Everyone in Seattle hates AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#271

Post by skywhopper » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

throwout4110 wrote: post #94

hectdev wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Maybe those people do different work than you do? Coding agents don’t work well in every scenario.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#272

Post by mjr00 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #244

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…

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…

> There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them.

"There's not much there" is a totally valid critique of a lot of the current AI ecosystem. How many startups are simple prompt wrappers on top of ChatGPT? How many AI features in products are just "click here to ask Rovo/Dingo/Kingo/CutesyAnthropomorphizedNameOfAI" text boxes that end up spitting out wrong information?

There's certainly potential but a lot of the market is hot air right now.

> Either way, the market is going to punish them accordingly.

I doubt this, simply because the market has never really punished people for being less efficient at their jobs, especially software development. If it did, people proficient in vim would have been getting paid more than anyone else for the past 40 years.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#273

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

dwaltrip wrote: post #153

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…

You can vibe-code a throwaway UI for investigating some complex data in less than 30 minutes. The code quality doesn't matter, and it will make your life much easier. Rinse and repeat for many "one-off" tasks. It's not going away, you need to learn how to use it. shrugs shoulders

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#274

Post by ben_w » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

hoppersoft wrote: post #103

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 sk…

> 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?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#275

Post by jasonjmcghee » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

NewsaHackO wrote: post #125

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's because it is difficult to actually add an em dash when writing with a keyboard (except I heard on Macs). So it's either they 1)memorized the em dash alt code, 2)had a keyboard shortcut for the key, or 3)are using the character map to insert it every time, all of which are a stretch for a random online post.

You just type hyphen twice in many programs... Or on mobile you hold hyphen for a moment and choose em dash. I don't use it, but it's very easy to use.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#276

Post by munificent » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

Fordec wrote: post #245

mr_toad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know what, this clarifies something for me. PC, Web and Smartphone hype was based on "we can now do [thing] never done before". This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people" It all feels much more like a wealth grab for the corporations than a promise of improving a standard of living for end customers. Much closer to a Cloud or Server (repl…

100%.

"You should be using AI in your day to day job or you won't get promoted" is the 2025 equivalent of being forced to train the team that your job is being outsourced to.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#277

Post by dwaltrip » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

dwaltrip wrote: post #153

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…

You can vibe-code a throwaway UI for investigating some complex data in less than 30 minutes. The code quality doesn't matter, and it will make your life much easier. Rinse and repeat for many "one-off" tasks. It's not going away, you need to learn how to use it. shrugs shoulders

It’s kind of fun watching this comment go up and down :)

There’s so much evidence out there of people getting real value from the tools.

Some questions you can ask yourself are “why doesn’t it work for me?” and “what can I do differently?”.

Be curious, not dogmatic. Ignore the hype, find people doing real work.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#278

Post by redwood » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

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

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#279

Post by DrewADesign » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #228

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 of…

I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed):

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!”. And it is a genuine win! But for me it’s dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip up experienced developers really trip up LLMs and sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than not having it.

So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of tasks take up most of your dev time.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#280

Post by 65 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

somekyle2 wrote: post #3

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.

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.