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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#221

Post by ponector »

pixl97 wrote: post #157
mingus88 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Not OP but for starters LLMs != AI Please don't do this, make up your own definitions. Pretty much anything and everything that uses neural nets is AI. Just because you don't like how the definition has been since the beginning doesn't mean you get to reframe it. In addition, if humans are not infallible oracles of wisdom, they wouldn't be an intelligence in your definition.

Why then there is an AI-powered dishwasher, but no AI car?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#222

Post by mgaunard »

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.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#223

Post by CSMastermind »

pkasting wrote: post #40

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…

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.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#225

Post by rawgabbit »

robocat wrote: post #181
rawgabbit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

> 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 usage was measured - what metrics was the account manager supposed to improve?

He was trying to get people to use the Azure unnamed service. I assume others like me did a trial, POC, and immediately ran away screaming.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#227

Post by sydd »

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 :)

The more I use AI for coding the more I realize that its a toy for vibe coding/fun projects. Its not for serious work.

When you work with a large codebase which have a very high complexity level, then the bugs put in there by AI will not worth the cost of the easily added features.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#228

Post by jandrese »

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 :)

The big problem is AI is amazing at doing the rote boilerplate stuff that generally wasn't a problem to begin with, but if you were to point a codebot at your trouble ticket system and tell it to go fix the issues it will be hopeless. Once your system gets complex enough the AI effectiveness drops off rapidly and you as the engineer have to spend more and more time babysitting every step to make sure it doesn't go off the rails.

In the end you can save like 90% of the development effort on a small one-off project, and like 5% of the development effort on a large complex one.

I think too many managers have been absolutely blown away by canned AI demos and toy projects and have not been properly disappointed when attempting to use the tools on something that is not trivial.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#229

Post by miltonlost »

mips_avatar wrote: post #204
pkasting wrote: post #40

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…

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.

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.
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