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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#261

Post by teej »

doyougnu wrote: post #201
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…

I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to. I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due diligence from some coworkers. I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the practitioners of AI-as-cod…

Your coworkers were probably writing subtle bugs before AI too.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#262

Post by Freak_NL »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #96

> AI-powered map > none of it had anything to do with what I built. She talked about Copilot 365. And Microsoft AI. And every miserable AI tool she's forced to use at work. My product barely featured. Her reaction wasn't about me at all. It was about her entire environment. She was given two context clues. AI. And maps. Maps work, which means all the information in an "AI-powered map" descriptor rests on the adjectiv…

The product website isn't convincing either. It's only in private beta, and the first example shows 'A scenic walking tour of Venice' as the desired trip. I'll readily believe LLMs will gladly give you some sort of itinerary for walking in Venice, including all highlights people write and post about a lot on social media to show how great their life is. But if you asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that region, the counter questions would be 'Why Venice specifically? I thought you hated crowds — have you considered less crowded alternatives where you will be appreciated more as a tourist? Have you actually been to Italy at all?'.

LLMs are always going to give you the most plausible thing for your query, and will likely just rehash the same destinations from hundreds of listicles and status signalling social media posts.

She probably understood this from the minimal description given.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#263

Post by elzbardico »

mips_avatar wrote: post #106
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…

My hot take is that the evangelical people don't really like AI either they're just scared. I think you have to be outside of big tech to appreciate AI

If AI replaces software engineers, people outside tech doesn't have much chance of surviving it too.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#264

Post by mips_avatar »

caconym_ wrote: post #97
mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author here if anyone has thoughts

It kinda seems like you're conflating Microsoft with Seattle in general. From the outside, what you say about Microsoft specifically seems to be 100% true: their leadership has gone fucking nuts and their irrational AI obsession is putting stifling pressure on leaf level employees. They seem convinced that their human workforce is now a temporary inconvenience. But is this representative of Seattle tech as a whole? I…

I think probably the safest place to be right now emotionally is a smaller company. Something about the hype right now is making Microsoft/Amazon act worse. Be curious to hear what specifically your company is doing to give people agency.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#265

Post by watwut »

throwout4110 wrote: post #187
aisengard wrote: post #171

Earlier 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…

> What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”?

Simple. The company providing the tool needs actual earning suddenly. Therefore, they need to raise the prices. They also need users to spend more tokens, so they will make the tool respond in a way that requires more refinement. After all, the latter is exactly what happened with google search.

At this point, that is pretty normal software cycle - try to attract crowd by being free or cheap, then lock features behind paywall. Then simultaneously raise prices more and more while making the product worst.

This literally NEEDS to happen, because these companies do not have any other path to profitability. So, it will happen at some point.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#266

Post by neilv »

Lots of creators (e.g., writers, illustrators, voice actors) hate "AI" too.

Not only because it's destroying creator jobs while also ripping off creators, but it's also producing shit that's offensively bad to professionals.

One thing that people in tech circles might not be aware of is that people outside of tech circles aren't thinking that tech workers are smart. They haven't thought that for a long time. They are generally thinking that tech workers are dimwit exploiter techbros, screwing over everyone. This started before "AI", but now "AI" (and tech billionaires backing certain political elements) has poured gasoline on the fire. Good luck getting dates with people from outside our field of employment. (You could try making your dating profile all about enjoying hiking and dabbling with your acoustic guitar, but they'll quickly know you're the enemy, as soon as you drive up in a Tesla, or as soon you say "actually..." before launching into a libertarian economics spiel over coffee.)

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#267

Post by badc0ffee »

Ekaros wrote: post #150
epolanski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, do it assuming different linguistic backgrounds. It could sound dramatically different by people that speak English but as second language, which are going to be a whole lot of your users, even if the application is in English.

If there is a g in there I will pronounce a g there. I have some standards and that is one. Pronouncing every single letter.

That's a gnarly standard you have there.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#268

Post by mips_avatar »

throwaway_dang wrote: post #55
mips_avatar wrote: post #2

Author here if anyone has thoughts

Out of curiosity, is this piece just some content that you created in the hopes of boosting your company's mindshare?

I'm just really isolated right now, I've been building solo for a long time. I don't have anyone to share my thoughts with, which is something I used to really value at Microsoft.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#269

Post by assemblyman »

I am not in Seattle. I do work in AI but have shifted more towards infrastructure.

I feel fatigued by AI. To be more precise, this fatigue includes several factors. The first one is that a lot of people around me get excited by events in the AI world that I find distracting. These might be new FOSS library releases, news announcements from the big players, new models, new papers. As one person, I can only work on 2-3 things at a given interval in time. Ideally I would like to focus and go deep in those things. Often, I need to learn something new and that takes time, energy and focus. This constant Brownian motion of ideas gives a sense of progress and "keeping up" but, for me at least, acts as a constantly tapped brake.

Secondly, there is a sentiment that every problem has an AI solution. Why sit and think, run experiments, try to build a theoretical framework when one can just present the problem to a model. I use LLMs too but it is more satisfying, productive, insightful when one actually thinks hard and understands a topic before using LLMs.

Thirdly, I keep hearing that the "space moves fast" and "one must keep up". The fundamentals actually haven't changed that much in the last 3 years and new developments are easy to pick up. Even if they did, trying to keep up results in very shallow and broad knowledge that one can't actually use. There are a million things going on and I am completely at peace with not knowing most of them.

Lastly, there is pressure to be strategic. To guess where the tech world is going, to predict and plan, to somehow get ahead. I have no interest in that. I am confident many of us will adapt and if I can't, I'll find something else to do.

I am actually impressed with and heavily use models. The tiresome part now are some of the humans around the technology who participate in the behaviors listed above.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#270

Post by [deleted] »

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

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