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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#431

Post by mattgreenrocks »

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.

I’m an AI skeptic. I like seeing what UIs it spits out, though, which defeats the blank page staring into my soul fear nicely. I don’t even use the code, just take inspiration from the layouts.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#432

Post by lbrito »

psyclobe wrote: post #129
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…

> 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.

Leverage.

Those slops already existed, but AI scales them by an order of magnitude.

I guess the same can be said of any technology, but AI is just a more powerful tool overall. Using languages as an example - lets say duck typing allowed a 10% productivity boost, but also introduced 5% more mistakes/problems. AI (claims to) allow a 10x productivity boost, but also ~10x mistakes/problems.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#433

Post by pdovj »

Is it that everyone in Seattle hates AI, or that Seattle is the only place you know people well enough they’ll tell you the truth? The bar for that is much lower in Seattle too, compared to say, Japan. And the author seems tone deaf enough to not know the difference.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#434

Post by r14c »

zwnow wrote: post #393
cs02rm0 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else Worse, they've lost all funding for anything else.

Industries are built upon shit people built in their basements, get hacking

I think it should be noted that a garage or basement in California costs like a million dollars.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#435

Post by littlekey »

vunderba wrote: post #24

From the article: > I wanted her take on Wanderfugl , the AI-powered map I've been building full-time. I can at least give you one piece of advice. Before you decide on a company or product name, take the time to speak it out loud so you can get a sense of how it sounds.

The weird thing is that half of the uses of the name on that landing page spell it as "Wanderfull". All of the mock-up screencaps use it, and at the bottom with "Be one of the first people shaping Wanderfull" etc.

So even the creator can't decide what to call it!

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#436

Post by groby_b »

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

There are plenty of good tasks left, but they're often one-off/internal tooling.

Last one at work: "Hey, here are the symptoms for a bug, they appeared in - go figure out the CL range and which 10 CLs I should inspect first to see if they're the cause"

(Well suited to AI, because worst case I've looked at 10 CLs in vain, and best case it saved me from manually scanning through several 1000 CLs - the EV is net positive)

It works for code generation as well, but not in a "just do my job" way, more in a "find which haystack the needle is in, and what the rough shape of the new needle is". Blind vibecoding is a non-starter. But... it's a non-starter for greenfields too, it's just that the FO of FAFO is a bit more delayed.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#437

Post by bigstrat2003 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #360
blibble wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. so, people with experience?

Obviously. Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation. In hindsight it makes sense, I’m sure every major shift has played out the same way.

> Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation.

It also turns out that experience can be what enables you to not waste time on trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises. You are simply assuming that AI is a paradigm shift rather than a waste of time. Fine, but at least have the humility to acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree on this point instead of labeling everyone who disagrees with you as some out of touch fuddy-duddy.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#438

Post by evil-olive »

in the first paragraph, he drops a link to the startup he's working on:

> I wanted her take on Wanderfugl, the AI-powered map I've been building full-time.

this seems to me like pretty obvious engagement-bait / stealth marketing - write a provocative blog post that will get shared widely, and some fraction of those people will click through to see what the product is all about.

but, apparently it's working because this thread is currently at 400+ comments after 3 hours.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#439

Post by ethbr1 »

josephg wrote: post #421
venturecruelty wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dem…

This is why AI is the perfect management Rorschach test.

To management (out of IC roles for long enough to lose their technical expertise), it looks perfect!

To ICs, the flaws are apparent!

So inevitably management greenlights new AI projects* and behaviors, and then everyone is in the 'This was my idea, so it can't fail' CYA scenario.

* Add in a dash of management consulting advice here, and note that management consultants' core product was already literally 'something that looks plausible enough to make execs spend money on it'

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#440

Post by bigstrat2003 »

fedsocpuppet wrote: post #297
ponector wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why then there is an AI-powered dishwasher, but no AI car?

https://www.tesla.com/fsd ? I also don't understand the LLM ⊄ AI people. Nobody was whining about pathfinding in video games being called AI lol. And I have to say LLMs are a lot smarter than A*.

It's because nobody was trying to take video game behavior scripts and declare them the future of all things technology.
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