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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#591

Post by justatdotin »

openasocket wrote: post #543
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…

Pretty much. Someone on our team put out a code review for some new feature and then bounced for a 2 week vacation. One of our junior engineers approved it. Despite the fact that it was in a section of dead code that wasn’t supposed to even be enabled yet, it managed to break our test environment. Took senior engineers a day to figure out how that was even possible before reverting. We had another couple engineers ta…

> One of our junior engineers approved it.

pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges.

so your process seems inadequate to me, agents or not.

also, was it tagged as generated? that seems like an obvious safety feature. As a junior, I might be thinking: 'my senior colleague sure knows lots of this stuff', but all it would take to dispel my illusion is an agent tag on the PR.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#592

Post by volf_ »

CSMastermind wrote: post #223
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…

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.

because autocorrect and predictive text doesn't help when half your job is revisions

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#593

Post by voidhorse »

venturecruelty wrote: post #552
adastra22 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx was correct in his identification of the problem (the communist manifesto still holds up today). Marx went off the rails with his solution.

Getting everyone to even agree that this is a problem is impossible. I'm open to the universe of solutions, as long as it isn't "Anthropic and OpenAI get another $100 billion dollars while we starve". We can probably start there.

Yeah, unfortunately Marx was right about people not realizing the problem, too. The proletariat drowns in false consciousness :(

In reality, the US is finally waking up to the fact that the "golden age" of capitalism in the US was built upon the lite socialism of the New Deal, and that all the bs economic opinions the average american has subscribed to over the past few decades was completely just propaganda and anyone with half a brain cell could see from miles away that since reagonomics we've had nothing but a system that leads to gross accumulation to the top and to the top alone and this is a sure fire way (variable maximization) in any complex system to produce instability and eventual collapse.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#594

Post by deaux »

nateglims wrote: post #556
deaux wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globally, the opinion isn't generally negative. It's localized.

Sure, I meant the anglosphere. But in most countries, the less people are aware of technology or use the internet the less they are enthusiastic about AI.

I don't see the correlation between technology/internet use and man-on-the-street attitudes towards AI. Compare Sweden with Japan.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#595

Post by crystal_revenge »

CSMastermind wrote: post #223
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…

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've generally found an inverse correlation between "understands AI" and "exuberance for AI".

I'm the only person at my current company who has had experience at multiple AI companies (the rest have never worked on it in a production environment, one of our projects is literally something I got paid to deliver customers at another startup), has written professionally about the topic, and worked directly with some big names in the space. Unsurprisingly, I have nothing to do with any of our AI efforts.

One of the members of our leadership team, who I don't believe understands matrix multiplication, genuinely believes he's about to transcend human identity by merging with AI. He's publicly discussed how hard it is to maintain friendship with normal humans who can't keep up.

Now I absolutely think AI is useful, but these people don't want AI to be useful they want it to be something that anyone who understands it knows it can't be.

It's getting to the point where I genuinely feel I'm witnessing some sort of mass hysteria event. I keep getting introduced to people who have almost no understanding of the fundamentals of how LLMs work who have the most radically fantastic ideas about what they are capable of on a level I have ever experienced in my fairly long technical career.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#596

Post by shahbaby »

averyvery wrote: post #144
bccdee wrote: post #41

> Engineers don't try because they think they can't. This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to. There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excite…

Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossibl…

The most ironic part is that AI skills won't really help you with job security.

You touched on some of the reasons; it doesn't take much skill to call an API, the technology is in a period of rapid evolution, etc.

And now with almost every company trying to adopt "AI" there is no shortage of people who can put AI experience on their resume and make a genuine case for it.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#597

Post by solid_fuel »

teej wrote: post #261
doyougnu wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your coworkers were probably writing subtle bugs before AI too.

I think the dynamic is different - before, they were writing and testing the functions and features as they went. Now, (some of) my coworkers just push a PR for the first or second thing copilot suggested. They generate code, test it once, it works that time, and then they ship it. So when I am looking through the PR it's effectively the _first_ time a human has actually looked over the suggested code.

Anecdote: In the 2 months after my org pushed copilot down to everyone the number of warnings in the codebase of our main project went from 2 to 65. I eventually cleaned those up and created a github action that rejects any PR if it emits new warnings, but it created a lot of pushback initially.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#598

Post by kevin948 »

nikkwong wrote: post #548
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…

As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight…

This has been exactly my mindset as well (another Seattle SWE/DS). The baseline capability has been improving and compounding, not getting worse. It'd actually be quite convenient if AI's capabilities stayed exactly where they are now; the real problems come if AI does work.

I'm extremely skeptical of the argument that this will end up creating jobs just like other technological advances did. I'm sure that will happen around the edges, but this is the first time thinking itself is being commodified, even if it's rudimentary in its current state. It feels very different from automating physical labor: most folks don't dream of working on an assembly line. But I'm not sure what's left if white collar work and creative work are automated en masse for "efficiency's" sake. Most folks like feeling like they're contributing towards something, despite some people who would rather do nothing.

To me it is clear that this is going to have negative effects on SWE and DS labor, and I'm unsure if I'll have a career in 5 years despite being a senior with a great track record. So, agreed. Save what you can.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#599

Post by voidhorse »

panarky wrote: post #475
josephg wrote: post #421

Earlier 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…

> 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…

Coding Contest != Software Engineering

Or even solving problems that business need to solve, generally speaking.

This complete misunderstand of what software engineering even is is the major reason so many engineers are fed up with the clueless leaders foisting AI tools upon their orgs because they apparently lack the critical reasoning skills to be able to distinguish marketing speak from reality.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#600

Post by keeda »

BearOso wrote: post #559
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

But how do you know you're getting the correct picture from that throwaway UI? A little while back there was an blog posted where the author wrote an article praising AI for his vibe-coded earth-viewer app that used Vulkan to render inside a GUI window. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case and AI just copied from somewhere and inserted code for a rudimentary software rendering. The AI couldn't do what was asked becaus…

> But how do you know you're getting the correct picture from that throwaway UI?

You get the AI to generate code that lets you spot-check individual data points :-)

Most of my work these days is in fact that kind of code. I'm working on something research-y that requires a lot of visualization, and at this point I've actually produced more throwaway code than code in the project.

Here's an example: I had ChatGPT generate some relatively straightforward but cumbersome geometric code. Saved me 30 - 60 minutes right there, but to be sure, I had it generate tests, which all passed. Another 30 minutes saved.

I reviewed the code and the tests and felt it needed more edge cases, which I added manually. However, these started failing and it was really cumbersome to make sense of a bunch of coordinates in arrays.

So I had it generate code to visualize my test cases! That instantly showed me that some assertions in my manually added edge cases were incorrect, which became a quick fix.

The answer to "how do you trust AI" is human in the loop... AND MOAR AI!!! ;-)

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