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

671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#671

Post by didibus »

kevin948 wrote: post #598
nikkwong wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 happe…

> It'd actually be quite convenient if AI's capabilities stayed exactly where they are now

That's what Im' crossing my fingers at, makes our job easier, but doesn't degrade our worth. It's the best possible outcome for devs.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#672

Post by ares623 »

evil-olive wrote: post #438

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 th…

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

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#673

Post by insane_dreamer »

psyclobe wrote: post #129
sirreal14 wrote: post #65

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#674

Post by didibus »

shepardrtc wrote: post #50

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 U…

> 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.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#675

Post by binary132 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #256
binary132 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

It’s hard to understand how people can be so determined to ignore reality.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#676

Post by didibus »

layer8 wrote: post #311
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…

> 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 s…

Are you sure it refers to that? Why would it later say:

> now believes she's both unqualified for AI work

Why would she believe to be unqualified for AI work if the "Engineers don't try" wasn't about her trying to adopt AI?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#677

Post by babyshake »

torginus wrote: post #500
josephg wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can be incredible because it writes the same or better code they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the code it produces is consistently worse than what we can do. At best my pride dem…

In my experience (with ChatGPT 5.1 as of late) is that the AI follows a problem->solution internal logic and doesn't think and try to structure its code. If you ask for an endpoint to a CRUD API, it'll make one. If you ask for 5, it'll repeat the same code 5 times and modify it for the use case. A dev wouldn't do this, they would try to figure out the common parts of code, pull them out into helpers, and try to make…

A good system prompt goes a long way with the latest models. Even just something as simple as "use DRY principles whenever possible." or prompting a plan-implement-evaluate cycle gets pretty good results, at least for tasks that are doing things that AI is well trained on like CRUD APIs.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#678

Post by mips_avatar »

decimalenough wrote: post #253

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…

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
Post reply on HN