121–130 of 1001 posts
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.
> 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? Do…
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).
You know who's NOT divided? Everyone outside the tech/management world. Antipathy towards AI is extremely widespread.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My creative writing teacher in college drilled the m dash into me. I can’t really write without them now
I think the presence of em dashes is a very poor metric for determining if something is AI generated. I'm not sure why it's so popular.
> 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 excite…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
At least, that's my wife's experience working on a contract with a state government at a big tech vendor.