Hating AI in Portland too! :wave:
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
531–540 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#532The big revenue isn't going to come from improvements in coding, or writing better emails, or protein folding. It's going to come from more seductive and compelling ads (using all the data vacuumed up from your apps and your psychological profile).
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#533Earlier 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.
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.
Yes. Love it for quick explorations of available options, reviewing my work, having it propose tests, getting its help with debugging, and all kinds of general subject matter questions. I don’t trust it to write anything important but it can help with a sketch.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#534There has always been a lot of Microsoft hate, but now its a whole new level. Windows now really sucks, My new laptop is all Linux for the first time ever. I dont see why this company is still so valuable. Most people only use a browser now and some ios apps, there is no need for Windows or Microsoft (and of course Azure is never anyone's first choice). Steam makes the gamers happy to leave too.
They do seem to be collecting a lot of self inflicted Ls lately
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#535Earlier 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
One thing people often don't realize or ignore: these LLMs are trained on the internet, the entire internet.
There's a shit-ton of bad and inefficient code on the internet. Lots of it. And it was used to train these LLMs as much as the good code.
In other words, the LLMs are great if you're OK with mediocrity at best. Mediocrity is occasionally good enough, but it can spell death for a company when key parts of it are mediocre.
I'm afraid a lot of the executives who fantasize about replacing humans with AI are going to have to learn this the hard way.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#536Ex-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…
It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite having tangible examples of how it has been useful.
Similar experience. I think it's become an identity politics concept. To those who consider themselves to be anti AI, the concept of the tool having any use is haram.
It feels awkward living in the "LLMs are a useful tool for some tasks" experience. I suspect this is because the two tribes are the loudest.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#537Ex-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…
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.
I notice that expert tends to be pretty bimodal. e.g. chef either enjoy really well made food or some version of scrappy fast food comfort they grew up eating.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easier to skim 1000 flies from a single drum than 100 flies from 100 bowls of soup.
Alas, the flies are not floating on the surface. They are deeply mixed in, almost as if the machine that generated the soup wanted desperately to appear to be doing an excellent job making fly-free soup.
… while not having a real distinction between flies and non-fly ingredients.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
I suspect this is because an LLM doesn't build a mental model of the code base like a dev does. It can decide to look at certain files, and maybe you can improve this by putting a broad architecture overview of a system in an agents.md file, I don't have much experience with that.
But for now, I'm finding it most useful still think in terms of code architecture, and give it small steps that are part of that architecture, and then iterate based on your own review of AI generated code. I don't have the confidence in it to just let some agent plan, and then run for tens of minutes or even hours building out a feature. I want to be in the loop earlier to set the direction.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#540As 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…
I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to. I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due diligence from some coworkers. I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the practitioners of AI-as-cod…
I wonder if there’s a way to measure the cost of such code and associate it with the individuals incurring it. Unless this shows on reports, managers will continue believing LLMs are magic time saving machines writing perfect code.