Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#191

Post by rconti »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161
averyvery wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impossibl…

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 :)

> If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech.

Or your job isn't what AI is good at?

AI seems really good at greenfield projects in well known languages or adding features.

It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#192

Post by rpcope1 »

binary132 wrote: post #164
bccdee wrote: post #41

> 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…

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

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.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#193

Post by nosianu »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161
averyvery wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impossibl…

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 :)

> If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right

I AM very impressed, and I DO use it and enjoy the results.

The problem is the inconsistency. When it works it works great, but it is very noticeable that it is just a machine from how it behaves.

Again, I am VERY impressed by what was achieved. I even enjoy Google AI summaries to some of the questions I now enter instead of search terms. This is definitely a huge step up in tier compared to pre-AI.

But I'm already done getting used to what is possible now. Changes after that have been incremental, nice to have and I take them. I found a place for the tool, but if it wanted to match the hype another equally large step in actual intelligence is necessary, for the tool to truly be able to replace humans.

So, I think the reason you don't see more glowing reviews and praise is that the technical people have found out what it can do and can't, and are already using it where appropriate. It's just a tool though. One that has to be watched over when you use it, requiring attention. And it does not learn - I can teach a newbie and they will learn and improve, I can only tweak the AI with prompts, with varying success.

I think that by now I have developed a pretty good feel for what is possible. Changing my entire workflow to using it is simply not useful.

I am actually one of those not enjoying coding as such, but wanting "solutions", probably also because I now work for an IT-using normal company, not for one making an IT product, and my focus most days is on actually accomplishing business tasks.

I do enjoy being able to do some higher level descriptions and getting code for stuff without having to take care of all the gritty details. But this functionality is rudimentary. It IS a huge step, but still not nearly good enough to really be able to reliably delegate to the AI to the degree I want.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#194

Post by ggerni »

hectdev wrote: post #166
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. I don't recognize that because it isn't true . I try th…

This fascinates me. Just observing but because it hasn't worked for you, everyone else must be lying? (I'm assuming that's what you mean by baseless) How does that bridge get built? I can provide tangible real life examples but I've found push back from that in other online conversations.

[flagged]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#195

Post by pnathan »

groos wrote: post #20

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 re…

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

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#196

Post by moduspol »

hectdev wrote: post #149
suprjami wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would say it is like that. No one HAS to use AI. But the shared goal is to get a change to the codebase to achieve a desired outcome. Some will outsource a significant part of that to AI, some won't. And its tricky because I'm trying not to appeal to emotion despite being fascinated with how this tool has enabled me to do things in a short amount of time that it would have taken me weeks of grinding to get to and i…

> But the shared goal is to get a change to the codebase to achieve a desired outcome.

I'd argue that's not true. It's more of a stated goal. The actual goal is to achieve the desired outcome in a way that has manageable, understood side effects, and that can be maintained and built upon over time by all capable team members.

The difference between what business folks see as the "output" of software developers (code) and what (good) software developers actually deliver over time is significant. AI can definitely do the former. The latter is less clear. This is one of the fundamental disconnects in discussions about AI in software development.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#197

Post by ejoso »

binary132 wrote: post #164
bccdee wrote: post #41

> 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…

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

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.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#199

Post by medhir »

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?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#200

Post by ben_w »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #118
throwout4110 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. I don't recognize that because it isn't true . I try th…

> I try the LLMs every now and then, and they still make the same stupid hallucinations that ChatGPT did on day 1.

One of the tests I sometimes do of LLMs is a geometry puzzle:

  You're on the equator facing south. You move forward 10,000 km along the surface of the Earth. You are rotate 90° clockwise. You move another 10,000 km forward along the surface of the earth. Rotate another 90° clockwise, then move another 10,000 km forward along the surface of the Earth.

  Where are you now, and what direction are you facing?
They all used to get this wrong all the time. Now the best ones sometimes don't. (That said, only one to succed just as I write this comment was DeepSeek; the first I saw succeed was one of ChatGPT's models but that's now back to the usual error they all used to make).

Anecdotes are of course a bad way to study this kind of thing.

Unfortunately, so are the benchmarks, because the models have quickly saturated most of them, including traditional IQ tests (on the plus side, this has demonstrated that IQ tests are definitely a learnable skill, as LLMs loose 40-50 IQ points when going from public to private IQ tests) and stuff like the maths olympiad.

Right now, AFAICT the only open benchmarks are the METR time horizon metric, the ARC-AGI family of tests, and the "make me an SVG of ${…}" stuff inspired by Simon Willison's pelican on a bike.

Post reply on HN