Everyone in Seattle hates AI

> 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.

I am thinking about this third path a lot, but the reality is that it wouldn't make AI more interesting than any other tool humans use to go about their daily lives. Does one get this obsessed about screwdrivers?

The issue is that a human-first world where technology is subservient to our needs is very incompatible with our current society. The AI hype is part and parcel of the capitalistic mode of production where humans are ultimately judged for their ability to produce more commodities; the goal has always been to improve productivity to make more for cheaper — this time, the quest for efficiency has found a viable replacement for many humans activities.

> the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow.

My company is basically writing blank cheques for "AI" (aka LLM, I hate the way we've poisoned AI as a term))tooling so that people can use any and all tooling they want and see what works and doesn't. This is a company with ~1500ish engineers, ranging from hardware engineers building POS devices to the junior frontenders building out our simplest UIs. There's also a whole lot more people who aren't technical, and they're also encouraged to use any and all AI tooling they can.

Despite the entire company trying to figure out how to use these effectively precisely because we're trying to look at things objectively and separate out the hype from the reality, the only people I've seen with any kind of praise so far (and this has been going on since the early ChatGPT days) have been people in Marketing and Sales, because for them it doesn't matter if the AI hallucinates some pure bullshit since that's 90% of their job anyway.

We have spent god knows how much time and resources trying to get these tools doing anything more useful than simple demos that get thrown out immediately, and it's just not there. No one is pushing 100x the code or features they were before, projects aren't finishing any faster than they were before, and nobody even bothers turning on the meeting transcription tools either anymore because more often than not it'll interpret things said in the meeting just plain wrong or even make up entire discussion points that were never had.

Just recently, like last week recently, we had some idiotic PR review bot from coderabbit or some other such company be activated. I've never seen so many people complain all at once on Slack, there was a thread with hundreds of individuals all saying how garbage it was and how much it was distracting from reviews. I didn't see a single person say they liked the tool, not 1 single person had anything good to say about it.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's just a MASSIVE fucking hype bubble that will ultimately spawn some tooling that is sorta useful for generating unimportant scripts, but little else.

> This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened.

I wish people would stop spreading this as if it were the main reason. It’s a weak argument and disconnected from reality, like those people who think the only ones who dislike cryptocurrencies are the ones who didn’t become rich from it.

There are plenty of reasons to be against the current crop of AI that have nothing to do with employment. The threat to the environment, the consolidation of resources by the ones at the top, the spread of misinformation and lies, the acceleration of mass surveillance, the decay of critical thinking, the decrease in quality of life (e.g. people who live next to noisy data centres)… Not everything is about jobs and money, the world is bigger than that.

its just the old pc vs mac cultism. nobody who actually has work to do cares. much like authors obsessed with typewriters, transport companies with auto brands, etc

Seattle is the type of economy that is heavily threatened by AI. Desk jobs that Claude basically already knows how to do, and just needs to be integrated into the existing systems to have impact.

Most people in Seattle "tech" are middle management with no discernible skills other than organizational deckchair arrangement. It is a place to optimize for work-life balance, and not take risk - this is why the region, despite its technology density, has such a disproportionately small startup scene.

AI IS a huge threat to a place like this and I am not optimistic about the ability for people to adapt.