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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#321

Post by nemomarx »

mips_avatar wrote: post #138
the_af wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, did you redact this with AI? It has all the telltale signs: lots of em-dashes but also "punched up" paragraphs, a lot of them end with a zinger, e.g. > Amazon folks are slightly more insulated, but not by much. The old Seattle deal—Amazon treats you poorly but pays you more—only masks the rot. or > Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the…

I wrote it by hand but I had an AI do some edits. I got the m dash drilled into me by my creative writing teacher in college.

I actually think your usage is pretty different from the usual ai style, if that means anything. More traditional?

I'm not sure why you needed it for edits though, since you seem good at writing generally.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#322

Post by kentm »

Loughla wrote: post #131
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…

>AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily. I mean this in sincerity, and not at all snarky, but - have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively? I find that I can get what I need from chatbots (and refuse to call them AI until we have general AI just to be contrary) if I spend a couple of minutes considering constraints and bein…

> have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively?

The problem is that this comes off just as tone-deaf as "you're holding it wrong." In my experience, when people promote AI, its sold as just having a regular conversation and then the AI does thing. And when that doesn't work, the promoter goes into system prompts, MCP, agent files, etc and entire workflows that are required to get it to do the correct thing. It ends up feeling like you're being lied to, even if there's some benefit out there.

There's also the fact that all programming workflows are not the same. I've found some areas where AI works well, but a lot of my work it does not. Usually things that wouldn't show up in a simple Google search back before it was enshittified are pretty spotty.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#324

Post by [deleted] »

mjr00 wrote: post #272
senordevnyc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cer…

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#325

Post by Animats »

A sizable fraction of current AI results are wrong. The key to using AI successfully is imposing the costs of those errors on someone who can't fight back. Retail customers. Low-level employees. Non-paying users.

A key part of today's AI project plan is clearly identifying the dump site where the toxic waste ends up. Otherwise, it might be on top of you.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#327

Post by teej »

munificent wrote: post #291
teej wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your coworkers were probably writing subtle bugs before AI too.

Would you rather consume a bowl of soup with a fly in it, or a 50 gallon drum with 1,000 flies in it? In which scenario are you more likely to fish out all the flies before you eat one?

Easier to skim 1000 flies from a single drum than 100 flies from 100 bowls of soup.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#328

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

dwaltrip wrote: post #277
dwaltrip wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're good questions! The problem is that I've tried to talk to the people who are getting real value from it, and often the answer ends up being that the value is not as real as they think. One guy gave an excited presentation about how AI let him write 7k LOC per day, expounded for an entire session about how the rest of us should follow in his shoes, and then clarified only in Q&A that reviewers couldn't keep up so he exempted himself from code review.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#329

Post by ElijahLynn »

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…

Well said!

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#330

Post by shepherdjerred »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #118
throwout4110 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. I don't recognize that because it isn't true . I try th…

What have you tried? How much time have you spent? Using AI is it’s own skill set separate from programming
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