Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 1001 posts

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#491

Post by artifaxx »

paxys wrote: post #179

All big corporate employees hate AI because it is incessantly pushed on them by clueless leadership and mostly makes their job harder. Seattle just happens to have a much larger percent of big tech employees than most other cities (>50% work for Microsoft or Amazon alone). In places like SF this gloom is balanced by the wide eyed optimism of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google etc. and the thousands of sta…

Definitely, AI sentiment is positive among most people at the small startup I work at in the Seattle area. I do see the "AI fatigue" too, I bet the majority is from using AI as a repeated layoff rationalization. Personally AI is a tool, one of the more useful ones (e.g. Claude and Gemini thinking models make quite helpful code reviewers once given a checklist) The hype often overshadows these benefits.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#492

Post by Karrot_Kream »

shepardrtc wrote: post #50

Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite: 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs. 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever U…

I was an early employee at a unicorn and I saw this culture take hold once we started hiring from Big Tech talent pools and offering Big Tech comp packages, though before AI hype took off. There's a crazy lack of agency that kicks in for Big Tech folks that's really hard to explain. This feeling that each engineer is this mercenary trying really hard to not get screwed by the internal system.

Most of it is because there's little that ties actual output to organizational outcomes. AI mandates after all are just a way to bluntly for e engineers to use AI, where if you were at a startup or smaller company you would probably organically find how much an LLM helps you where. It may not even help your actual work even if it helps your coworkers. That market feedback is sorely missing from the Big Techs and so hamfisted engineering mandates have to do in order to for e engineers to become more efficient.

In these cases I always try to remind friends that you can always leave a Big Tech. The thing is, from what I can tell, a lot of these folks have developed lifestyle inflation from working in Big Tech and some of their anger comes from feeling trapped in their Big Tech role due to this. While I understand, I'm not particularly sympathetic to this viewpoint. At the end of the day your lifestyle is in your hands.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#493

Post by jonners00 »

toast0 wrote: post #33

> After a pause I tried to share how much better I've been feeling—how AI tools helped me learn faster, how much they accelerated my work on Wanderfugl. I didn't fully grok how tone deaf I was being though. She's drowning in resentment. Here's the deal. Everyone I know who is infatuated with AI shares things AI told them with me, unsolicited, and it's always so amazingly garbage, but they don't see it or they apologi…

>It's even less helpful than if the friend just suggested to contact support and/or delete the facebook account.

To be fair, pretty much all advice in life is less helpful than 'delete the facebook account'

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#494

Post by mips_avatar »

erentz wrote: post #470
mips_avatar wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK I got really sick in a foreign country, I wasn't sure how to get to the hospital and I was alone in a hotel room. I don't really know how using chatgpt to help me isn't actualizing.

We used to have Google search and Google maps which solved this problem of finding information about symptoms and finding medical centers near you. LLM doesn’t make anything better it just confidently asserts things about medicine that may be wrong and always need to be verified with the real sources anyway.

Well google search is a little nerfed since it went full ad revenue focused

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#495

Post by vessenes »

mips_avatar wrote: post #169
vessenes wrote: post #43

Thanks for the post - it's work to write and synthesize, and I always appreciate it! My first reaction was "replace 'AI' with the word 'Cloud'" ca 2012 at MS; what's novel here? With that in mind, I'm not sure there is anything novel about how your friend is feeling or the organizational dynamics, or in fact how large corporations go after business opportunities; on those terms, I think your friends' feelings are a l…

It does feel like without a compelling AI product Microsoft isn't super differentiated. Maybe Satya is right that scale is a differentiation, but I don't think people are as trapped in an AI ecosystem as they were in Azure.

Their hyper scale data centers are super compelling. And they get OpenAI IP for some time. I don’t think we’ve really seen what they want to launch on the product side yet.

Satya mentioned recently that computer use agents use like 5x the windows license time on azure over a single person - they see a lotttt of inference growth coming and its multiplicative in that it uses their compute and azure infra.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#496

Post by nateglims »

hexator wrote: post #209
shepardrtc wrote: post #50

Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite: 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs. 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever U…

Some people really do hate AI, it's not entirely about the layoffs. This is a well insulated bubble but you can find tons of anti-AI forums online.

Outside of tech, I think the opinion is generally negative. AI has lost a lot the narrative due to things like energy prices and layoffs.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#497

Post by RajT88 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #300
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.

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.

I am not a great (some would argue, not even good) programmer, and I find a lot of issues with LLM generated code. Even Claude pro does really weird dumb stuff.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#498

Post by j2kun »

> like building an AI product made me part of the problem.

I don't see how the author can believe that quitting their job to work on an AI startup is NOT contributing to the problem of "AI products being shoved down everyone's throats."

Except, of course, that their financial bottom line depends on not believing this.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#499

Post by richiebful1 »

thinkling wrote: post #488
mips_avatar wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pronounced wanderfull in Norwegian

The one current paying user of the app I've seen in this discussion called it "Wanderlog". FYI on the stickiness of the current name.

wanderlog is a separate web service

https://wanderlog.com/

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#500

Post by torginus »

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…

In my experience (with ChatGPT 5.1 as of late) is that the AI follows a problem->solution internal logic and doesn't think and try to structure its code.

If you ask for an endpoint to a CRUD API, it'll make one. If you ask for 5, it'll repeat the same code 5 times and modify it for the use case.

A dev wouldn't do this, they would try to figure out the common parts of code, pull them out into helpers, and try to make as little duplicated code as possible.

I feel like the AI has a strong bias towards adding things, and not removing them. The most obviously wrong thing is with CSS - when I try to do some styling, it gets 90% of the way there, but there's almost always something that's not quite right.

Then I tell the AI to fix a style, since that div is getting clipped or not correctly centered etc.

It almost always keeps adding properties, and after 2-3 tries and an incredibly bloated style, I delete the thing and take a step back and think logically about how to properly lay this out with flexbox.

Post reply on HN