even though every other HN commenter thinks they’re the only contrarian in the world to see the light and surely the masses must be misguided for not seeing it their way.

The same way people love to think they’re cooler than the masses by hating [famous pop artist]. “But that’s not real music!” they cry.

And that’s fine. Frankly, most of my AI skeptic friends are missing out on a skill that’s helped me a fair bit in my day to day at work and casually. Their loss.

Like it or not, LLMs are here to stay. The same way social media boomed and was here to stay, the same way e-commerce boomed and was here to stay… there’s now a whole new vertical that didn’t exist before.

Of course there will be washouts over time as the hype subsides, but who cares? LLMs are still wicked cool to me.

I don’t even work in AI, I just think they’re fascinating. The same way it was fascinating to me when I made a computer say “Hello, world!” for the first time.

doom2• 8 months ago

I think the disconnect for me is that I want AI to do a bunch of mundane stuff in my job where it is likely to be discouraged so I can focus on my work. My employer's CEO just implemented an Elon-style "top 5" bi-weekly report. Would they find it acceptable for me to submit AI-generated writing? I just had to do my annual self and peer reviews. Is AI writing valid here? A company wanted to put me, a senior engineer, through a five stage interview process, including a software-graded Leetcode style assessment. Should I be able to use AI to complete it?

These aren't meant to be gotcha rhetorical questions, just parts of my professional life where AI _isn't_ desirable by those in power, even if they're some of the only real world use cases where I'd want to use it. As someone said upthread, I want AI to do my dishes and laundry so I can focus on leisure and creative pursuits (or, in my job, writing code). I don't want AI doing creative stuff for me so I can do dishes and laundry.

Capricorn24814• 8 months ago

I feel like actually, being negative on AI is the common view now, even though every other HN commenter thinks they’re the only contrarian in the world to see the light and surely the masses must be misguided for not seeing it their way

I have mostly seen people on HN criticizing the few people in tech who have attached themselves to the hype and senselessly push it everywhere, not "the masses." The masses don't particularly like AI. It seems like it's only people hyping it that think everyone but Luddites are into it.

You're both painting a narrative that anti-AI sentiment is a popular bandwagon everyone is doing to be cool, as well as not that big actually and everyone is loving AI. Which is it?

latexr4• 8 months ago

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.

What I feel is people are denouncing the problems and describing them as not being worth the tradeoff, not necessarily saying it has zero use cases. On the other end of the spectrum we have claims such as:

countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for.

Maybe those blow your mind, but not everyone’s mind is blown so easily.

For every one of your cases, I can give you a counter example where doing the same went horribly wrong. From cases being dismissed due to non-existent laws being quoted, to people being poisoned by following LLM instructions.

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.

No, they are not! We can’t keep making climate change worse and fix it later. We can’t keep spreading misinformation at this rate and fix it later. We can’t keep increasing mass surveillance at this rate and fix it later. That “fix it later” attitude is frankly naive. You are falling for the narrative that got us into shit in the first place. Nothing will be “fixed later”, the powerful actors will just extract whatever they can and bolt.

and as we add them in smart ways to systems that exist today, things will only get better.

No, they will not. Things are getting worse now, it’s absurd to think it’s inevitable they’ll get better.

r0m4n03• 8 months ago

Yea I do think you make a lot of valid points about the tradeoffs of the advances. I think anything we do to progress humanity technologically will have negative outcomes on everything else. I think as humans make things better for ourselves it will almost always rely on destroying something in nature in return. The capitalistic world we live in will almost always drive that to the extreme quickly.

As for the other points, are the LLMs wrong sometimes, yes. But so are humans so it's not really a novel thing to point out. The question is, are they more correct than humans? I have seen they can be more accurate, less biased, etc... and we are driving toward higher accuracy and other ways to make them right.

And the fix later attitude is not great toward everything and I was referring to the accuracy issues that people often point out as why AI is hype. The things you mention are side effects and those should be controlled because the cat is out of the bag. You can spend your time yelling at the clouds or try to do something to make it better. I assure you, capitalism is a tough enemy. This is no different than another type of combustable engine that was created that has negative consequences on the environment in different ways.

I'm not disagreeing with you... mostly just saying: the hype is warranted

nutjob29• 8 months ago

Its not about the tech, the negativity is due to the mismatch between hype and reality. LLMs are incredibly useful, for certain things, like the ones you have found. Others simply don't work.

Is it going to deliver on even 1% of the hype any time soon? Unlikely.

r0m4n03• 8 months ago

I'm mostly saying the hype is real on a lot of things today. Is it working perfectly for everything? Definitely not, but I'm of the opinion giving it another 10 years and it just might be. I'm amongst the many working to make it better and all I see is a million possibilities of what can be done that we have only worked through a few of the issues. Did it change EVERYTHING over night? No, it was a big breakthrough, the rest is still catching up.

senordevnyc7• 8 months ago

1% of what hype? AGI? Because other than AGI, I think it's delivered on most of the hype already.

I think our tooling is holding us back more than the actual models, and even if they never advance at all from here (unlikely), we'll still get years of improvement and innovation.

spaceguillotine• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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-olive2• 8 months ago

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.

ares623• 8 months ago

I’ve been really tempted to put up a “wall of baiters” for such cases.

chrsw• 8 months ago

Tech company leadership sees AI as a shortcut to success. You know how in project planning meetings engineers are usually asked how they can pull in the schedule by x number of months? AI is now that thing. Obviously, this is a mistake.

The cult of AI maximalists aren't helping the situation.

jansommer• 8 months ago

AI is such a blessing. I use it almost every day at work, and I've spent this evening getting a Bluetooth to USB mapper for a ps4 controller working by having ChatGPT write it for me, for a bigger project I'm working on. Yes, it's going to take some time to fully understand the code and adjust it to my own standards, but i've been playing a game a few hours now and I feel zero latency and plenty of controller rumble that I'm having fun giving some extra power. It pretty much worked with the first 250 lines of C it spew out.

What's gonna be super interesting is that I'm going to have an rpi zero 2 power up my machine when I press the controller's ps-button. That means I might need to solder and do some electrical voodoo that I've never tried. Crossing my fingers that the plan ChatGPT has come up with won't electrocute me.

scotty793• 8 months ago

That kind of explained half of comments on HN. When it's your induatry that's being disrupted suddenly a lot of people are on the edge.

sparrc• 8 months ago

I'm in Seattle at AWS and haven't encountered this attitude towards AI at all. All of my coworkers pretty much love using Cline and Kiro.

huey77• 8 months ago

I stopped reading after the third em dash. I'm sorry if you use them, but they are my AI copy/paste blog red flag these days

spit2wind• 8 months ago

Bring up AI in a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you're advocating asbestos.

I don't know who first uses the asbestos analogy, but it's 1000% on point.

I think Cory Doctrow says it best,

"AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our society — and our descendants will be digging it out for generations."

I believe that's exactly the language to combat AI hype.

th0ma5• 8 months ago

This submarines a few blame the AI haters ideas while promoting some honest aspects of reality.

nextworddev• 8 months ago

I’m pretty sure the other 80% of non-tech Seattlites would love AI to take away the techies

j2kun• 8 months ago

like building an AI product made me part of the problem.

I don't see how the author can believe that quitting their job to work on an AI startup is NOT contributing to the problem of "AI products being shoved down everyone's throats."

Except, of course, that their financial bottom line depends on not believing this.

marssaxman4• 8 months ago

Roughly a third of the engineers in the greater Seattle area work for Microsoft, so we needn't conjure up any strange quality of the local culture to explain this.

satisfice• 8 months ago

Negative? You mean realistic. You mean “refuse to tell lies.”

Just stop lying about AI. Thank you.

The author’s AI app looks like something that drains all the fun and challenge out of travel planning.

ch_fr2• 8 months ago

I have some trouble reconciling the conclusion of this article with everything else it described. How is "Clearly my coworker just wasn't believing hard enough in AI, and it harms everyone!" the conclusion the author comes to?

It might just be an ESL issue on my end, but I seriously feel some huge dissonance between the explanations of "how the tech was made the main KPI, used to justify layoffs and forced in a way that hinders productivity", and the conclusion that seems to say "the real issue with those people complaining is that they just don't believe in AI".

I don't understand this article, it seems to explain all the reasons people in Seattle might have grievances, and then completely dismisses those to adopt the usual "you're using it wrong".

Is this article just a way to advertise for Wanderfugl? Because this reads like the usual "Okay your grievances are fine and all, but consider the following: it allows me to make a SaaS really fast!" that I became accustomed to see in HN discussions.

nice_byte• 8 months ago

Reading some of these comments from fellow seattleites, I'm really quite thankful for having the privilege of being able to completely ignore all of this noise.

There is zero push in my org to use any of these tools. I don't really use them at all but know some coworkers who do and that's fine. Sounds like this is a rare and lucky arrangement.

alex1138• 8 months ago

AI/LLMs provide an absolutely perfect excuse for halfwit managers and other fail upwards type people

I hate the entire premise even though some of it has been useful but at worst you're creating code and/or information that's just wrong and "can get someone killed" (metaphorical, but also probably literal), you're creating absolutely unrealistic expectations

Zuck said they'd be able to replace engineers with AI. Well, that tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it? With all of the scandals Facebook properties have had over the years. A real engineer/competent CEO wouldn't say that

j45• 8 months ago

Why did OP have to mention AI and just ask for feedback on the solution itself and let anything come up organically?

Big tech workers might be perceiving writing on the wall sooner - there have already been some layoffs.

I also find a lot of technpeollemsurprisinglynhabent spent as much time with AI over the past 3 years compared to other techs.

jaredcwhite• 8 months ago

Hating AI in Portland too! :wave:

CommenterPerson• 8 months ago

The big revenue isn't going to come from improvements in coding, or writing better emails, or protein folding. It's going to come from more seductive and compelling ads (using all the data vacuumed up from your apps and your psychological profile).

queenkjuul7• 8 months ago

Been meaning to visit Seattle, seems like my kinda place

shadowtree• 8 months ago

Everyone in Detroit hates EVs.

fencepost• 8 months ago

From someone who's mostly avoided the AI craze so far, I think it comes down to a combination of two things.

1) "AI" is in many ways like the unreliable coworker so many of us have had in the past - maybe someone who talked a good game in interviews, but after you'd worked with them for a while you realize that you have to double-check everything they do for stupid/careless problems. In the worst case, you also have to do some hand-holding as they ask you for help with things that they should know how to do. They can produce good output but they can't be trusted to produce good (or even marginal) output so they're a net time sink.

2) In a frightening number of companies right now, that problem coworker is the owner's or manager's relative and cannot be avoided.

So boom, there you go, bad coworkers and a toxic culture that not just protects but promotes them.

BrenBarn• 8 months ago

Reminds me of this post from a week or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027290

almosthere• 8 months ago

I think we should be honest and consistent about losing our jobs to AI. For decades we justified automation by saying things like: "Sure, the toothpaste tube machine replaced 30 workers, but someone will need to maintain and operate it." And whenever someone pointed out that one mechanic doesn't replace those 30 lost jobs, everyone went quiet.

Now we're using the same logic again: "Well, you just need to learn to use the AI before someone else does."

And if anyone doubts that the world can move on without the software engineer, remember that it moved on just fine after eliminating the toothpaste tube fillers. The world kept turning, just a little colder and more indifferent each time another role disappeared.

Maybe instead of pretending this time is different, we should focus on writing the best epitaph we can.

stogot• 8 months ago

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.

This is revolting. Three years ago I’d have said this is a terrible black mirror plot

chimerasaurus• 8 months ago

I’m never leaving Seattle.

iykyk

QuiEgo• 8 months ago

Making no statement about the value or lack of value in AI itself:

When people talk about it like this (this author is hardly the only example) they sound like an evangelist proselytizing and it feels so weird to me.

This thing could basically read “people in Seattle don’t want to believe in God with me, people in San Francisco have faith though. I’m sad my friends in Seattle won’t be going to heaven.”

danieltanfh95• 8 months ago

The reason is quite straightforward. LLMs excel at mapping tasks but suck at first principles reasoning and validation.

When you are working on the AI map app, you are mapping your new idea to code.

When people are working with legacy code and fixing bugs, they are employing reasoning and validation.

The problem is management doesn't allow the engineers to discern which is which and just stuff it down their throats.

johnnienaked2• 8 months ago

I feel like a lot of people hate AI

LunicLynx• 8 months ago

Is this a sophisticated ad?

MobiusHorizons• 8 months ago

Well written! I’m Seattle based (although at Google) I think the mood is only slightly better than what you describe. But the general feeling that the company has no interest in engineering innovation is alive and well. Everything needs to be standardized and engineers get shuffled between products in a way that discourages domain knowledge.

mips_avatar44• 8 months ago

Thanks!

didibus5• 8 months ago

The article seems full of made up things. The "coworker" isn't a real person, some kind of "composite of people", I'm then curious if the "she" is simply used as "a random made up person".

Then it says: "Engineers don't try because they think they can't." They don't try AI is what I understand, but that contradicts the whole article, that every engineer in Seattle is actively using AI, even forced too.

Then it says: "now believes she's both unqualified for AI work", why would they believe that? She's supposedly has been using AI constantly, has not been part of those "layed off", so must be a great AI talent.

Finally it says: "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." Which is completely usubstantiated and also coming from a person trying to grift us with their AI product which they want to promote and sell.

I don't know, it read like a shill article from a grifter.

siliconc0w• 8 months ago

Most codebases are pretty proprietary and so out of distribution for the AI which causes poor performance and you really have to fight some of the training to use internal libraries and conventions.

Still useful but certainly not PhD-level when it imports X, you remind it's instructions are to use Y, it apologizes, imports Y but then immediately imports X again.

So when your project gets cancelled for AI and haven't gotten a raise while AI researchers in the same company are getting generational wealth- it does feel pretty bad.

MarkLowenstein• 8 months ago

According to demos, AI coding tools are allowing neophytes to instantly create working apps and websites with mere descriptions of what they want. According to devs, they're 10x as productive because certain time-consuming tasks are condensed like unit test writing, code reviews, and code refactors and clean-up. So we're to assume that in the age when the typical App Store offers a million apps we'll never be interested in, soon that number will be a billion.

In comes Wanderfugl. A tool for traveling that I will never need, where just trying to figure out what it does used more time than I wanted to spend on it. Now with AI, there will be several shiny new travel apps like Wanderfugl for you to learn and choose from literally every time you go on another vacation.

Wanderfugl may be wonderful, and an achievement. But the reaction of this Seattleite is "What's the point anymore?" This is why I am uninterested in the AI coding trend. It's just a part of a lot of new stuff I don't need.

elendee• 8 months ago

AI for decades has been the word to mean "frontier capability which is not fully developed yet". It is not a pitch for end users. Perhaps your product produces quality code. Perhaps it produces highly novel trip itineries. Say that, but don't say AI. The end user does not know the difference between a neural net and a for loop.

petterroea2• 8 months ago

Basically everyone I know in engineering share this resentment in some way, and the AI industry has itself to blame.

People are fed up and burned out from being forced to try useless AI tools by non-technical leaders who do not understand how LLM works nor understand how they suck, and now resent anything related to AI. But for AI companies there is a perverse incentive to push AI on people until it finally works, because the winner of the AI arms race won't be the company that waits until they have a perfect, polished product.

I have myself had "fun" trying to discuss LLMs with non technical people, and met a complete wall trying to explain why LLMs aren't useful for programming - at least not yet. I argue the code is often of low quality, very unmaintainable, and usually not useful outside quick experimentation. They refuse to believe it, even though they do hit a wall with their vibe-coded project after a few months when claude stops generating miracles any more - they lack the experience with code to understand they are hitting maintainability issues. Combine that with how every "wow!" LLM example is actually just the LLM regurgitating a very common thing to write tutorials about, and people tend to over-estimate its abilities.

I use claude multiple times a week because even though LLM-generated code is trash I am open to try new tools, but my general experience is that Claude is unable to do anything well that I can't have my non-technical partner do. It has given me a sort of superiority complex where I immediately disregard the opinion of any developer who thinks its a wondertool, because clearly they don't have high standards for the work they were already doing.

I think most developers with any skill to their name agree. Looking at how Microsoft developers are handling the forced AI, they do seem desperate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 even though they respond with the most "cope" answers I've ever read when confronted about how poorly it is going.

finaard2• 8 months ago

and met a complete wall trying to explain why LLMs aren't useful for programming - at least not yet. I argue the code is often of low quality, very unmaintainable, and usually not useful outside quick experimentation.

There are quite a few things they can do reasonably well - but they mostly are useful for experienced programmers/architecs as a time safer. Working with a LLM for that often reminds me of when I had many young, inexperienced Indians to work with - the LLM comes up with the same nonsense, lies and excuses, but unlike the inexperienced humans I can insult it guilt free, which also sometimes gets it back on track.

They refuse to believe it, even though they do hit a wall with their vibe-coded project after a few months when claude stops generating miracles any more - they lack the experience with code to understand they are hitting maintainability issues.

For having a LLM operate on a complete code base there currently seems to be a hard limit of something like 10k-15k LOC, even with the models with the largest context windows - after that, if you want to continue using a LLM, you'll have to make it work only on a specific subsection of the project, and manually provide the required context.

Now the "getting to 10k LOC" _can_ be sped up significantly by using a LLM. Ideally refactor stupid along the way already - which can be made a bit easier by building in sensible steps (which again requires experience). From my experiments once you've finished that initial step you'll then spend roughly 4-5 times the amount of time you just spent with the LLM to make the code base actually maintainable. For my test projects, I roughly spent one day building it up, rest of the week getting it maintainable. Fully manual would've taken me 2-3 weeks, so it saved time - but only because I do have experience with what I'm doing.

petterroea2• 8 months ago

I think there's a lot of reason to what you are saying. The 4-5 amount of time to make the codebase readable resonates.

If i really wanted to go 100% LLM as a challenge I think I'd compartmentalize a lot and maybe rely on OpenAPI and other API description languages to reduce the complexity of what the LLM has to deal with when working on its current "compartment" (i.e the frontend or backend). Claude.md also helps a lot.

I do believe in some time saving, but at the same time, almost every line of code I write usually requires some deliberate thought, and if the LLM makes that thought, I often have to correct it. If i use English to explain exactly what I want it is some times ok, but then that is basically the same effort. At least that's my empirical experience.

pfannkuchen• 8 months ago

Did he try any control topics?

It’s possible that no matter what he asked, the people of Seattle would respond negatively.

fergie• 8 months ago

I did some contract work for Microsoft a few years ago (2011-2013). It was striking how much pressure was put on you to dogfood Microsoft stuff at the expense of basically everything. I can only imagine what it must be like at the moment.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 8 months ago

I'm surprised that nobody at the tech companies seems to realize basic psychology: The harder you try to force something on people, the less they want it.

erikerikson• 8 months ago

I live and work in Seattle and I don't hate AI. Further, I know people here that are just as overly excited about AI as it's proponents on HN.

I've also heard complaints about the mandatory use of the tools in the office and the pageantry involved.

I've seen people in love with garbage they produced with AI.

I'm annoyed by the way they are being pushed in my face but hate is really too strong. I've tried using them and gotten total garbage. I think that's because my prompting sucks because I know people that love the tools and have shared great output from them. Those people are a minority in my opinion.

Trying to over simplify the experiences of humanity is a fool's game.

p0w3n3d2• 8 months ago

Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI.

  AI is about centralisation of power

So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work).

For me AI is just a natural language query model for texts. So if I need to find something in text, make join with other knowledge etc. things I'd do in SQL if there was an SQL processing natural language, I do in LLM. This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened. I know a person who resigned CS course because AI was solving algorithmic exercises better than him. This might cause global depression, as we no longer are on the "top". Moreover he went to medicine, where people basically will be using AI to diagnose people and AI operators are required (i.e. there are no threats of reductions because of AI in Public Health Service)

So the world is changing, the power is being gathered, there is no longer possibility to "run your local cloud with open office, and a mail server" to take that power from the giants.

lerp-io2• 8 months ago

but the opposite is actually true. u can use ai to bypass a lot of SaaS solutions

entropi2• 8 months ago

So you are saying now that you can bypass a lot of solutions offered by a mix of small/large providers by using a single solution from a huge provider, this is the opposite of a centralization of power?

Rebuff5007• 8 months ago

But why not? AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models.

As an average consumer, I actually feel like i'm less locked into gemini/chatgpt/claude than I am to Apple or Google for other tech (i.e. photos).

futuraperdita• 8 months ago

AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models.

It was already tough to run flagship-class local models and it's only getting worse with the demand for datacenter-scale compute from those specific big players. What happens when the model that works best needs 1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs?

AI computation looks a lot like early Bitcoin: first the CPU, then the GPUs, then the ASICs, then the ASICs mostly being made specifically by syndicates for syndicates. We are speedrunning the same centralization.

marginalia_nu• 8 months ago

Economies of scale makes this a space that is really difficult to be competitive in as a small player.

If it's ever to be economically viable to run a model like this, you basically need to run it non-stop, and make money doing so non-stop in order to offset the hardware costs.

runarberg4• 8 months ago

There is a case that the indices owned by the major search engines are a form of centralization of power. Normal people and smaller companies would have to pay a lot of money to get indices for their new competing search engine. However the analogy falls apart when you look at a) the scale of the investments involved and b) the pervasiveness of the technology.

Creating a search engine index requires several orders of magnitude less computing power then creating the weights of an LLM model. Like it is theoretically possible for somebody with a lot of money to spare to create a new search index, but only the richest of the rich can do that with an LLM model.

And search engines are there to fulfill exactly one technical niche, albeit an important one. LLMs are stuffed into everything, whether you like it or not. Like if you want to use Zoom, you are not told to “enrich your experience with web search”, you are told, “here is an AI summary of your conversation”.

troyvit2• 8 months ago

That's what I was thinking as I was listening to the "be like clippy" video linked in the parent. Those local models probably won't be able to match the quality of the big guys' for a long time to come, but for now the local, open models have a lot of potential for us to escape this power consolidation before it's complete and still get their users 75-80% of the functionality. That remaining 20-25%, combined with the new skill of managing an LLM, is where the self-value comes in, the bit that says, "I do own what I built or learned or drew."

The hardest part with that IMO will be democratizing the hardware so that everybody can afford it.

waffletower3• 8 months ago

Exactly. I was paying for Gemini Pro, and moved to a Claude subscription. Am going to switch back to Gemini for the next few months. The cloud centralization, in its current product stage, allows you to be a model butterfly. And these affordable and capable frontier model subscriptions, help me train and modify my local open weight models.

hatefulheart2• 8 months ago

Sorry but your SQL comparison is way off. SQL is deterministic, has a defined implementation that databases must follow and when you run a statement it presents a query plan.

This is the absolute opposite to using an LLM. Please stop using this comparison and perhaps look for others, like for example, a randomised search engine.

nutjob29• 8 months ago

You're missing the point entirely. He's saying it's horses for courses, each tool has its use and you use the right tool for the job.

And he's right. LLMs are fancy text query engines and work very well as such.

The problem is when people try to shoehorn everything into LLMs. That's a disaster yet being perused vigorously by some.

code_for_monkey4• 8 months ago

hear me out though: What if every time you used an sql query it made a bunch of stuff up? 80% of the time its what you want but sometimes it just imagines data and pulls it out of its butt

latexr4• 8 months ago

This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened.

I wish people would stop spreading this as if it were the main reason. It’s a weak argument and disconnected from reality, like those people who think the only ones who dislike cryptocurrencies are the ones who didn’t become rich from it.

There are plenty of reasons to be against the current crop of AI that have nothing to do with employment. The threat to the environment, the consolidation of resources by the ones at the top, the spread of misinformation and lies, the acceleration of mass surveillance, the decay of critical thinking, the decrease in quality of life (e.g. people who live next to noisy data centres)… Not everything is about jobs and money, the world is bigger than that.

wseqyrku4• 8 months ago

Would you say there's at least fifty percent of people who are informed about these?

Zoquento• 8 months ago

Don't forget the fact that most of the time, the AI tools don't actually work well enough to be worth the trouble.

AI meeting notes are great! After you spend twice as long editing out the errors, figuring out which of the two Daves was talking each time, and removing all the unimportant side-items that were captured in the same level of detail as the core decision.

AI summaries are great - if you're the sort of person that would use a calculator that's wrong 10% of the time. The rest of us realize that an hour spent reading something is more rewarding and useful than an hour spent double checking an AI summary for accuracy.

AI as Asbestos isn't even an apt comparison, both are toxic and insidious, but Asbestos at least had a clear and compelling use case at the time. It solved some problems both better and cheaper than available alternatives. AI solves problems poorly and at higher cost, and people call you "threatened" if you point that out.

kouru2252• 8 months ago

Ngl I feel like most people only accept these criticisms of AI because they’re against AI to begin with. If you look at the claims, they fall apart pretty quickly. The environment issue is negligible and has less to do with AI than just computing in general, the consolidation of resources assumes that larger more expensive AI models will outcompete smaller local models and that’s not necessarily happening, the spread of misinformation doesn’t seem to have accelerated at all since AI came about (probably because we were already at peak misinformation and AI can’t add much more), the decay in critical thinking is far overblown if not outright manipulated data.

About the only problem here is the increase of surveillance and you can avoid that by running your own models, which are getting better and better by the day. The fact that people are so willing to accept these criticisms without much scrutiny is really just indicative of prior bias

raxxorraxor• 8 months ago

You can still run your local cloud and AI providers will be heavily consolidated to a few.

While for programming task I do use Claude currently, local models can be tuned to serve 80% of the time reduction you win by using AI. Depends a bit on the work you do. This will improve probably, while frontier models seem to hit hard ceilings.

Where I would disagree is that joining concepts or knowledge works at all with current AI. It works decently bad in my opinion. Even the logical and mathematical improvements of the latest Gemini model don't impress too much yet.

adamhartenz• 8 months ago

Local models are fine for the way we have been using AI, like as a chatbot, or a fancy autocomplete. But everyone is craming AI into everything. Windows will be an agentic OS whether we like it or not. There will be no using your own local model for that use case. It is looking like everything is moving that way.

encyclopedism2• 8 months ago

AI is about centralisation of power

I do not believe this is the main reason at all.

The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".

Much of the meaning we humans derive from work is tied to the value it provides to society. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding where it provides value to others/society is far more meaningful.

Presently some may say: AI is amazing I am much more productive, AI is just a tool or that AI empowers me. The irony is that this in itself shows the deficiency of AI. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you to NOT need to make you more productive. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for a human intermediary altogether that is the AI holy grail. Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now it is comfortable position financially or socially but your future you in just a few short months may be dramatically impacted.

I can well imagine the blood draining from peoples faces, the graduate coder who can no longer get on the job ladder. The law secretary whose dream job is being automated away, a dream dreamt from a young age. The journalist whose value has been substituted by a white text box connected to an AI model.

Thews• 8 months ago

It sounds like you agreed by the end, just with a slightly different way of getting there.

fragmede• 8 months ago

Hardware is a different problem from software. Once the chores robot gets here, then what? Millions of houseworkers are now out of a job. Then how will you feel about AI?

roncesvalles3• 8 months ago

I don't think that's the reason either.

AI is just not that good. If it really made me more productive, why wouldn't I use it all the time? I'd get everything done before lunch and go home. Or I'd use it all day to do the work of 3 people and be on the fast track to promotions.

The problem is simply that it gets in the way. For things I know nothing about, AI is excellent. For things that I'm good at and have literally been doing for a decade+, I can just do it better and faster myself, and I'm tired of people who know nothing about my profession gaslighting me into thinking that LLMs do the same thing. And I'm really tired of people saying "oh AI is not good today, but it'll be good tomorrow so just start using them" -- fine, wake me up when it's good because I've been waiting and patiently testing every new SOTA model since 2023.

Just get the facts right, that's all I ask of tech execs. Why has AI become a religion?

p0w3n3d2• 8 months ago

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes

You're absolutely right, this is another face of this AI coin... We people are taught to do things and love doing them and we're scared it's going to be taken away from us. This is what I thought when writing about the man who cancelled CS course. He apparently predicted that learning algorithms solving won't make him happy because AI will do it for him

waffletower3• 8 months ago

I think it is incredibly healthy to be critical and perhaps even a tinge cynical about the intentions of companies developing and productizing large language models (AI). However, the argument here completely ignores the evolving ecosystem of open weight models. Yes, the prominent companies developing frontier models are attempting to build markets and moats where possible, and the capital cloud investments are incredibly centralized. But even in 2025 the choice is there, with your own capital investment (RTX, MacBook etc.), for completely private and decentralized AI. You can also choose your own cloud too -- Cloudflare just acquired Replicate. If enough continue to participate in the open weight ecosystem, this centralization need not be totalitarian.

stickfigure2• 8 months ago

No, the main reason people don't accept AI is that it isn't very good[1] at the things they want to accomplish.

Everyone I know accepts AI for the things it is good at, and rejects it for things it sucks at. The dividing line varies by task and the skill of the operator (both "how good at persuading the AI" and "how easy would it be to just do the job by hand").

In some companies the problem is management layers with thin understanding trying to force AI into the organization because they read some article in CIO Magazine. In other companies (like Microsoft) I suspect the problem is that they're forcing the org to eat their own dogfood and the dogfood kinda sucks.

[1] Yet.

kouru2252• 8 months ago

Karpathy recently did an interview where he says that the future of AI is 1b models and I honestly believe him. The small models are getting better and better, and it’s going to end up decentralizing power moreso than anything else

thefz3• 8 months ago

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

Believe me, the same reflexive, critical, negative response is true for most of Europe too

thefz3• 8 months ago

I mean how can you blame her for not being excited at yet-another-AI-powered planner.

JensRantil• 8 months ago

This sentiment is not only in Seattle.

solaarphunk• 8 months ago

Seattle is the type of economy that is heavily threatened by AI. Desk jobs that Claude basically already knows how to do, and just needs to be integrated into the existing systems to have impact.

Most people in Seattle "tech" are middle management with no discernible skills other than organizational deckchair arrangement. It is a place to optimize for work-life balance, and not take risk - this is why the region, despite its technology density, has such a disproportionately small startup scene.

AI IS a huge threat to a place like this and I am not optimistic about the ability for people to adapt.

jtrn• 8 months ago

I believe that most headlines with the format "everybody thinks X" would be more honest if rewritten as "I believe X".

Or should I say... Everybody thinks that titles using the format "everybody thinks X" would be more honest if they instead said: "I believe X."

Rochus• 8 months ago

When companies mandate tools regardless of effectiveness and punish engineers for not using them, it's governance failure dressed as innovation.

The distinction between "real products" (solving actual problems) and "hype products" (exciting investors) reflects a pragmatic engineering perspective.

The situation seems less about AI itself and more about corporate dysfunction using AI as cover for broader organizational failures.

donny2018• 8 months ago

I'm a former AI-hater and sceptic. I do B2B consultancy/development work for my clients.

I understand why people are irritated by this.

However, recently I tried the GitHub Copilot agent with VS Code using Claude Opus 4.5. It literally implemented, tested and fixed entire new features in minutes, that otherwise would have taken days or even weeks of routine repetitive work from me. All while mimicking style and patterns in my existing codebase which made me instantly understand exactly what it was doing. I found it to be an insane productivity boost and I can see how it might be affecting hiring processes in numerous industries, especially in software engineering space.

mlavrent2• 8 months ago

I was at Microsoft until July of this year until I left for an SF-based company (not AI though).

The difference between the two with regards to AI tool usage couldn’t be more different- at Microsoft, they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools, which often were under par and you didn’t have a choice in. At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver. And, shocker, turns out they actually spend a lot building and getting feedback on internal AI tooling and so it gets a lot of use!

The Microsoft culture is a sort of toxic “get AI usage by forcing it down the engineer throats” vs the new “make it actually useful and win users” approach at that new place. The Microsoft approach builds resentment in the engineering base, but I’m convinced it’s the only way leadership there knows how to drive initiatives.

wseqyrku4• 8 months ago

they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools

That is kind of insane right? They are practically mining their own people for data, one wonders what they would not do to their customers.

zeristor• 8 months ago

Perhaps the managers performance goals are linked to take up, this sometimes happens and it all becomes too blunt.

stickfigure2• 8 months ago

Microsoft is forcing the company to dogfood their own tools. They do this because they need the feedback so they can improve their tools, and they think these tools are a critical part of their future.

Presumably your new company isn't building AI tools, so they don't care what you use.

Imagine a developer in 1990s Microsoft saying "I want to use Borland C++ because it's better than the Microsoft IDE". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not the point.

capr• 8 months ago

Maybe if they would've let their engineers use Borland C++ they would've learned a thing or two for their own product.

sedawk2• 8 months ago

This is true, but is effective only if the dogfooders' feedback is accepted and worked upon. Which is not the case, I can tell you this from first-hand experience (currently work at Msft). Also unleashing and forcing tech savvy people to use immature tools is only asking for trouble when you don't have allocated enough manpower to deal with the fallout (that is, incessant downpour of improvement feedback). One cannot just force engineers to dogfood tools and then ignore them. This is precisely like Win-8 era mania, only this time it's infecting the whole company not just single org!

mlavrent2• 8 months ago

They do actually build internal tooling! They key is that it’s actually good enough that feedback to the limited, targeted, and quickly actionable. Microsoft’s internal was immature enough that the general feedback you’d always have is “this is unusable”, which is something the teams building the tools could probably figure out themselves before making the whole company spend time beta testing the tools.

The main point is that the tools need to be of a certain quality/maturity for dogfooding to be effective.

vkou• 8 months ago

Look, if you want the people to dig trenches with spoons, you can expect them to do it. But if all you're giving them is spoons, you're going to need to give them a lot of slack on the expected digging schedules.

Being forced to use a shit tool because <some other department somewhere in the company wants your feedback>, while your deadlines haven't been adjusted for all this wasted time is not acceptable behaviour. It's the kind of authoritarian horseshit that's that's so often pushed by unproductive parasites onto people who do actual work.

roncesvalles3• 8 months ago

Microsoft either doesn't care about feedback or doesn't have the engineering ability to act on them, otherwise Visual Studio and Microsoft Teams wouldn't be such terrible pieces of software despite tens of thousands of Microsoft employees using them daily.

OhMeadhbh• 8 months ago

Dogfooding is great and all, but if you're forcing your engineering staff to dogfood something, you should make sure you're in the same industry as your customers. I've always had a bit of respect for MSFT products in the "I'm a company with about 5 reasonable, but not stellar developers" space. Do I want to build an operating system with Visual Basic? No. Do I force C++ on our loading dock foreman who upskilled to a VB4 dev 'cause he knows the problem domain inside and out? Also no. MSFT traditionally attracted "above average" devs who had the support to work on big projects for a (comparatively) long time.

As J. R. "Bob" Dobbs once said, "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." ( see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._R._%22Bob%22_Dobbs )

Maybe the engineers complaining about dogfooding vibe-coding tools aren't the kind of developers you should have vibe-coding.

pjmlp6• 8 months ago

In 2025, C++ Builder is still better than Visual C++, in what concerns doing Windows GUI development in C++, some things never change, and management keeps being blind to them.

Regarding dog fooding, Project Reunion was also a victim of all engines AI, now the damage is done and only the Windows team cares, because their job depends on using it.

indrora• 8 months ago

I too was at MSFT until the July layoffs.

Hang around old Microsofties and you'll encounter a phrase: "The Deal." The Deal is this informal agreement: Microsoft doesn't pay amazingly but you're given the time to have work-life balance, you can be relatively assured that upper leadership gives a shit about the ICs, there's space for "... So I was thinking..." to become real "... and that's our next product" discussions and that it's okay to fall so long as you can get back up and keep walking afterwards.

The Deal is dead.

People fired for performance after a bad review their manager didn't give them. The constant slimming of orgs and the relentless gnawing at budgets. I watched as a team went from reasonable to gutted because it got the short straw in "unregretted attrition quotas"

AI is driving this, and I want to see the chat logs between executives and copilot. What sycophantic shit is it producing that is driving them to make horrible decisions?

HacklesRaised• 8 months ago

Is it AI, or is it being run by people entirely divorced from the founder's vision?

joshwa• 8 months ago

URA quotas—I see the Amazon infection has spread from Seattle to Redmond.

taurath5• 8 months ago

AI is busy quietly convincing every executive that uses it that they have no use for people to work out the details of their ideas anymore. It’s so frustrating to have these drive by executives come into a space you’re working in, drop in a 15 page deep think report they got from a 2 sentence prompt and call that contributing. Bonus points if the report is from an AI platform your company doesn’t have approved so you as a line employee can get written up for.

roncesvalles3• 8 months ago

The Deal died when Microsoft got on the layoff bandwagon in Q1 2023 for no good reason and became very aggressive with perf after that. If Microsoft is just as toxic and unstable as Meta, why not just work at Meta for double the money?

Funnily, Apple also has an unspoken "deal" (pay a bit low but treat really well) and they stuck to it even through the layoff era.

pjmlp6• 8 months ago

From the outside this is clearly visible how Project Reunion crashed, C++/WinRT went into maintenance, VC++ losing steam to ISO compliance after bosting about C++20 and C11/17, .NET focus on Aspire/Blazor all AI in detriment of the rest,....

Thankfully I am technology mercenary, polyglot, and use whatever the clients need, regardless of my point of view, but it is sad to see the human part behind those decisions being affected.

etruong422• 8 months ago

At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver

I work at Google, and I am of the overall opinion that it doesn't matter what you deliver from an engineering perspective. I've seen launches that changed some behavior from opt-in to opt-out get lauded as worth engineering-years of investment. I've seen demos that were 1-2 years ahead of our current product performance get buried under bureaucracy and nitpicking while the public product languishes with nearly no usage. The point being, what you objectively deliver doesn't matter, but what ends up mattering is how the people in your orbit weave the narrative about what you built.

So if "leadership" wants something concretely done, they must mandate it in such a way that cuts through all the spin that each layer of bureaucracy adds before presenting it to the next layer of bureaucracy. And "leadership" isn't a single person, so you might describe leaders as individual vectors in a vector space, and a clear eigenvector in this space of leadership decisions in many companies is the vector of "increase employee usage of AI tools".

geldedus2• 8 months ago

So, they were laid-off because they stubbornly resisted adopting AI? Remember those who were laid-off in the 90s because they resisted working at a computer because they hated computers? History repeating.

code_for_monkey4• 8 months ago

something I havent seen mentioned: the people who are AI's biggest proponents are distinctly unlikeable humans. Look at Elon Musk with Grok, its disgusting. Look at Sam Altman, Alex Karp, look at Peter "Im not sure humanity should continue" Thiel. These people are wildly misanthropic, of course it gives the whole thing an unpleasant miasma.

fgauer• 8 months ago

40+ year software developer here (not saying this for ego, just that I've been doing this a long time and I've seen a lot of things). Here's how I've re-framed things in my mind due to AI:

The centralization of 'power' in AI will be the entities that want to run the bigger, more general-purpose models. Fine. So be it. Knock yourself out. Good luck building the data centers and finding power.

After that, AI now becomes a 'field leveler', and I say this with the utmost of sincerity and confidence. Need a supply chain system? Goodbye big boys. Goodbye vendor lock. Now there will be dozens, if not hundreds of small teams that can provide this for you at a fraction of the cost. Accounting you ask? Goodbye Intuit. We'll whip up what you need and you'll be off and running and you can kiss the global monsters goodbye. You get the idea.

This is a defining moment and it's awesome. Sure there will be some initial pain. Mindsets will have to change. Priorities will shift. My fundamental point is, all of the big boy/fat cats rushing in the AI race are literally rushing to completely undermine their own leverage and power. Each and every day I am amazed at what I can do, after a lifetime of staring at screens, with a $25.00/month Claude Code license. I am reaching out and lifting my neighbors, who have no technical experience at all, into a completely new playing field where they compete against entities they had no chance of competing with ever before.

Forgive my optimism, but it's hard not to be as I can now use my experience, with a tight group of trusted friends and colleagues, and a little bit of coding help (which goes a long way) to go wherever we want to go now.

hm-nah• 8 months ago

Maybe change the title to: “Everyone in Seattle (Everywhere?) Hates Microsoft’s AI”

user____name• 8 months ago

Just rebrand any existing context sensitive features as "AI" so you can work on those. The other day I saw some productivity software that advertised their recently-opened-files as AI powered.

6thbit• 8 months ago

I wonder how is Satya perceived internally?

He's above the 10 year mark, which is a long time for fortune 500 ceos.

wartywhoa232• 8 months ago

This fell from HN top suspiciously quick.

MagicMoonlight• 8 months ago

wanderfugl

That’s probably the worst name for an app I’ve ever heard.

skx001• 8 months ago

The industry will truly only find out how well AI adoption is going if it allows users both internal (employees, tech workers) and external (general users/consumers) to fully opt-out.

AI is being forced down peoples' throat. Millions want to but cannot disable Gemini from Gmail. Many SWEs don't want to use AI tools but managers are forcing them to do so.

How do you know if something is really liked/needed/wanted when there is no opt-out?

jitbit• 8 months ago

I don’t work at Microsoft and I have (almost) no friends there, but—

My team has relied on the Microsoft stack for over a decade (dotnet, GitHub Actions, VS Code, MS extensions), and I can say that the overall quality and “polish” of their releases has declined.

I try to help where I can—filing issues for outdated docs, contributing to dotnet/core, joining discussions about .NET 10 still not being available in Ubuntu APT feeds, reporting and helping resolve issues with MSSQL drivers and SqlClient on GitHub, etc.

But every time I interact with someone at Microsoft, I can’t help but read between the lines: they seem slightly demotivated by the company's shift toward an AI-first focus.

It's sad.

esoterae• 8 months ago

Where does one begin with this kind of fallacy-ridden mud slinging? Appeals to both authority and majority, and guilt by location just to name the first three.

So what if "everyone in Seattle hates AI"? What gives The Author the right to simultaneously invalidate Seattle's comparatively immeasurably larger advantage in experience, qualification, and education? If even the ludicrously biased title had even the barest hint of truth to it, they've stacked the deck against themselves in credibility unless they've already mentally biased themselves to blindly dismiss anyone that doesn't mirror their own now blatant fanaticism. Which we've already established now includes all of Seattle.

So put this out on the curb with the rest of the garbage meant to inflame and divide, because on it's face it is neither reasonable nor factual.

Lapsa• 8 months ago

Charlie, say it like it's fun: "Bing!"

etruong422• 8 months ago

Those in power (such as those in the corporate managerial class) are trying to consolidate power by replacing humans with AI. There is the nice story of trying to improve overhead and increase efficiencies. There is also the ugly story of those in power trying to leverage AI for expert opinions even in the face of dissenting human experts.

For now, the human dissenters have a lot of leverage because AI still makes very clear and obvious errors sometimes, and it would be a political nightmare for a decision-maker to be accused of erring on the side of AI by recognized human experts who dissented. I wonder if there will come a time that AI opinion would be on par or even favored over the human expert because the human would be considered more fallible. This doesn't even have to be true - it only has to be sufficiently perceived to be sufficiently true.

poutrathor• 8 months ago

please rework your color gradient text on the landing page of Wanderfugl. On dark mode it is rendered as a rectangle of gradient. My dark mode is handled by Dark Reader the firefox addon. It breaks the flow of presentation.

Also, at the bottom, the beta is opened but it closes the November 15th, so it's close and open at the same time :) (else it's November 2026?)

Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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