Always amazed to see people who don't hate AI.
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#232[dead]
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#233It's satisfying to hear that Microsoft engineers hate Microsoft's AI offerings as much as I do.
Visual Studio is great. IntelliSense is great. Nothing open-source works on our giant legacy C++ codebase. IntelliSense does.
Claude is great. Claude can't deal with millions of lines of C++.
You know what would be great? If Microsoft gave Claude the ability to semantic search the same way that I can with Ctrl-, in Visual Studio. You know what would be even better? If it could also set breakpoints and inspect stuff in the Debugger.
You know what Microsoft has done? Added a setting to Visual Studio where I can replace the IntelliSense auto-complete UI, that provides real information determined from semantic analysis of the codebase and allows me to cycle through a menu of possibilities, with an auto-complete UI that gives me a single suggestion of complete bullshit.
Can't you put the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a fucking room together? Figure out how LLMs can augment your already-really-good-before-AI product? How to leverage your existing products to let Claude do stuff that Claude Code can't do?
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#234Earlier 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 :)
> 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.
> It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases.
This is precisely my experience.
Having the AI work on a large mono repo with a front-end that uses a fairly obscure templating system? Not great.
Spinning up a greenfield React/Vite/ShadCN proof-of-concept for a sales demo? Magic.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
In my personal use case, I work at a company that has SO MUCH process and documentation for coding standards. I made an AI agent that knows all that and used it to update legacy code to the new standard in a day. Something that would have taken weeks if not more. If your desire is manageable code, make that a requirement.
I'm going to say this next thing as someone with a lot of negative bias about corporations. I was laid off from Twitter when Elon bought the company and at a second company that was hemorrhaging users.
Our job isn't to write code, it's to make the machine do the thing. All the effort for clean, manageable, etc is purely in the interest of the programmer but at the end of the day, launching the feature that pulls in money is the point.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#236"But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world-so sometimes they actually do."
? For the better, or for the worse ?
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#237Ex-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.
This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security, shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#238Earlier 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 :)
I wonder if this issues isn't caused by people who aren't programmers, and now they can churn out AI generated stuff that they couldn't before. So to them, this is a magical new ability. Where as people who are already adept at their craft just see the slop. Same thing in other areas. In the before-times, you had to painstakingly handcraft your cat memes. Now a bot comes along and allows someone to make cat memes they didn't bother with before. But the real artisan cat memeists just roll their eyes.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#239“I didn't fully grok how tone deaf I was being though.
[…]
Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world—so sometimes they actually do.”
Nope, still completely fucking tone deaf.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is zero guarantee that these tools will continue to be there. Those of us who are skeptical of the value of the tools may find them somewhat useful, but are quite wary of ripping up the workflows we've built for ourselves over decade(s)(+) in favor of something that might be 10-20% more useful, but could be taken away or charged greater fees or literally collapse in functionality at any moment, leaving us sudde…
What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”? I would say Claude right now has probably made worse code and wasted time than if I had coded things myself, but it’s because this is like the first few hundred days of this. Open weight models are also worse but they will never go away and improve steadily as well. I am all for people doi…
My understanding is that all the big AI companies are currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get big, and then hope to make a profit later. So any service you depend on could crash out of the race, and if one emerges as a victorious monopoly and you rely on them, they can charge you almost whatever they like.
To my mind, the 'only just started' argument is wearing off. It's software, it moves fast anyway, and all the giants of the tech world have been feverishly throwing money at AI for the last couple of years. I don't buy that we're still just at the beginning of some huge exponential improvement.