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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#421

Post by josephg »

venturecruelty wrote: post #304
yoyohello13 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has good engineers. Generally I've noticed the better someone is at coding the more critical they are of AI generated code. Which make sense honestly. It's easier to spot flaws the more expert you are. This doesn't mean they don't use AI gen code, just they are more careful with when an where.

Yes, because they're more likely to understand that the computer isn't this magical black box, and that just because we've made ELIZA marginally better, doesn't mean it's actually good. Anecdata, but the people I've seen be dazzled by AI the most are people with little to no programming experience. They're also the ones most likely to look on computer experts with disdain.

Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can be incredible because it writes the same or better code they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the code it produces is consistently worse than what we can do. At best my pride demands I fix all its flaws before shipping. More commonly, it’s a waste of time to ask it to help, and I need to code the solution from scratch myself anyway.

I use it for throwaway prototypes and demos. And whenever I’m thrust into a language I don’t know that well, or to help me debug weird issues outside my area of expertise. But when I go deep on a problem, it’s often worse than useless.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#422

Post by quickthrowman »

mips_avatar wrote: post #78
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.

It's pronounced wanderfull in Norwegian

Just FYI, I would read it out loud in English as “wander fuggle”. I would assume most Americans would pronounce the ‘g’.

I thought ‘wanderfugl’ was a throwback to ~15 years ago when it was fashionable to use a word but leave out vowels for no reason, like Flickr/ /Tumblr/Scribd/Blendr.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#423

Post by icedchai »

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

I have found value for one off tasks. I forget the exact situation, but I wanted to do some data transformation, something that would normally take me a half hour of awk/sed/bash or python scripting. AI spit it out right away.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#424

Post by SpaceNoodled »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #212
pkasting wrote: post #40

Ex-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…

I also would like to see AI end up dying off except for a few niches, but I find myself using it more and more. It is not a productivity boost in the way I end up using it, interestingly. Actually I think it is actively harming my continued development, though that could just be me getting older, or perhaps massive anxiety from joblessness. Still, I can't help but ask it if everything I do is a good idea. Even in the…

That honestly sounds like addiction.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#425

Post by throwout4110 »

skywhopper wrote: post #271
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…

Maybe those people do different work than you do? Coding agents don’t work well in every scenario.

Yet people imply that because it doesn’t work in their scenario that it’s not good?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#426

Post by ohyoutravel »

buildsjets wrote: post #237
mips_avatar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I saw a post on Reddit the other day where the user was posting screenshots from ChatGPT about how they were using ChatGPT as a “Human OS” and outsourcing all decisions and information to ChatGPT. It made me queasy.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#427

Post by brokencode »

decimalenough wrote: post #253

While everybody else is ranting about AI, I'll rant about something else: trip planning apps. There have been literally thousands of attempts at this and AFAICT precisely zero have ever gotten any traction. There are two intractable problems in this space. 1) A third party app simply cannot compete with Google Maps on coverage, accuracy and being up to date. Yes, there are APIs you can use to access this, but they're…

I use and pay for Wanderlog. Idk how their business is doing, but I love it as a user. They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations, so there is no problem for coverage.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#428

Post by bigstrat2003 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #363
handstitched wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What you described isn't a shallow dismissal. They tried it, found it to not be useful in solving the problems they face, and moved on. That's what any reasonable professional should do if a tool isn't providing them value. Just because you and they disagree on whether the tool provides value doesn't mean that they are "failing at their job".

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#429

Post by Xeronate »

pkasting wrote: post #40

Ex-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…

Is it true that it's bad for learning new skills? My gut tells me it's useful as long as I don't use it to cheat the learning process and I mainly use it for things like follow up questions.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#430

Post by sirreal14 »

dpark wrote: post #145
psyclobe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function > under test. Yup. Ai is so fickle it’ll do anything to accomplish the task. But ai is just a tool it’s all about what you allow it to do. Can’t blame ai really.

In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake. We had a complete outage in the testing of a product once and a couple of tests were still green. Turns it they tested nothing and never had.

> In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake

These were (formerly) not the kinds of humans who regularly made these kinds of mistakes.

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