That kind of explained half of comments on HN. When it's your induatry that's being disrupted suddenly a lot of people are on the edge.
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, otherwis…
> it just makes software engineering into bothering supervisor job.
I'm pretty sure this is the entire enthusiasm from C-level for AI in a nutshell. Until AI SWE resisted being mashed into a replaceable cog job that they don't have to think/care about. AI is the magic beans that are just tantalizingly out of reach and boy do they want it.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#473I'm in Seattle at AWS and haven't encountered this attitude towards AI at all. All of my coworkers pretty much love using Cline and Kiro.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#474Earlier 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.
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.
This seems to be the overall trend in AI. If you're an expert in something, you can see where it's wrong. If you're not, you can't.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#475Earlier 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…
> It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub
This is a common intuition but it's provably false.
The fact that LLMs are trained on a corpus does not mean their output represents the median skill level of the corpus.
Eighteen months ago GPT-4 was outperforming 85% of human participants in coding contests. And people who participate in coding contests are already well above the median skill level on Github.
And capability has gone way up in the last 18 months.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#476Earlier 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.
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.
It works both ways. If you are good, it's also easier to spot moments of brilliance from AI agent when it saves you hours of googling, reading docs, some trial and error while you pour yourself cup of coffee and ponder the next steps. You can spot when a single tab press saved you minutes.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#477While 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…
There just isn't much friction between having a few tabs open (maps, booking site, airplane site, google search) and a notepad. The friction of searching for an app, downloading it, and then learning how to use it is just higher.
So many products are like this - it sounds good on paper to consolidate a bunch of tasks in one place but it's not without costs and the benefit is just not very high.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> I try the LLMs every now and then, and they still make the same stupid hallucinations that ChatGPT did on day 1. One of the tests I sometimes do of LLMs is a geometry puzzle: You're on the equator facing south. You move forward 10,000 km along the surface of the Earth. You are rotate 90° clockwise. You move another 10,000 km forward along the surface of the earth. Rotate another 90° clockwise, then move another 10,…
Out of interest, was your intended answer "where you started, facing east"?
FWIW, Claude Opus 4.5 gets this right for me, assuming that is the intended answer. On request, it also gave me a Mathematica program which (after I fixed some trivial exceptions due to errors in units) informs me that using the ITRF00 datum the actual answer is 0.0177593 degrees north and 0.168379 west of where you started (about 11.7 miles away from the starting point) and your rotation is 89.98 degrees rather than 90.
(ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, for me, get the wrong answer because it correctly gets near the South Pole and then follows a line of latitude 200 times round the South Pole for the second leg, which strikes me as a flatly incorrect interpretation of the words "move forward along the surface of the earth". Was that the "usual error they all used to make"?)
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#479Earlier 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.
I saw an ad for Lovable. The very first thing I noticed was an exchange where the promoter asked the AI to fix a horizontal scroll bar that was present on his product listing page. This is a common issue with web development, especially so for beginners. The AI’s solution? Hide overflow on the X axis. Probably the most common incorrect solution used by new programmers.
But to the untrained eye the AI did everything correctly.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
My internal mnemonic for targeting AI correctly is 'It's easier to change a problem into something AI is good at, than it is to change AI into something that fits every problem.' But unfortunately the nuances in the former require understanding strengths and weaknesses of current AI systems, which is a conversation the industry doesn't want to have while it's still riding the froth of a hype cycle. Aka 'any current w…
> 'any current weaknesses in AI systems are just temporary growing pains before an AGI future' I see we've met the same product people :)
I had a VP of a revenue cycle team tell me that his expectation was that they could fling their spreadsheets and Word docs on how to do calculations at an AI powered vendor, and AI would be able to (and I direct quote) "just figure it all out."
That's when I realized how far down the rabbit hole marketing to non-technical folks on this was.