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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#701

Post by monch1962 »

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…

Spot on in my experience.

I work in a space where I get to build and optimise AI tools for my own and my team's use pretty much daily. As such I focus mainly on AI'ing the crap out of boring & time-consuming stuff that doesn't interest any of us any more, and luckily enough there's a whole lot of low hanging fruit in that space where AI is a genuine time, cost and sanity saver.

However any activity that requires directed conscious thought and decision making where the end state isn't clearly definable up front tends to be really difficult for AI. So much of that work relies on a level of intuition and knowledge that is very hard to explain to a layman - let alone eidetic idiots like most AIs.

One example is trying to get AI to identify security IT incidents in real time and take proactive action. Skilled practitioners can fairly easily use AI to detect anomalous events in near real time, but getting AI to take the next step to work out which combinations of "anomalous" activities equate to "likely security incident" is much harder. A reasonably competent human can usually do that relatively quickly, but often can't explain how they do it.

Working out what action is appropriate once the "likely security incident" has been identified is another task that a reasonably competent human can do, but where AIs are hopeless. In most cases, a competent human is WAAAY better at identifying a reasonable way forward based on insufficient knowledge. In those cases, a good decision made quickly is preferable to a perfect decision made slowly, and humans understand this fairly intuitively.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#702

Post by jama211 »

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.

Emphasis on ‘some’. Compare that to the article title!

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#703

Post by finaard »

petterroea wrote: post #694

Basically everyone I know in engineering share this resentment in some way, and the AI industry has itself to blame. People are fed up and burned out from being forced to try useless AI tools by non-technical leaders who do not understand how LLM works nor understand how they suck, and now resent anything related to AI. But for AI companies there is a perverse incentive to push AI on people until it finally works, be…

> and met a complete wall trying to explain why LLMs aren't useful for programming - at least not yet. I argue the code is often of low quality, very unmaintainable, and usually not useful outside quick experimentation.

There are quite a few things they can do reasonably well - but they mostly are useful for experienced programmers/architecs as a time safer. Working with a LLM for that often reminds me of when I had many young, inexperienced Indians to work with - the LLM comes up with the same nonsense, lies and excuses, but unlike the inexperienced humans I can insult it guilt free, which also sometimes gets it back on track.

> They refuse to believe it, even though they do hit a wall with their vibe-coded project after a few months when claude stops generating miracles any more - they lack the experience with code to understand they are hitting maintainability issues.

For having a LLM operate on a complete code base there currently seems to be a hard limit of something like 10k-15k LOC, even with the models with the largest context windows - after that, if you want to continue using a LLM, you'll have to make it work only on a specific subsection of the project, and manually provide the required context.

Now the "getting to 10k LOC" _can_ be sped up significantly by using a LLM. Ideally refactor stupid along the way already - which can be made a bit easier by building in sensible steps (which again requires experience). From my experiments once you've finished that initial step you'll then spend roughly 4-5 times the amount of time you just spent with the LLM to make the code base actually maintainable. For my test projects, I roughly spent one day building it up, rest of the week getting it maintainable. Fully manual would've taken me 2-3 weeks, so it saved time - but only because I do have experience with what I'm doing.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#704

Post by sunaookami »

nateglims wrote: post #496
hexator wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world and it's used by the most normal people in the world, in what way is the opinion "generally negative"?

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#705

Post by pjmlp »

recursive wrote: post #609
zubiaur wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people take find their life meaning through craft and work. When that craft is suddenly less scarce, less special, so does that craft-tied meaning. I wonder if these feelings are what scribes and amanuenses felt when the printing press arrived. I do enjoy programming, I like my job and take pride on it, but I actively try for it not to be the life-mean giving activity. I'm a just mercenary of my trade.

The craft isn't any less scarce. If anything, only more. The craft of building wooden furniture is just as scarce as ever, despite the existence of Ikea.

Which is the only woodworkers that survive are the ones with enough customers willing to pay premium prices for furniture, or lucky to live in countries where Ikea like shops aren't yet a thing.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#706

Post by petterroea »

finaard wrote: post #703
petterroea wrote: post #694

Basically everyone I know in engineering share this resentment in some way, and the AI industry has itself to blame. People are fed up and burned out from being forced to try useless AI tools by non-technical leaders who do not understand how LLM works nor understand how they suck, and now resent anything related to AI. But for AI companies there is a perverse incentive to push AI on people until it finally works, be…

> and met a complete wall trying to explain why LLMs aren't useful for programming - at least not yet. I argue the code is often of low quality, very unmaintainable, and usually not useful outside quick experimentation. There are quite a few things they can do reasonably well - but they mostly are useful for experienced programmers/architecs as a time safer. Working with a LLM for that often reminds me of when I had…

I think there's a lot of reason to what you are saying. The 4-5 amount of time to make the codebase readable resonates.

If i really wanted to go 100% LLM as a challenge I think I'd compartmentalize a lot and maybe rely on OpenAPI and other API description languages to reduce the complexity of what the LLM has to deal with when working on its current "compartment" (i.e the frontend or backend). Claude.md also helps a lot.

I do believe in some time saving, but at the same time, almost every line of code I write usually requires some deliberate thought, and if the LLM makes that thought, I often have to correct it. If i use English to explain exactly what I want it is some times ok, but then that is basically the same effort. At least that's my empirical experience.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#707

Post by isodev »

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.

I don’t think people hate models. They hate that techbros are putting LLMs in places they don’t belong … and then trying to anthropomorphize the thing finding what best rhymes with your prompt as “reasoning” and “intelligence” (which it isn’t).

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#708

Post by nikkwong »

LaFolle wrote: post #655
nikkwong wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. I'm also of the mindset that even if this is not true, that is, even if current state of LLMs is best that it ever will be, AI still would be helpful. It is already great at writing self contained scripts, and efficiency with large codebases has already improved. > I would imagine the chance of many of us being on the…

I mean, some are good at adaptability, while others get completely left in the dust. Look at the rust belt: jobs have left, and everyone there is desperate for a handout. Trump is busy trying to engineer a recession in the US—when recessions happen, companies at the margin go belly-up and the fat is trimmed from the workforce. With the inroads that AI is making into the workforce, it could be the first restructuring where we see massive losses in jobs.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#709

Post by mips_avatar »

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…

Thanks for signing up. I’m going to try really hard to open up some beta slots next week so more people can try it. There’s some embarrassingly bad bugs in prod right now…

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#710

Post by adastra22 »

waterTanuki wrote: post #460
adastra22 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI will never make financial sense.

UBI isn't about making financial sense it's about keeping the last traces of society duct taped together before it all collapses. Remove all pathways to a middle-class life and you're left with a populace on the precipice of violent revolts.

What I mean is that it simply would not work. The math doesn't add up. It would directly lead to Weimar levels of hyperinflation. Which is a far worse outcome.
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