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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#611

Post by crystal_revenge »

throwaway-0001 wrote: post #606
crystal_revenge wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there is a correlation between when you can you expect from something when I know their internals vs someone that doesn’t know but is not like who knows internals is much much better. Example: many people created websites without a clue of how they really work. And got millions of people on it. Or had crazy ideas to do things with them. At the same time there are devs that know how internals work but can’t ge…

I'm a big fan of the concept of 初心 (Japanese: Shoshin aka "beginners mind" [0] ) and largely agree with Sazuki's famous quote:

> “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”

Experts do tend to be limited in what they see as possible. But I don't think that allows carte blanche belief that a fancy Markov Chain will let you transcend humanity. I would argue one of the key concepts of "beginners mind" is not radical assurance in what's possible but unbounded curiosity and willingness to explore with an open mind. Right now we see this in the Stable Diffusion community: there are tons of people who also don't understand matrix multiplication that are doing incredible work through pure experimentation. There's a huge gap between "I wonder what will happen if I just mix these models together" and "we're just a few years from surrendering our will to AI". None of the people I'm concerned about have what I would consider an "open mind" about the topic of AI. They are sure of what they know and to disagree is to invite complete rejection. Hardly a principle of beginners mind.

Additionally:

> pc manufacturers never were able to even imagine what random people were able to do with their pc.

Belies a deep ignorance of the history of personal computing. Honestly, I don't think modern computing has still ever returned to the ambition of what was being dreampt up, by experts, at Xerox PARC. The demos on the Xerox Alto in the early 1970s are still ambitious in some senses. And, as much as I'm not a huge fan, Gates and Jobs absolutely had grand visions for what the PC would be.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#613

Post by elzbardico »

LPisGood wrote: post #524
elzbardico wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI replaces software engineers, people outside tech doesn't have much chance of surviving it too.

Exactly. I think it’s pretty clear that software engineering is an “intelligence complete” problem. If you can automatically solve SWE than you can automatically solve pretty much all knowledge work.

A lot of modern corporate work is bullshit work.

I don't think it is too outrageous to believe that LLMs can do a lot of what all those armies of corporate bureaucrats do.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#614

Post by cindyllm »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #611
throwaway-0001 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a correlation between when you can you expect from something when I know their internals vs someone that doesn’t know but is not like who knows internals is much much better. Example: many people created websites without a clue of how they really work. And got millions of people on it. Or had crazy ideas to do things with them. At the same time there are devs that know how internals work but can’t ge…

I'm a big fan of the concept of 初心 (Japanese: Shoshin aka "beginners mind" [0] ) and largely agree with Sazuki's famous quote: > “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few” Experts do tend to be limited in what they see as possible. But I don't think that allows carte blanche belief that a fancy Markov Chain will let you transcend humanity. I would argue one of the key con…

[dead]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#615

Post by nilkn »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #595
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.

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…

I mostly disagree with this. Lots of things correlate weakly with other things, often in confusing and overlapping ways. For instance, expertise can also correlate with resistance to change. Ego can correlate with protection of the status quo and dismissal of people who don't have the "right" credentials. Love of craft can correlate with distaste for automation of said craft (regardless of the effectiveness of the automation). Threat to personal financial stability can correlate with resistance (regardless of technical merit). Potential for personal profit can correlate with support (regardless of technical merit). Understanding neural nets can correlate both with exuberance and skepticism in slightly different populations.

Correlations are interesting but when examined only individually they are not nearly as meaningful as they might seem. Which one you latch onto as "the truth" probably says more about what tribe you value or want to be part of than anything fundamental about technology or society or people in general.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#616

Post by QuiEgo »

Making no statement about the value or lack of value in AI itself:

When people talk about it like this (this author is hardly the only example) they sound like an evangelist proselytizing and it feels so weird to me.

This thing could basically read “people in Seattle don’t want to believe in God with me, people in San Francisco have faith though. I’m sad my friends in Seattle won’t be going to heaven.”

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#617

Post by danieltanfh95 »

The reason is quite straightforward. LLMs excel at mapping tasks but suck at first principles reasoning and validation.

When you are working on the AI map app, you are mapping your new idea to code.

When people are working with legacy code and fixing bugs, they are employing reasoning and validation.

The problem is management doesn't allow the engineers to discern which is which and just stuff it down their throats.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#618

Post by sodafountan »

queenkjuul wrote: post #557
jliptzin wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends and I have always wondered as we've gotten older what's going to be the new tech that the younger generation seems to know and understand innately while the older generations remain clueless and always need help navigating (like computers/internet for my parents' generation and above). I am convinced that thing is AI. Kids growing up today are using AI for everything, whether or not that's sanctioned or if…

The thing is, Claude Code is great for unimportant casual projects, and genuinely very bad at working in big, complex, established projects. The latter of course being the ones most people actually work on. Well either it's bad at it, or everyone on my team is bad at prompting. Given how dedicated my boss has been to using Claude for everything for the past year and the output continuing to be garbage, though, i don'…

I was going to try having an AI agent analyze a well-established open source project. I was thinking of trying something like Bitcoin Core or an open-source JavaScript library, something that has had a lot of human eyes on it. To me, that seems like a good use case, as some of those projects can get pretty complex in what they're aiming to accomplish. Just the sheer amount of complexity involved in Bitcoin, for instance, would be a good candidate for having an AI agent explain the code to you as you're reviewing it. A lot of those projects are fairly well-written as they are, with the higher-level concepts being the more difficult thing to grasp.

Not attempting to claim anything against your company, but I've worked for enterprises where code bases were a complete mess and even the product itself didn't have a clear goal. That's likely not the ideal candidate for AI systems to augment.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#619

Post by insin »

solid_fuel wrote: post #597
teej wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Then when you've taken an hour to be the first person to understand how their code works from top to bottom and point out obvious bugs, problems and design improvements (no, I don't think this component needs 8 useEffects added to it which deal exclusively with global state that's only relevant 2 layers down, which are effectively treating React components like an event handling system for data - don't believe people who tell you LLMs are good at React, if you see a useEffect with an obvious LLM comment above it, it's likely to be buggy or unnecessary), your questions about it are answered with an immediate flurry of commits and it's back to square one.

Who are we speeding up, exactly?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#620

Post by SubiculumCode »

pennomi wrote: post #558
queenkjuul wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, Claude Code is great for unimportant casual projects, and genuinely very bad at working in big, complex, established projects. The latter of course being the ones most people actually work on. Well either it's bad at it, or everyone on my team is bad at prompting. Given how dedicated my boss has been to using Claude for everything for the past year and the output continuing to be garbage, though, i don'…

As context size increases, AI becomes exponentially dumber. Most established software is far, FAR too large for AI. But small, greenfield projects are amazing for something like Claude Code.

This is why I argue that the impact of LLMs is in the tail. Its all the small to midsize shops that want something done, but don't have money to hire a programmer. Its small tasks, like pushing data around, writing a quick interface to help day to day jobs in niche jobs and technical problems. Its the ability to quickly generate prototype logos and scripts for small scale ad campaigns, for solving Nancy's Excel issue, etc. Big companies have big software and code stacks with tons of dependencies. Small shops have little project needs that solve significant issues facing their operations, but will unlikely become large enough that things like scaling issues, maintenance, integration, are ever a problem at all. Its a tail, but its long in small to midsize businesses. In research labs, which I have personal experience, AI is rapidly making feasible more ambitious projects, quicker timelines, and better code, generally.
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