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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#361

Post by [deleted] »

perardi wrote: post #234
rconti wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#363

Post by senordevnyc »

handstitched wrote: post #352
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…

> 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. I would argue that the "actual job" is simply to solve problems. The client / customer ultimately do not care what technology you use. Hell, they don't really care if there's technology at all. And a lot of softw…

Again, AI isn’t the right tool for every job, but that’s not the same thing as a shallow dismissal.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#364

Post by raincole »

> Instead, she reacted to it with a level of negativity I'd never seen her direct at me before.

A few months ago, a friend of mine showed a poem she wrote for her newborn. Or more specifically, she asked ChatGPT to write for her newborn.

I almost acted like this ex-Microsoft senior. Tbh if I didn't know it was for her own child, I would have acted this way.

I (thought that I) managed ignoring my opinions about whether writing poems is a good use of AI and steering the topic to baby formula milk instead.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#365

Post by Vegenoid »

teej wrote: post #327
munificent wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I think it would be far easier to pick 100 flies each from a single bowl of soup than to pick all 1000 flies out of a 50 gallon drum.

You don’t get to fix bugs in code by simply pouring it through a filter.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#366

Post by antonvs »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #161
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…

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.

Much of this boils down to people simply not understanding what’s really happening. Most people, including most software developers, don’t have the ability to understand these tools, their implications, or how they relate to their own intelligence.

> Edit: lol this forum :)

Indeed.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#367

Post by rr808 »

We have these weekly rah rah AI meetings where we swap tips on what we've achieved with copilot and devin. Mostly crickets but everyone is talking with lots of enthusiasm. Its starting to get silly though now, most people can't even get the tools to do anything useful more than trivial things we used to see on stack overflow.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#368

Post by cs02rm0 »

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…

> the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else

Worse, they've lost all funding for anything else.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#369

Post by adastra22 »

elzbardico wrote: post #289
pnathan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a layoff justification and a hurryup tool, it is pretty loathesome. People use their jobs for their housing, food, etc.

More than this man. AI is making me re-appreciate part of the Marxist criticism of capitalism. The concept of worker alienation could be easily extended in new forms to the labor situation in an AI-based economy. FWIW, humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.

Marx was correct in his identification of the problem (the communist manifesto still holds up today). Marx went off the rails with his solution.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#370

Post by karmasimida »

gipp wrote: post #295
CSMastermind wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends at Google are some of the most negative about the potential of AI to improve software development. I was always surprised by this and assumed internally at Google would be one of the first places to adopt these.

Engineers at Google are much less likely to be doing green-field generation of large amounts of code . It's much more incremental, carefully measured changes to mature, complex software stacks, and done within the Google ecosystem, which is heavily divergent from the OSS-focused world of startups, where most training data comes from

That is the problem.

AI is optimized to solve a problem no matter what it takes. It will try to solve one problem by creating 10 more.

I think long time/term agentic AI is just snake oil at this point. AI works best if you can segment your task into 5-10 minutes chunks, including the AI generating time, correcting time and engineer review time. To put it another way, a 10 minute sync with human is necessary, otherwise it will go astray.

Then it just makes software engineering into bothering supervisor job. Yes I typed less, but I didn’t feel the thrill of doing so.

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