26 ms·

Everyone in Seattle hates AI

• mips_avatar 11mo ago
  Author here if anyone has thoughts
  • cosmicgadget 11mo ago
    Would love to hear more anecdotes from former colleagues.
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      One fun one was the leadership of Windows Update became obsessed with shipping AI models via Windows update, but they can't safely ship files larger than 200mb inside of an update.
  • nickff 11mo ago
    I was under the distinct impression that Seattle was somewhat divided over 'big tech', with many long-term residents resenting Microsoft and Amazon's impact on the city (and longing for the 'artsy and free-spirited' place it used to be). Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the Microsofties and Amazonians? This is a genuine question, as I've never lived in Seattle, but I visit often, and live in the PNW.
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      They kind of are, though I think so many locals now work in big tech in some way that it's shifted a bit. I wish we could return to being a bit more artsy and free spirited
    • caconym_ 11mo ago
      > Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the Microsofties and Amazonians? As somebody who has lived in Seattle for over 20 years and spent about 1/3 of it working in big tech (but not either of those companies), no, I don't really think so. There is a lot of resentment, for the same reasons as everywhere else: a substantial big tech presence puts anyone who can't get on the train at a significant economic disadvantage.
    • MicrosoftShill 11mo ago
      I've lived in the Seattle area most of my life and lived in San Francisco for a year. SF embraces tech and in general (politics, etc) has a culture of being willing to try new things. Overall tech hostility is low, but the city becoming a testbed for projects like Waymo is possibly changing that. There is a continuous argument that their free-spirited culture has been cannibalized by tech. Seattle feels like the complete opposite. Resistant to change, resistant to trying things, and if you say you work in tech you're now a "techbro" and met with eyerolls. This is in part because in Seattle if you are a "techbro" you work for one of the megacorps whereas in SF a "techbro" could be working for any number of cool startups. As you mentioned, Seattle has also been taken over by said megacorps which has colored the impressions of everyone. When you have entire city blocks taken over by Microsoft/Amazon and the roads congested by them it definitely has some negative domino effects. As an aside, on TV we in the Seattle area get ads about how much Amazon has been doing for the community. Definitely some PR campaign to keep local hostility low.
      • sleepybrett 11mo ago
        'how much they do for the community' like trying to buy elections so we won't tax them, same thing boeing and microsoft did. Anytime out local government gets a little uppity suddenly these big corps are looking to move like boeing largely did. Remember Amazon HQ2, at least part of the reasoning behind that disaster was seattlites asking, 'what the hell is amazon doing for us besides driving up rents and snarling traffic?' (.. and exactly how is boeing doing since it was forced to move away from 'engineering culture' by moving out of the city where their workforce was trained and training the next generation. Oh yeah planes are falling out of the sky and their software is pushing planes into the ground.)
      • jfalcon 11mo ago
        I'm sure the 5% employee tax in Seattle and the bill being introduced in Olympia will do more to smooth things over than some quirky blipvert will. I think most people in Seattle know how economics works, logic follows: while "techbro" don't work is true: if "techbro" debt > income: unless assets == 0: sellgighustle else sellhousebeforeforeclosure nomoreseattleforyou("techbro") end else "gigbot" isn't summoned and people don't get paid. "techbro" health-- due to high expense of COBRA. [etc...] end end
    • jfalcon 11mo ago
      It depends on how AI affects your economy. If you are a writer or a painter or a developer - in a city as expensive as Seattle - then one may feel a little threatened. Then it becomes the trickle down effect, if I lose my job, I may not be able to pay for my dog walker, or my child care or my hair dresser, or... Are they sympathetic? It depends on how much they depend on those who are impacted. Everyone wants to get paid - but AI don't have kids to feed or diapers to buy.
  • smikhanov 11mo ago
    "Grabbed lunch" is an awful phrase
    • smikhanov 11mo ago
      Oh, and there's also "grok" just few paragraphs later!
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      It kind of is
  • rawgabbit 11mo ago
    Regarding "And then came the final insult: everyone was forced to use Microsoft's AI tools whether they worked or not." As a customer, I actually had an MS account manager once yelled at me for refusing to touch <latest newfangled vaporware from MS> with a ten foot pole. Sorry, burn me a dozen times; I don't have any appendages left to care. I seriously don't get Microsoft. I am still flabbergasted anytime anyone takes Microsoft seriously.
    • robocat 11mo ago
      > MS account manager once yelled at me Presumably the account manager is under a lot of pressure internally... Do they repeatedly yell at you? Do you know how your <vaporware> usage was measured - what metrics was the account manager supposed to improve?
      • rawgabbit 11mo ago
        He was trying to get people to use the Azure unnamed service. I assume others like me did a trial, POC, and immediately ran away screaming.
  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
    I like that you shared the insight. Feels like you shared a secret to the world that is not so secret if you work a Microsoft (I guess this is less about the city) I feel bad for people who work at dystopian places where you can't just do the job, try to get ahead etc. It is set up to make people fail and play politics. I wonder if the company is dying slowly but with AI hype qaand old good foundations keeping her stock price going.
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      Well I think it's interesting how much what goes on inside of the major employers that affects Seattle. Like crappy behavior inside of Microsoft is felt outside of it.
  • chankstein38 11mo ago
    Howdy! I personally don't really understand the "point" the article is trying to make. I mostly agree with your sentiment that AI can be useful. I too have seen a massive increase in productivity in my hobbies, thanks to LLMs. As to the point of the article, is it just to say "People shouldn't hate LLMs"? My takeaway was more "This person's future isn't threatened directly so they just aren't understanding why people feel this way." but I also personally believe that, if the CEOs have their way, AI will threaten every job eventually. So yeah I guess I'm just curious what the conclusion presented here is meant to be?
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      I guess in conclusion I'm saying that it's hard to build in Seattle, and that's really unfortunate.
      • the_af 11mo ago
        I don't follow why it's hard to build in Seattle. Do you mean before this "AI summer" they struggled, or that with AI they have become too slow because they won't adopt it?
  • throwaway_dang 11mo ago
    Out of curiosity, is this piece just some content that you created in the hopes of boosting your company's mindshare?
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      I'm just really isolated right now, I've been building solo for a long time. I don't have anyone to share my thoughts with, which is something I used to really value at Microsoft.
  • the_af 11mo ago
    Out of curiosity, did you redact this with AI? It has all the telltale signs: lots of em-dashes but also "punched up" paragraphs, a lot of them end with a zinger, e.g. > Amazon folks are slightly more insulated, but not by much. The old Seattle deal—Amazon treats you poorly but pays you more—only masks the rot. or > Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world—so sometimes they actually do. Once or twice can be coincidence, but a full article of it reads a tiny bit like AI slop.
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      I wrote it by hand but I had an AI do some edits. I got the m dash drilled into me by my creative writing teacher in college.
      • nemomarx 11mo ago
        I actually think your usage is pretty different from the usual ai style, if that means anything. More traditional? I'm not sure why you needed it for edits though, since you seem good at writing generally.
  • caconym_ 11mo ago
    It kinda seems like you're conflating Microsoft with Seattle in general. From the outside, what you say about Microsoft specifically seems to be 100% true: their leadership has gone fucking nuts and their irrational AI obsession is putting stifling pressure on leaf level employees. They seem convinced that their human workforce is now a temporary inconvenience. But is this representative of Seattle tech as a whole? I'm not sure. True, morale at Amazon is likely also suffering due to recent layoffs that were at least partly blamed on AI. Anecdotally, I work at a different FAANMG+whatever company in Seattle that I feel has actually done a pretty good job with AI internally: providing tools that we aren't forced to use (i.e. they add selectable functionality without disrupting existing workflows), not tying ratings/comp to AI usage (seriously how fucking stupid are they over in Redmond?), and generally letting adoption proceed organically. The result is that people have room to experiment with it and actually use it where it adds real value, which is a nonzero but frankly much narrower slice than a lot of """technologists""" and """thought leaders""" are telling us. Maybe since Microsoft and Amazon are the lion's share (are they?) of big tech employment in Seattle, your point stands. But I think you could present it with a bit of a broader view, though of course that would require more research on your part. Also, I'd be shocked if there wasn't a serious groundswell of anti-AI sentiment in SF and everywhere else with a significant tech industry presence. I suspect you are suffering from a bit of bias due to running in differently-aligned circles in SF vs. Seattle.
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      I think probably the safest place to be right now emotionally is a smaller company. Something about the hype right now is making Microsoft/Amazon act worse. Be curious to hear what specifically your company is doing to give people agency.
      • caconym_ 11mo ago
        > Be curious to hear what specifically your company is doing to give people agency. Wrt. AI specifically, I guess we are simply a) not using AI as an excuse to lay off scores of employees (at least, not yet) and b) not squeezing the employees who remain with arbitrary requirements that they use shitty AI tools in their work. More generally, participation in design work and independent execution are encouraged at all levels. At least in my part of the company, there simply isn't the same kind of miserable, paranoid atmosphere I hear about at MS and Amazon these days. I am not aware of any rigidly enforced quota for PIPing people. Etc. Generally, it feels like our leadership isn't afflicted with the same kind of desperate FOMO fever other SMEGMAs are suffering from. Of course, I don't mean to imply there haven't been layoffs in the post free money era, or that some people don't end up on shitty teams with bad managers who make them miserable, or that there isn't the usual corporate bullshit, etc.
  • IAmBroom 11mo ago
    Nope, no one does. This thread is devoid of opinion on the topic.
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      I think people just have a lot of frustration to get off their chest, which is fine.
  • jfalcon 11mo ago
    I get the feeling that this is supposed to be about the economics of a fairly expensive city/state and that "six-figure salary", but you don't really call it out. If it was about the technology, then it would be no different than being a java/c++ developer and calling someone who does html and javascript their equal so pay them. It's not. People get anxious when something may cause them to have to change - especially in terms of economics and the pressures that puts on people beyond just "adulting". But I don't really think you explained the why of their anxiety. Pointing the finger at AI is like telling the Germans that all their problems are because of Jews without calling out why the Germans are feeling pressure from their problems in the first place.
  • evil-olive 11mo ago
    from your post: > Bring up AI in a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you're advocating asbestos. can you please share the methodology you used to reach this conclusion? in other words - what is the sample size? how many Seattle coffee shops did you walk into and yell out "hey, what do people think about AI?" (or did you gather the data in a different way, such as by approaching individual people at the coffee shop?) what is your control group? in other words, how many SF coffee shops did you visit and conduct the same experiment?
• somekyle2 11mo ago
  Anecdotally, lots of people in SF tech hate AI too. _Most_ people out of tech do. But, enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters.
  • tptacek 11mo ago
    It is not at all my experience working in local government (that is, in close contact with everybody else paying attention to local government) that non-tech people hate AI. It seems rather the opposite.
    • kg 11mo ago
      EDIT: Removed part of my post that pissed people off for some reason. shrug It makes a lot of sense that someone casually coming in to use chatgpt for 30 minutes a week doesn't have any reason to think more deeply about what using that tool 'means' or where it came from. Honestly, they shouldn't have to think about it.
      • tptacek 11mo ago
        The claim I was responding to implied that non-techies distinctively hate AI. You're a techie.
    • wk_end 11mo ago
      Managers everywhere love the idea of AI because it means they can replace expensive and inefficient human workers with cheap automation. Among actual people (i.e. not managers) there seems to be a bit of a generation gap - my younger friends (Gen Z) are almost disturbingly enthusiastic about entrusting their every thought and action to ChatGPT; my older friends (young millennials and up) find it odious.
      • tptacek 11mo ago
        The median age of people working local politics is probably 55, and I've met more people (non-family, that is) over 70 doing this than in anything else, and all of them are (a) using AI for stuff and (b) psyched to see any new application of AI being put to use (for instance, a year or so ago, I used 4o to classify every minute spent in our village meetings according to broad subjects). Or, drive through Worth and Bridgeview in IL, where all the middle eastern people in Chicago live, and notice all the AI billboards. Not billboards for AI, just, billboards obviously made with GenAI. I think it's just not true that non-tech people are especially opposed to AI.
• ispeaknumbers 11mo ago
  this reads like an ad for your project
  • cosmicgadget 11mo ago
    You mean Wanderfugl???
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      An iconic name
  • exmadscientist 11mo ago
    It reads like it's AI-edited, which is deliciously ironic. (Protip: if you're going to use em—dashes—everywhere, either learn to use them appropriately, or be prepared to be blasted for AI—ification of your writing.)
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      My creative writing teacher in college drilled the m dash into me. I can’t really write without them now
      • jasonjmcghee 11mo ago
        I think the presence of em dashes is a very poor metric for determining if something is AI generated. I'm not sure why it's so popular.
        • mips_avatar 11mo ago
          So the funny thing is m dashes have always been a great trick to help your writing flow better. I guess gpt4o figured this out in RLHF and now it's everywhere
        • exmadscientist 11mo ago
          For me it is that they are wrongly used in this piece. Em dashes as appositives have the feel of interruption—like this—and are to be used very sparingly. They're a big bump in the narrative's flow, and are to be used only when you want a big bump. Otherwise appositives should be set off with commas, when the appositive is critical to the narrative, or parentheses (for when it isn't). Clause changes are similar—the em dash is the biggest interruption. Colons have a sense of finality: you were building up to this: and now it is here. Semicolons are for when you really can't break two clauses into two sentences with a full stop; a full stop is better most of the time. Like this. And so full stops should be your default clause splice when you're revising. Having em-dashes everywhere—but each one or pair is used correctly—smacks of AI writing—AI has figured out how to use them, what they're for, and when they fit—but has not figured out how to revise text so that the overall flow of the text and overall density of them is correct—that is, low, because they're heavy emphasis—real interruptions. (Also the quirky three-point bullet list with a three-point recitation at the end with bolded leadoffs to each bullet point and a final punchy closer sentence is totally an AI thing too.) But, hey, I guess I fit the stereotype!—I'm in Seattle and I hate AI, too.
• not_the_fda 11mo ago
  I don't think the phenomenon is limited to Seattle.
  • jofla_net 11mo ago
    Its not. I know some ex bay area devs who are the same mind, and i'm not too far off. I think its definitely stronger in MS as my friend on the inside tells me, than most places. There are alot of elements to it, one being profits at all costs, the greater economy, FOMO, and a resentment of engineers and technical people who have been practicing, what execs i can guess only see as alchemy, for a long time. They've decided that they are now done with that and that everyone must use the new sauce, because reasons. Sadly until things like logon buttons dis-appear and customers get pissed, it won't self-correct. I just wish we could present the best version of ourselves and as long as deadlines are met, it'll all work out, but some have decided for scorched-earth. I suppose its a natural reaction to always want to be on the cutting edge, even before the cake has left the oven.
• nullbound 11mo ago
  'If you could classify your project as "AI," you were safe and prestigious. If you couldn't, you were nobody. Overnight, most engineers got rebranded as "not AI talent."' It hits weirdly close to home. Our leadership did not technically mandate use, but 'strongly encourages' it. I did not even have my review yet, but I know that once we get to the goals part, use of AI tools will be an actual metric ( which is.. in my head somewhere between skeptic and evangelist.. dumb ). But the 'AI talent' part fits. For mundane stuff like data model, I need full committee approval from people, who don't get it anyway ( and whose entire contribution is: 'what other companies are doing' ).
  • kg 11mo ago
    I know of at least one bigco that will no longer hire anyone, period, who doesn't have at least 6 months of experience using genai to code and isn't enthusiastic about genai. No exceptions. I assume this is probably true of other companies too. I think it makes some amount of sense if you've decided you want to be "an AI company", but it also makes me wary. Apocryphally Google for a long period of time struggled to hire some people because they weren't an 'ideal culture fit'. i.e. you're trying to hire someone to fix Linux kernel bugs you hit in production, but they don't know enough about Java or Python to pass the interview gauntlet...
    • empressplay 11mo ago
      Like any tool, the longer you use it the better you learn where you can extract value from it and where you can't, where you can leverage it and where you shouldn't. Because your behaviour is linked to what you get out of the LLM, this can be quite individual in nature, and you have to learn to work with it through trial and error. But in the end engineers do appear to become more productive 'pairing' with an LLM, so it's no surprise companies are favouring LLM-savvy engineers.
      • bigstrat2003 11mo ago
        > But in the end engineers do appear to become more productive 'pairing' with an LLM Quite the opposite: LLMs reduce productivity, they don't increase it. They merely give the illusion of productivity because you can generate code real fast, but that isn't actually useful when you spend time fixing all the mistakes it made. It is absolutely insane that companies are stupid enough to require people use something which cripples them.
• ab987 11mo ago
  [dead]
• tasspeed 11mo ago
  textbook way to NOT rollout AI for your org. AI has genuine benefits to white collar workers, but they are not trained for the use-cases that would actually benefit them, nor are they trained in what the tech is actually good at. they are being punished for using the tools poorly (with no guidance on how to use them "good"), and when they use the tools well, they fear being laid off once an SOP for their AI workflows are written.
• SecretDreams 11mo ago
  > My former coworker—the composite of three people for anonymity—now believes she's both unqualified for AI work and *that AI isn't worth doing anyway*. *She's wrong on both counts*, but the culture made sure she'd land there. I'm not sure they're as wrong as these statements imply? Do we think there's more or less crap out now with the advent and pervasiveness of AI? Not just from random CEOs pushing things top down, but even from ICs doing their own gig?
  • chankstein38 11mo ago
    Oh but we're all supposed to swoon over the author's ability to make ANOTHER AI powered mapping solution! Probably vibecoded and bloated too. Just what we need, obviously all the haters are wrong! /s
    • empressplay 11mo ago
      Honestly if it's using a swiss-army-knife framework it's already bloated.
  • IAmBroom 11mo ago
    Getting a real Jonathan Coulton "Skullcrusher Mountain" vibe here from the author (where vibe has its traditional meaning)... "I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you But I get the feeling that you don't like it What's with all the screaming? You like monkeys, you like ponies Maybe you don't like monsters so much Maybe I used too many monkeys Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony Making a gift for you?
• groos 11mo ago
  It's not just that AI is being pushed on to employees by the tech giants - this is true - but that the hype of AI as a life changing tech is not holding up and people within the industry can easily see this. The only life-changing thing it's doing is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of eliminating jobs in the tech industry and outside by CEOs who have bet too much on AI. Everyone currently agrees that there is no return on all the money spent on AI. Some players may survive and do well in the future but for a majority there is only the prospect of pain, and this is what all the negativity is about.
  • pnathan 11mo ago
    As a layoff justification and a hurryup tool, it is pretty loathesome. People use their jobs for their housing, food, etc.
    • elzbardico 11mo ago
      More than this man. AI is making me re-appreciate part of the Marxist criticism of capitalism. The concept of worker alienation could be easily extended in new forms to the labor situation in an AI-based economy. FWIW, humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.
      • adastra22 11mo ago
        Marx was correct in his identification of the problem (the communist manifesto still holds up today). Marx went off the rails with his solution.
        • venturecruelty 11mo ago
          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.
          • 11mo ago
• vunderba 11mo ago
  From the article: > I wanted her take on Wanderfugl , the AI-powered map I've been building full-time. I can at least give you one piece of advice. Before you decide on a company or product name, take the time to speak it out loud so you can get a sense of how it sounds.
  • epolanski 11mo ago
    Also, do it assuming different linguistic backgrounds. It could sound dramatically different by people that speak English but as second language, which are going to be a whole lot of your users, even if the application is in English.
    • mips_avatar 11mo ago
      It's pronounced wanderfull in Norwegian
      • epolanski 11mo ago
        And how many of your users are going to have Nordic backgrounds? I personally thought it was wander _fughel_ or something. Let alone how difficult it is to remember how to spell it and look it up on Google.
      • quickthrowman 11mo ago
        Just FYI, I would read it out loud in English as “wander fuggle”. I would assume most Americans would pronounce the ‘g’. I thought ‘wanderfugl’ was a throwback to ~15 years ago when it was fashionable to use a word but leave out vowels for no reason, like Flickr/ /Tumblr/Scribd/Blendr.
      • hbosch 11mo ago
        "Wanderful" would be a better name.
      • thinkling 11mo ago
        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.
• ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
  Literally everyone I know is sick of AI. Sick of it being crowbar'd into tools we already use and find value in. Sick of it being hyped at us as though it's a tech moment it simply isn't. Sick of companies playing at being forward thinking and new despite selling the same old shit but they've bolted a chatbot to it, so now it's "AI." Sick of integrations and products that just plain do not fucking work. I wouldn't shit talk you to your face if you're making an AI thing. However I also understand the frustration and the exhaustion with it, and to be blunt, if a product advertises AI in it, I immediately do treat it more skeptically. If the features are opt-in, fine. If however it seems like the sort of thing that's going to start spamming me with Clippy-style "let our AI do your work for you!" popups whilst I'm trying to learn your fucking software, I will get aggravated extremely fast.
  • venturecruelty 11mo ago
    Oh, I will happily get in your face and tell you your AI garbage sucks. I'm not afraid of these people, and you shouldn't be, either. Bring back social pressure. We successfully shamed Google Glassholes into obscurity, we can do it again. This shit has infested entire operating systems now, all so someone can get another billion dollars, while the rest of us struggle to make rent. It's made my career miserable, for so many reasons. It's made my daily life miserable. I'm so sick and tired of it.
    • ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
      The thing that stops me being outwardly hostile is that there are a minority, and it is a minor, minor minority, of applications for AI that are actually pretty interesting and useful. It's just catastrophically oversaturated with samey garbage that does nothing. I'm all for shaming people who just link to ChatGPT and call their whatever thing AI powered. If you're actually doing some work though and doing something interesting, I'll hear you out.
    • marcosdumay 11mo ago
      > This shit has infested entire operating systems now Well, it's not the fault on a random person doing some project that may even be cool. I'll certainly adjust my priors and start treating the person as probably an idiot. But if given evidence they are not, I'm interested on what they are doing.
• stego-tech 11mo ago
  This isn’t just a Seattle thing, but I do think the outsized presence of specific employers there contributes to an outsized negativity around AI. Look, good engineers just want to do good work. We want to use good tools to do good work, and I was an early proponent of using these tools in ways to help the business function better at PriorCo. But because I was on the wrong team (On-Prem), and because I didn’t use their chatbots constantly (I was already pitching agents before they were a defined thing, I just suck at vocabulary), I was ripe for being thrown out. That built a serious resentment towards the tooling for the actions of shitty humans. I’m not alone in these feelings of resentment. There’s a lot of us, because instead of trusting engineers to do good work with good tools, a handful of rich fucks decided they knew technology better than the engineers building the fucking things.
• ryanwhitney 11mo ago
  Our (on-the-way-out) mayor likes it! "I said, Imagine how cool would this be if we had like, a 10-foot wall. It’s interactive and it’s historical. And you could talk to Martin Luther King, and you could say, ‘Well, Dr, Martin Luther King, I’ve always wanted to meet you. What was your day like today? What did you have for breakfast?’ And he comes back and he talks to you right now."
• venturecruelty 11mo ago
  I'm stuck between feeling bad because this is my field–I spend most days worrying about not being able to pay my bills or get another job–and wanting to shake every last tech worker by the shoulders and yell "WAKE UP!" at them. If you are unhappy with what your employer is doing, because they have more power over you, you don't have to just sit there and take it. You can organize. Of course, you could also go online and sulk, I suppose. There are more options between "ZIRP boomtimes lol jobs for everyone!" and "I got fired and replaced with ELIZA". But are tech workers willing to expore them? That's the question. It just feels like it's in bad taste that we have the most money and privilege and employment left (despite all of the doom and gloom), and we're sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. If not now, when? And if not us, who?
• akomtu 11mo ago
  Good for them. It turns out, the common folk have more wisdom than tech bros with regard to AI.
  • RandallBrown 11mo ago
    This article is about how the tech bros in Seattle hate AI.
  • typs 11mo ago
    Ah yes. The big tech employees of Amazon and Microsoft, the common folk.
• arjie 11mo ago
  I wonder if I'm the guy in the bubble or if all these people are in the bubble. Everyone I know is really enjoying using these tools. I wrote a comment yesterday about how much my life has improved https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131280 But also, it's not just my own. My wife's a graphic designer. She uses AI all the time. Honestly, this has been revolutionary for me for getting things done.
  • empressplay 11mo ago
    I recently returned to the world of education and it's _everywhere_. I feel for those people who hate LLMs because they've already lost the war.
• toast0 11mo ago
  > 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 apologize it away [1]. And this garbage is being shoved in my face from every angle --- my browser added it, my search engine added it, my desktop OS added it, my mobile OS added it, some of my banks are pushing it, AI comment slop is ruining discussion forums everywhere (even more than they already were, which is impressive!). In the mean time, AI is sucking up all the GPUs, all the RAM, and all the kWH. If AI is actually working for you, great, but you're going to have to show it. Otherwise, I'm just going to go into my cave and come out in 5 years and hope things got better. [1] Just a couple days ago, my spouse was complaining to her friend about a change that Facebook made, and her friend pasted an AI suggestion for how to fix it with like 7 steps that were all fabricated. That isn't helpful at all. It's even less helpful than if the friend just suggested to contact support and/or delete the facebook account.
  • TulliusCicero 11mo ago
    I've recently found that it can be a useful substitute for stackoverflow. It does occasionally make shit up, but stackoverflow and forums searching also has a decently high miss rate as well, so that doesn't piss me off too much. And it's usually immediately obvious when a method doesn't exist, so it doesn't waste a lot of time for each incident. Specifically I was using Gemini to answer questions about Godot specifically for C# (not gdscript or using the IDE, where documentation and forums support are stronger), and it was mostly quite good for that.
  • cwillu 11mo ago
    It's like porn: use it privately if you have to, but don't make it my problem.
  • jonners00 11mo ago
    >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'
• cosmicgadget 11mo ago
  To the extent that Microsoft pushes their employees to use all their other shitty products, Copilot seeks like just another one (it can't be more miserable/broken than Sharepoint).
• symbogra 11mo ago
  I honestly expected this to be about sanctimonious lefties complaining about a single chatgpt query using an Olympic swimming pool worth of water, but it was actually about Seattle big tech workers hating it due to layoffs and botched internal implementations which is a much more valid reason to hate it. My buddies still or until recently still at Amazon have definitely been feeling this same push. Internal culture there has been broken since the post covid layoffs, and layering "AI" over the layoffs leaves a bad taste.
• pkasting 11mo ago
  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 apparently-effective tools that have negative long-term consequences (see: anything involving learning a new skill, anything where correctness is critical), and a large number of places where LLMs are simply ineffective from the get-go but will increasingly be rammed down consumers' throats. Accordingly I tend to be overly skeptical of AI proponents and anything touching AI. It would be nice if I was more rational, but I'm not; I want everyone working on AI and making money from AI to crash and burn hard. (See also: cryptocurrency)
  • hectdev 11mo ago
    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.
    • anthem2025 11mo ago
      [dead]
    • throwout4110 11mo ago
      Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. The progress has moved astoundingly fast and the sheer amount of capital and competition and pressure means the train is not slowing down. Predictions of “2025 is the year of coding agents” from a chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in fact absolutely true…
• bccdee 11mo ago
  > 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 excited, so they'll fork over more money). This isn't a strict dichotomy; often companies with real products will mix in tidbits of hype, such as Microsoft's "pivot to AI" which is discussed in the article. But moving toward one pole moves you away from the other. I think many engineers want to stay as far from hype-driven tech as they can. LLMs are a more substantive technology than blockchain ever was, but like blockchain, their potential has been greatly overstated. I'd rather spend my time delivering value to customers than performing "big potential" to investors. So, no. I don't think "engineers don't try because they think they can't." I think engineers KNOW they CAN and resent being asked to look pretty and do nothing of value.
  • throwout4110 11mo ago
    > 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 excited, so they'll fork over more money). AI is not both of these things? There are no real AI products that have real customers and make money by giving people what they need? > LLMs are a more substantive technology than blockchain ever was, but like blockchain, their potential has been greatly overstated. What do you view as the potential that’s been stated?
    • Fraterkes 11mo ago
      A way to state this point that you may find less uncharitable is that a lot of current LLM applications are just very thin shells around ChatGPT and the like. In those cases the actual "new" technology (ie, not the underlying ai necessarily) is not as substantive and novel (to me at least) as a product whose internals are not just an (existing) llm. (And I do want to clarify that, to me personally, this tendency towards 'thin-shell' products is kind of an inherent flaw with the current state of ai. Having a very flexible llm with broad applications means that you can just put Chatgpt in a lot of stuff and have it more or less work. With the caveat that what you get is rarely a better UX than what you'd get if you'd just prompted an llm yourself. When someone isn't using llms, in my experience you get more bespoke engineering. The results might not be better than an llm, but obviously that bespoke code is much more interesting to me as a fellow programmer)
• vessenes 11mo ago
  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 little boring, or at least don't give us any new market data. In MS in that era, there was a massive gold rush inside the org to Cloud-ify everything and move to Azure - people who did well at that prospered, people who did not, ... often did not. This sort of internal marketplace is endemic, and probably a good thing at large tech companies - from the senior leadership side, seeing how employees vote with their feet is valuable - as is, often, the directional leadership you get from a Satya who has MUCH more information than someone on the ground in any mid-level role. While I'm sure there were many naysayers about the Cloud in 2012, they were wrong, full stop. Azure is immensely valuable. It was right to dig in on it and compete with AWS. I personally think Satya's got a really interesting hyper scaling strategy right now -- build out national-security-friendly datacenters all over the world -- and I think that's going to pay -- but I could be wrong, and his strategy might be much more sophisticated and diverse than that; either way, I'm pretty sure Seattleites who hate how AI has disrupted their orgs and changed power politics and winners and losers in-house will have to roll with the program over the next five years and figure out where they stand and what they want to work on.
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    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.
    • ilaksh 11mo ago
      Lol. You don't think that Microsoft has _a_ compelling AI product? The new version of 365 Copilot is objectively compelling, even if it is a work in progress. And Github Copilot is also objectively compelling.
• shepardrtc 11mo ago
  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 Uber-for-pets-AI-ly idea pops up won't happen. 4. I don't think people hate AI, they hate the hype. Anyways, your app actually does sound interesting so I signed up for it.
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    I think these companies would benefit from honesty, if they're right and their new AI capabilities are really powerful then poisoning their workforce against AI is the worst thing they could do right now. Like a generous severance approach and compassionate layoffs would go a long way right now.
  • hexator 11mo ago
    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.
    • zubiaur 11mo ago
      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.
      • venturecruelty 11mo ago
        I mean, I would still hate to be replaced by some chat bot (without being fairly compensated because, societally, it's kind of a dick move for every company to just fire thousands of people and then nobody can find a job elsewhere), but I wouldn't be as mad if the damn tools actually worked. They don't. It's one thing to be laid off, it's another to be laid off, ostensibly, to be replaced by some tool that isn't even actually thinking or reasoning, just crapping out garbage. And I will not be replying to anyone who trots out their personal AI success story. I'm not interested.
• side_up_down 11mo ago
  There's a great non-AI point in this article - Seattle has great engineers. In pursuing startups, Seattle engineers are relatively unambitious compared to the Bay Area. By that I mean there's less "shooting for unicorns" and a comparatively more reserved startup culture and environment. I'm not sure why. I don't think it's access to capital, but I'd love to hear thoughts.
  • sleepybrett 11mo ago
    My pet theory is that most of the investor class in seattle is ex microsoft and ex amazon. Neither microsoft nor amazon are really big splashy unicorns. Amazon's greatest innovation (aws) isn't even their original line of business and is now 'boring'. No doubt they've innovated all over their business in both little and big ways, but not splashy ways, hell every time amazon tries to splash they seem to fall on their ass more often than not (look at their various cancelled hardware lines, their game studios, etc. Alexa still chugs on, but she's not getting appreciably better to the end user over even the last 10 years). Microsoft is the same, a generally very practical company just trying to practical company stuff. All the guys that made their bones, vested and rested and now want to turn some of that windfall into investments likely don't have the kind of risk tolerance it takes to fund a potential unicorn. All smart people I'm sure, smart enough to negotiate big windfalls from ms/az but far less risk tollerant than a guy in SF who made their investment nestegg building some risky unicorn.
  • ajkjk 11mo ago
    one reason is that startup culture is cringe as hell I'm being course, but like... it is though.
• anthem2025 11mo ago
  [dead]
• sirreal14 11mo ago
  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 unit tests that mock the actual function under test. New features that actually already exist with more sane APIs. Code that is a tangled web of spaghetti. These people largely think AI is improving their speed but then their code isn't making it past code review. I worry about teams with less stringent code review cultures, modifying or improving these systems is going to be a major pain.
  • jfalcon 11mo ago
    I see it like the hype of js/node and whatever module tech is glued to it when it was new from the perspective of someone who didn't code js. Sum of F's given is still zero. -206dev
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    My hot take is that the evangelical people don't really like AI either they're just scared. I think you have to be outside of big tech to appreciate AI
    • elzbardico 11mo ago
      If AI replaces software engineers, people outside tech doesn't have much chance of surviving it too.
      • LPisGood 11mo ago
        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.
        • 11mo ago
• AstroBen 11mo ago
  I'm not surprised you're getting bad reactions from people who aren't already bought-in. You're starting from a firm "I'm right! They're wrong!" with no attempt to understand the other side. I'm sure that comes across not just in your writing
• 0_____0 11mo ago
  My 2¢... LLMs are kind of amazing for structured text output like code. I have a completely different experience using LLMs for assistance writing code (as a relative novice) than I do in literally every other avenue of life. Electricl engineering? Garbage. Construction projects? Useless. But code is code everywhere, and the immense amount of training data available in the form of working code and tutorials, design and style guides, means that the output as regards software development doesn't really resemble what anybody working in any other field sees. Even adjacent technical fields.
  • knollimar 11mo ago
    I'm experimenting with the gemini 3 and will do opus 4.5 soon, but I've seen huge jumps doing EE for construction over the last batch of models. I'm working on a harness but I think it can do some basic revit layouts with coaxing (which with a good harness should be really useful!) Let me know what you've experienced. Not many construction EE on HN.
    • alexeischiopu 11mo ago
      EE on HN and from construction! I use to draft in AutoCad and Revit before switching to software. Saw your comment around using Gemini. I’d love to chat with you. I started building something for the build side of the electrical world, but eventually want to make the jump to the design side of the house.
      • knollimar 11mo ago
        I'm on the build side, too. I think the root of the problem is the design side is very cautious of giving out their revit models to the build side, so you get pdfs in order to protect a bit of IP.
• inshard 11mo ago
  Seattle hits a doom (helped by the gloom) loop every winter. This too shall pass.
• lateforwork 11mo ago
  I love AI but I find Microsoft AI to be mostly useless. You'd think that anything called Copilot can do things for you, but most of the time it just gives you text answers. Even when it is in the context of the application it can't give you better answers than ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. What is the point of that? Satya has completely wasted their early lead in AI. Google is now the leader.
• lowbloodsugar 11mo ago
  The article reports Microsoft SDEs complaining about Copilot and being forced to use it. It's "worse than competitors' tools." No shit. But that's hardly everyone is Seattle. I'd imagine people at Amazon aren't upset about being forced to use Copilot, or Google folks.
• defraudbah 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• yieldcrv 11mo ago
  Unlike Seattle, in Los Angeles there are few software engineers but I would not utter AI at all here Its an infinite moving goalpost of hate, if its an actor, "creative", writer, AI is a monolithic doom, next its theoretical public policy or the lack thereof, and if they have nothing that affects them about it then it's about the energy use and environment nobody is going to hear about what your AI does, so don't mention anything about AI unless you're trying to earn or raise money. Its a double life
  • BGyss 11mo ago
    I was just about to post that this entire story could have been completely transposed to almost every conversation I've had in Los Angeles over the past year and a half. Looks like you beat me to it!
    • yieldcrv 11mo ago
      the only difference is that I don't have the conversation ha, I don't tell people about anything I do that's remotely close to that, rarely even mention anything in tech. I listen to enough other conversations to catch on to how it goes, very easy to get roped into an AI doomer conversation that's hard to get out of
• par 11mo ago
  I think reading the room is required here. You and your friend can both be right at the same time. You want to build an AI-enabled app, and indeed there's plenty of opportunity for it I'm sure. And your friend can hate what it's done to their job stability and the industry. Also, totally unrelated, but is the meaning or etymology behind the app name Wanderfugl? I initially read it as Wanderfungl.
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    It's wandering bird in Norwegian
    • gizzlon 11mo ago
      no..?
  • IAmBroom 11mo ago
    I "spoke" it to myself while reading, and instantly heard "Wonderfuckle".
• cvsswebshit 11mo ago
  Slop.
• tombert 11mo ago
  I got a thread on SomethingAwful gassed [1] because it was about an AI radio station app I was working on. People on that forum do not like AI. I think some of the reasons that they gave were bullshit, but in fairness I have grown pretty tired of how much low-effort AI slop has been ruining YouTube. I use ChatGPT all the time, but I am growing more than a little frustrated how much shit on the internet is clearly just generated text with no actual human contribution. I don’t inherently have an issue with “vibe coding”, but it is getting increasingly irritating having to dig through several-thousand-line pull requests of obviously-AI-generated code. I’m conflicted. I think AI is very cool, but it is so perfectly designed to exploit natural human laziness. It’s a tool that can do tremendous good, but like most things, it requires people use it with effort, which does seem to be the outlier case. [1] basically the hall of shame for bad threads.
• piljoong 11mo ago
  This isn’t really a common-folk-vs-tech-bros story. It’s about one specific part of Seattle’s tech culture reacting to AI hype. People outside that circle often have very different incentives.
• JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > AI-powered map > none of it had anything to do with what I built. She talked about Copilot 365. And Microsoft AI. And every miserable AI tool she's forced to use at work. My product barely featured. Her reaction wasn't about me at all. It was about her entire environment. She was given two context clues. AI. And maps. Maps work, which means all the information in an "AI-powered map" descriptor rests on the adjective.
  • Freak_NL 11mo ago
    The product website isn't convincing either. It's only in private beta, and the first example shows 'A scenic walking tour of Venice' as the desired trip. I'll readily believe LLMs will gladly give you some sort of itinerary for walking in Venice, including all highlights people write and post about a lot on social media to show how great their life is. But if you asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that region, the counter questions would be 'Why Venice specifically? I thought you hated crowds — have you considered less crowded alternatives where you will be appreciated more as a tourist? Have you actually been to Italy at all?'. LLMs are always going to give you the most plausible thing for your query, and will likely just rehash the same destinations from hundreds of listicles and status signalling social media posts. She probably understood this from the minimal description given.
    • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > I'll readily believe LLMs will gladly give you some sort of itinerary for walking in Venice I tried this in Crotone in September. The suggested walking tour was shit. The facts weren't remarkable. The stops were stupid and stupidly laid out. The whole experience was dumb and only redeeming because I was vacationing with a friend who founded on the of the AI companies. > if you asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that region, the counter questions would be 'Why Venice specifically? In the region? Because it's a gorgeous city with beautiful architecture, history and festivals?
      • Freak_NL 11mo ago
        > In the region? Because it's a gorgeous city with beautiful architecture, history and festivals? That would be a great answer to continue from. Would you come for the Biennale specifically? Do you care greatly about sustainability? Would you enjoy yourself more in a different gorgeous city without the mass-tourism problem if that meant you would feel more welcome? Is there a way you can visit Venice without contributing to the issue as much? Off-season perhaps? Venice is unique, but there are a lot of gorgeous places in the region, from Verona to Trieste.
• jesse_dot_id 11mo ago
  AI is in the Radium phase of its world-changing discovery life cycle. It's fun and novel, so every corporate grifter in the world is cramming it into every product that they can, regardless of it making sense. The companies being the most reckless will soon develop a cough, if they haven't already.
• watwut 11mo ago
  The author has unquestioning assumption that the only innovation possible is the one with AI. That is genuinely weird. Even if one believes in AI, innovation in non-AI space should be possible, no? Second, engineering and innovation are two different categories. Most of engineering is about ... making things work. Fixing bugs, refactoring fragile code, building new features people need or want. Maybe AI products would be hated less if they were just a little less about being able to pretend they are an innovation and just a little more about making things works.
• palmotea 11mo ago
  > But then I realized this was bigger than one conversation. Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building. But in Seattle? Instant hostility the moment they heard "AI." So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Does Seattle have more employee-workers and San Francisco has more people hustling for their startup? I assume Bali (being a vacation destination) is full people who are wealthy enough to feel they're insulated from whatever will happen.
  • wrs 11mo ago
    Seattle has always been a second-mover when it comes to hype and reality distortion. There is a lot more echo chamber fervor (and, more importantly, lots of available FOMO money to burn) in SF around whatever the latest hotness is.
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    My SF friends think they have a shot at working at a company whose AI products are good (cursor, anthropic, etc.), so that removes a lot of the hopelessness. Working for a month out of Bali was wonderful, it's mostly Australians and Dutch people working remotely. Especially those who ran their own businesses were super encouraging (though maybe that's just because entrepreneurs are more supportive of other entrepreneurs).
  • Klonoar 11mo ago
    I live in Seattle now, and have lived in San Francisco as well. Seattle has more “normal” people and the overall rhetoric about how life “should be” is in many ways resistant to tech. There’s a lot to like about the city, but it absolutely does not have a hustle culture. I’ve honestly found it depressing coming from the East Coast. Tangent aside, my point is that Seattle has far more of a comparison ground of “you all are building shit that doesn’t make the world better, it just devalues the human”. I think LLMs have (some) strong use cases, but it is impossible to argue that some of the societal downsides we see aren't ripe for hatred - and Seattle will latch on to that in a heartbeat. Edit: are -> aren't. Stupid autocorrect.
• hoppersoft 11mo ago
  This person crafts quite the straw man! > This belief system—that AI is useless and that you're not good enough to work on it anyway—hurts three groups I don't know anyone who thinks AI is useless. In fact, I've seen quite a few places where it can be quite useful. Instead, I think it's massively overhyped to its own detriment. This article presents the author as the person who has the One True Vision, and all us skeptics are just tragically undereducated. I'm a crusty old engineer. In my career, I've seen RAD tooling, CASE tools, no/low-code tools, SGML/XML, and Web3 not live up to the lofty claims of the devotees and therefore become radioactive despite there being some useful bits in there. I suspect AI is headed down the same path and see (and hear of) more and more projects that start out looking really impressive and then crumble after a few promising milestones.
  • kentm 11mo ago
    This person wrote a blog post admitting to tone-deafness in cheerleading AI and talking about all the ways AI hype has negatively impacted peoples' work environment. But then they wrap up by concluding that its the anti-AI people that are the problem. Thats a really weird conclusion to come to at the end of that blog post. My expectation was that the end result was "We should be measured and mindful with our advocacy, read the room, and avoid aggressively pushing AI in ways that negatively impact peoples' lives."
  • ben_w 11mo ago
    > I don't know anyone who thinks AI is useless. By my reading, there are several people on this discussion thread right now who think it (in the form of LLMs) is useless?
• qoez 11mo ago
  It's probably good if some portion of the engineering culture is irrationally against AI and like refuses to adopt it sort of amish style. There's probably a ton still good work that can only be done if every aspect of a product/thing is given focused human attention to it, some that might out-compete AI aided ones.
  • ktzar 11mo ago
    I think you hit the nail in the head there. There's absolutely nothing we can do with AI that we can't do without it. And the level of understanding of a large codebase that a solid group of engineers has is paramount to moving fast once the product is live.
    • seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
      > level of understanding of a large codebase that a solid group of engineers has is paramount to moving fast once the product is live. Trying hiring and retaining that solid group of engineers if you are a small/mid sized company without FAANG-level resources to offer.
• exasperaited 11mo ago
  It’s like you saw all the evidence and drew the conclusion you were most comfortable with, despite what the evidence suggests.
• itg 11mo ago
  Was this written by AI? It sounds like the writing style of an elementary school student. Almost entirely made of really simple sentence structures, and for whatever reason I find it really annoying to read.
  • atarian 11mo ago
    It has all the signs. Em-dashes. That distinct way of using short sentences to drive a point. Like this.
• jfalcon 11mo ago
  206dev here... Oh yeah, call out a tech city and all the butt-hurt-ness comes out. Perfect example of "Rage Bait". People here aren't hurt because of AI - people here are hurt because they learned they were just line items in a budget. When the interest rates went up in 2022/2023 and the cheap money went away, businesses had to pivot their taxes while appeasing the shareholder. Remember that time when Satya went to a company sponsored rich people thing with Aerosmith or whomever playing while announcing thousands of FTE's being laid off? Yeah, that... If your job can be done by a very small shell script, why wasn't it done before?
• bgwalter 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• thorum 11mo ago
  People hate what the corporations want AI to be and people hate when AI is used the way corporations seem to think it should be used, because the executives at these companies have no taste and no vision for the future of being human. And that is what people think of when they hear “AI”. I still think there’s a third path, one that makes people’s lives better with thoughtful, respectful, and human-first use of AI. But for some reason there aren’t many people working on that.
  • sph 11mo ago
    > I still think there’s a third path, one that makes people’s lives better with thoughtful, respectful, and human-first use of AI. But for some reason there aren’t many people working on that. I am thinking about this third path a lot, but the reality is that it wouldn't make AI more interesting than any other tool humans use to go about their daily lives. Does one get this obsessed about screwdrivers? The issue is that a human-first world where technology is subservient to our needs is very incompatible with our current society. The AI hype is part and parcel of the capitalistic mode of production where humans are ultimately judged for their ability to produce more commodities; the goal has always been to improve productivity to make more for cheaper — this time, the quest for efficiency has found a viable replacement for many humans activities.
• lukev 11mo ago
  Interesting that this talks about people in tech who hate AI; it's true, tech seems actually fairly divided with respect to AI sentiment. You know who's NOT divided? Everyone outside the tech/management world. Antipathy towards AI is extremely widespread.
  • IAmBroom 11mo ago
    And yet there are multiple posts ITT (obviously from tech-oriented people) proclaiming that large swaths of the non-tech world love AI. An opinion I've personally never encountered in the wild.
    • lukev 11mo ago
      I think they exist as a "market segment" (i.e, there are people out there who will use AI), but in terms of how people talk about it, sentiment is overwhelmingly negative in most circles. Especially folks in the arts and humanities. The only non-technical people I know who are excited about AI, as a group, are administrator/manager/consultant types.
• ajkjk 11mo ago
  > like building an AI product made me part of the problem. It's not about their careers. It's about the injustice of the whole situation. Can you possibly perceive the injustice? That the thing they're pissed about is the injustice? You're part of the problem because you can't. That's why it's not about whether the tools are good or bad. Most of them suck, also, but occasionally they don't--but that's not the point. The point is the injustice of having them shoved in your face; of having everything that could be doing good work pivot to AI instead; of everyone shamelessly bandwagoning it and ignoring everything else; etc.
  • ajkjk 11mo ago
    I feel like this is a textbook example of how people talk past each other. There are people in this world who operate under personal utility maximization, and they think everyone else does also. Then there are people who are maximizing for justice: trying to do the most meaningful work themselves while being upset about injustices. Call it scrupulosity, maybe. Executives doing stupid pointless things to curry favor is massively unjust, so it's infuriating. If you are a utilitarian person and you try to parse a scrupulous person according to your utilitarianism of course their actions and opinions will make no sense to you. They are not maximizing for utility, whatsoever, in any sense. They are maximizing for justice. And when injustices are perpetrated by people who are unaccountable, it creates anger and complaining. It's the most you can do. The goal is to get other people to also be mad and perhaps organize enough to do something about it. When you ignore them, when you fail to parse anything they say as about justice, then yes, you are part of the problem.
  • IAmBroom 11mo ago
    > like [being involved in creation of the problem] made me a part of the problem. Yeah, that's weird. Why would anyone think that? /s
  • basscomm 11mo ago
    > It's not about their careers. That's the thing, though, it is about their careers. It's not just that people are annoyed that someone who spends years to decades learning their craft and then someone who put a prompt into a chatbot that spit out an app that mostly works without understanding any of the code that they 'wrote'. It's that the executives are positively giddy at the prospect that they can get rid of some number their employees and the rest will use AI bots to pick up the slack. Humans need things like a desk and dental insurance and they fall unconscious for several hours every night. AI agents don't have to take lunch breaks or attend funerals or anything. Most employees that have figured this out resent AI getting shoved into every facet of their jobs because they know exactly what the end goal is: that lots of jobs are going to be going away and nothing is going to replace them. And then what?
• 1zael 11mo ago
  I don't think the root cause here is AI. It's the repeated pattern of resistance to massive technological change by system-level incentives. This story has happened again and again throughout recent history. I expect it to settle out in a few years where: 1. The fiduciary duties of company shareholders will bring them to a point of stopping to chase AI hype and instead derive an understanding of whether it's driving real top-line value for their business or not. 2. Mid to senior career engineers will have no choice but to level up their AI skills to stay relevant in the modern workforce.
• etempleton 11mo ago
  Everyone who has been told AI is a panacea by executive leadership who barely understand it feels this way.
  • ponector 11mo ago
    But AI takes job of average "western" IT employee. Like in meme AI stands for Actually Indians.
• bgwalter 11mo ago
  Wanderfugl is a strange for an "AI" powered map. The Wandervogel movement was against industrialization and pro nature. I'm sure they would have looked down on iPhones and centralized "AI" that gives them instructions where to go. Again a somewhat positive term (if you focus on "back to nature" and ignore the nationalist parts) is taken, assimilated and turned on its head.
• lisp2240 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ragnoroct 11mo ago
    HN guidelines ask commenters to avoid name-calling. You can critique the article without slurs.
    • lisp2240 11mo ago
      Exhibit B
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
• jmull 11mo ago
  It's almost like the hype of AI is massively ahead of the reality, and the people being directly squeezed by that dynamic don't like how it feels.
• zmmmmm 11mo ago
  As a place with a high density of people with agency to influence the outcome, I think it's important for people here to acknowledge that much of what the negative people think is probably 100% true. There will absolutely some cases where AI is used well. But probably the larger fraction will be where AI does not give better service, experience or tool. It will be used to give a cheaper but shittier one. This will be a big win for the company or service implementing it, but it will suck for literally everybody else involved. I really believe there's huge value in implementing AI pervasively. However it's going to be really hard work and probably take 5 years to do it well. We need to take an engineering and human centred approach and do it steadily and incrementally over time. The current semi-religious fervour about implementing it rapidly and recklessly is going to be very harmful in the longer term.
• mensetmanusman 11mo ago
  Finance and HR are supposed to demoralize parts of organizations asking for too many resources.
• paxys 11mo ago
  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 startups piggybacking off of them hoping to make it big.
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    That's probably the difference
  • artifaxx 11mo ago
    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.
• pnathan 11mo ago
  AI the hype beast product and the club for workers is a plague that I frankly hate. AI the manual algorithm to generate code and analyze images is quite an interesting underlying tech.
• whoamiopa 11mo ago
  Very new ex-MSFT here. I couldn’t relate more with your friend. That’s exactly what happened. I left Microsoft about 5 weeks ago and it’s been really hard to detox from that culture. AI pushed down everywhere. Sometimes shitty-AI that needed to be proved at all cost because it should live up to the hype. I was in one of such AI-orgs and even there several teams felt the pressure from SLT and a culture drift to a dysfunctional environment. Such pressure to use AI at all costs, as other fellows from Google mentioned, has been a secret ingredient to a bitter burnout. I’m going to therapy and under medication now to recover from it.
  • droopybuns 11mo ago
    Hey man- hang in there. FWIW: I realized this year that there are whole cohorts of management people who have absolutely zero relationship with the words that they speak. Literal tabula rasas who convert their thoughts to new words with no attachment to past statements/goals. Put another way: Liars exist and operate all around you in the top tier of the FAANGS rn.
    • ch_fr 11mo ago
      Reminded me of: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today...
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    Best of luck with this transition. I had a really hard time when I left Microsoft. It’s took longer than I expected to feel better but I do now.
    • sph 11mo ago
      Jesus, is it actually a thing to grieve after leaving a job? (doesn't sound like you were laid off)
      • mips_avatar 11mo ago
• medhir 11mo ago
  wow — this hit me hard. I live in Seattle, and got laid off from Microsoft as a PM in Jan of this year. Tried in early 2024 to demonstrate how we could leverage smaller models (such as Mixtral) to improve documentation and tailor code samples for our auth libraries. The usual “fiefdom” politics took over and the project never gained steam. I do feel like I was put in a certain “non-AI” category and my career stalled, even though I took the time to build AI-integrated prototypes and present them to leadership. It’s hard to put on a smile and go through interviews right now. It feels like the hard-earned skills we bring to the table are being so hastily devalued, and for what exactly?
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    I’m glad it resonated. I’ve found a lot of people in Microsoft have some shared struggles right now. It’s really hard get excited about jobs after that, but you only need one job to be the right fit. It sounds like you were working on some great stuff and you should keep pursuing that interest in the meantime. You never know where it might lead you.
• rr808 11mo ago
  There 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.
  • w4yai 11mo ago
    Gaming.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Havoc 11mo ago
    They do seem to be collecting a lot of self inflicted Ls lately
• blairanderson 11mo ago
  Seattle is going to tax the fuck out of big-tech, for better or worse.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• wavemode 11mo ago
  My previous software job was for a Seattle-based team within Amazon's customer support org. I consider it divine intervention that I departed shortly before LLMs got big. I can't imagine the unholy machinations my former team has been tasked with working on since I left.
• mgaunard 11mo ago
  The only clear applications for AI in software engineering are for throwaway code, which interestingly enough isn't used in software engineering at all, or for when you're researching how to do something, for which it's not as reliable as reading the docs. They should focus more on data engineering/science and other similar fields which is a lot more about those, but since there are often no tests there, that's a bit too risky.
• decimalenough 11mo ago
  The name "Wanderfugl" is wanderfully fugly. Oddly, the screenshots in the article show the name as "Wanderfull".
• uhkbuteuter 11mo ago
  [dead]
• excalibur 11mo ago
  Always amazed to see people who don't hate AI.
• uhkbuteuter 11mo ago
  [dead]
• neutronicus 11mo ago
  It's satisfying to hear that Microsoft engineers hate Microsoft's AI offerings as much as I do. Visual Studio is great. IntelliSense is great. Nothing open-source works on our giant legacy C++ codebase. IntelliSense does. Claude is great. Claude can't deal with millions of lines of C++. You know what would be great? If Microsoft gave Claude the ability to semantic search the same way that I can with Ctrl-, in Visual Studio. You know what would be even better? If it could also set breakpoints and inspect stuff in the Debugger. You know what Microsoft has done? Added a setting to Visual Studio where I can replace the IntelliSense auto-complete UI, that provides real information determined from semantic analysis of the codebase and allows me to cycle through a menu of possibilities, with an auto-complete UI that gives me a single suggestion of complete bullshit. Can't you put the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a fucking room together? Figure out how LLMs can augment your already-really-good-before-AI product? How to leverage your existing products to let Claude do stuff that Claude Code can't do?
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
  "But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world-so sometimes they actually do." ? For the better, or for the worse ?
• cwillu 11mo ago
  “I didn't fully grok how tone deaf I was being though. […] Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world—so sometimes they actually do.” Nope, still completely fucking tone deaf.
• themafia 11mo ago
  Instead of admitting you built the wrong thing you denigrate a friend and someone whom you admire. Instead of reconsidering the value of AI you immediately double down. This is a product of hurt feelings and not solid logic.
• decimalenough 11mo ago
  While everybody else is ranting about AI, I'll rant about something else: trip planning apps. There have been literally thousands of attempts at this and AFAICT precisely zero have ever gotten any traction. There are two intractable problems in this space. 1) A third party app simply cannot compete with Google Maps on coverage, accuracy and being up to date. Yes, there are APIs you can use to access this, but they're expensive and limited, which leads us to the second problem: 2) You can't make money off them. Nobody will pay to use your app (because there's so much free competition), and the monetization opportunities are very limited. It's too late in the flow to sell flights, you can't compete with Booking etc for hotel search, and big ticket attractions don't pay commissions for referrals. That leaves you with referrals for tours, but people who pay for tours are not the ones trying to DIY their trip planning in the first place.
  • debesyla 11mo ago
    It's just another business/service niche that is solved until the current Big Provider becomes Evil or goes under. Similar to "made for everyone" social networks and video upload platforms. But there are niches that are trip planning + there are no one solving the pain! For example Geocaching. I always dreamed about an easy way to plan Geocaching routes to travel and find interesting caches on the way. Currently you gotta filter them out and then eyeball the map what seems to be nearby, despite there, maybe, not being any real roads there, or the cache is probably maybe actually lost or has to be accessed at specific time of day. So... No one wants apps that are already solved + boring.
  • brokencode 11mo ago
    I use and pay for Wanderlog. Idk how their business is doing, but I love it as a user. They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations, so there is no problem for coverage.
    • cube00 11mo ago
      > They use an embedded Google Maps viewer for locations If they become popular they'll have to move to OSM, Google's steep charging for their Maps API at high usage that has brought companies to their knees is well known [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089776
• captainkrtek 11mo ago
  I've lived in Seattle my whole life, and have worked in tech for 12+ years now as a SWE. I think the SEA and SF tech scenes are hard to differentiate perfectly in a HN comment. However, I think any "Seattle hates AI" has to do more with the incessant pushing of AI into all the tech spaces. It's being claimed as the next major evolution of computing, while also being cited as reasons for layoffs. Sounds like a positive for some (rich people) and a negative for many other people. It's being forced into new features of existing products, while adoption of said features is low. This feels like cult-like behavior where you must be in favor of AI in your products, or else you're considered a luddite. I think the confusing thing to me is that things which are successful don't typically need to be touted so aggressively. I'm on the younger side and generally positive to developments in tech, but the spending and the CEO group-think around "AI all the things" doesn't sit well as being aligned with a naturally successful development. Also, maybe I'm just burned out on ads in podcasts for "is your workforce using Agentic AI to optimize ..."
• adverbly 11mo ago
  Some massive bait in this article. Like come on author - do you seriously have these thoughts and beliefs? > It felt like the culture wanted change. > > That world is gone. Ummm source? > This belief system—that AI is useless and that you're not good enough to work on it anyway I actually don't know anyone with this belief system. I'm pretty slow on picking up a lot of AI tooling, but I was slow to pick up JS frameworks as well. It's just smart to not immediately jump on a bandwagon when things are changing so fast because there is a good chance you're backing the wrong horse. And by the way, you sound ridiculous when you call me a dinosaur just because I haven't started using a tool that didn't even exist 6 months ago. FOMO sales tactics don't work on everyone, sorry to break it to you. When the singularity hits in who knows how many years from now, do you really think it's one of these llm wrapper products that's going to be the difference maker? Again, sorry to break it to you but that's a party you and I are not going to get invited to. 0% chance governments would actually allow true super intelligence as a direct to consumer product.
• neilv 11mo ago
  Lots of creators (e.g., writers, illustrators, voice actors) hate "AI" too. Not only because it's destroying creator jobs while also ripping off creators, but it's also producing shit that's offensively bad to professionals. One thing that people in tech circles might not be aware of is that people outside of tech circles aren't thinking that tech workers are smart. They haven't thought that for a long time. They are generally thinking that tech workers are dimwit exploiter techbros, screwing over everyone. This started before "AI", but now "AI" (and tech billionaires backing certain political elements) has poured gasoline on the fire. Good luck getting dates with people from outside our field of employment. (You could try making your dating profile all about enjoying hiking and dabbling with your acoustic guitar, but they'll quickly know you're the enemy, as soon as you drive up in a Tesla, or as soon you say "actually..." before launching into a libertarian economics spiel over coffee.)
  • int_19h 11mo ago
    You have a very cartoon villain image of tech workers in your head. While Tesla-driving libertarian techbros are certainly a thing, this doesn't even accurately represent the majority of employees in Big Tech, nevermind the industry as a whole.
    • neilv 11mo ago
      What impression do you think non-tech workers have of tech workers, these days.
      • int_19h 11mo ago
        Probably quite similar. But your comment above is clearly assuming that said impression is real.
• assemblyman 11mo ago
  I am not in Seattle. I do work in AI but have shifted more towards infrastructure. I feel fatigued by AI. To be more precise, this fatigue includes several factors. The first one is that a lot of people around me get excited by events in the AI world that I find distracting. These might be new FOSS library releases, news announcements from the big players, new models, new papers. As one person, I can only work on 2-3 things at a given interval in time. Ideally I would like to focus and go deep in those things. Often, I need to learn something new and that takes time, energy and focus. This constant Brownian motion of ideas gives a sense of progress and "keeping up" but, for me at least, acts as a constantly tapped brake. Secondly, there is a sentiment that every problem has an AI solution. Why sit and think, run experiments, try to build a theoretical framework when one can just present the problem to a model. I use LLMs too but it is more satisfying, productive, insightful when one actually thinks hard and understands a topic before using LLMs. Thirdly, I keep hearing that the "space moves fast" and "one must keep up". The fundamentals actually haven't changed that much in the last 3 years and new developments are easy to pick up. Even if they did, trying to keep up results in very shallow and broad knowledge that one can't actually use. There are a million things going on and I am completely at peace with not knowing most of them. Lastly, there is pressure to be strategic. To guess where the tech world is going, to predict and plan, to somehow get ahead. I have no interest in that. I am confident many of us will adapt and if I can't, I'll find something else to do. I am actually impressed with and heavily use models. The tiresome part now are some of the humans around the technology who participate in the behaviors listed above.
  • mkoubaa 11mo ago
    I get excited by new model releases, try it, switch it to default if I feel it's better, and then I move on. I don't understand why any professional SWE should engage in weird cultish behavior about these models, it's a better mousetrap as far as I'm concerned
    • agobineau 11mo ago
      its just the old pc vs mac cultism. nobody who actually has work to do cares. much like authors obsessed with typewriters, transport companies with auto brands, etc
• redwood 11mo ago
  He describes his startup as an ai-oriented map... to me that sounds amazing and totally at my alley. But then it's actually about trip planning... to me is too constrained and specific. What I would love is a map type experience that gives me an AI type interface for interesting things in any given area that might be near me and worth checking out. And not just for travel by the way... I love just exploring maps and seeing a place.. I'd love to learn more about a place kind of like a mesh between Wikipedia and a map and AI could help
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    So actually that’s what I’ve been working on. It’s been taking so long because I’ve been building my own ai focused geocoder to do just that
    • redwood 11mo ago
      Look forward to trying it!
• zjp 11mo ago
  I like AI to the extent that it can quickly solve well-worn, what I've taken to calling "embarrassingly solved problems", in your environment, like "make an animation subsystem for my program". A Qt timeline is not hard, but it is tedious, so the AI can do it. And it turns out that there are some embarrassingly solved problems, like rudimentary multiplayer games, that look more impressive than they really are when you get down to it. More challenging prompts like "change the surface generation algorithm my program uses from Marching Cubes to Flying Edges", for which there are only a handful of toy examples, VTK's implementation, and the paper, result in an avalanche of shit. Wasted hours, quickly becoming wasted days.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    I feel the same way about those embarrassingly solved problems! Though oftentimes the trick is knowing what to ask for. I remember grinding for weeks on a front end but until I realized what the problem was (not the exact bug just what the general concept should be) Claude then fixed it in 10 seconds.
• groos 11mo ago
  My esteem of Seattle area engineers compared to Silicon Valley engineers has just gone up.
• aiono 11mo ago
  I think treating AI as the best possible field for everyone smart and capable is itself very narrow minded and short sighted. Some people just aren't interested in that field, what's so hard to accept it? World still needs experts in other fields even within computing.
• MaintenanceMode 11mo ago
  Whenever I see "everyone", and broad statements that try to paint an entire geography based on one company "Microsoft" I'm suspect of the motives of the author at worst, or just dismissive of the premise at best. I see what the author is saying here, but they're painting with an overly broad brush. The whole "San Francisco still thinks it can change the world" also is annoying. I am from the Seattle area, so I do take it a bit personally, but this isn't exactly my experience here.
• runarberg 11mo ago
  I live in Seattle (well a 20 min ferry from Seattle) and I too hate AI. In fact I have a Kanji learning app which I am trying to push on to people, and I brand it as AI free. No AI was used to develop it, no AI used to write content, no AI is there to “help you learn”. When I see apps like Wanderfugl, I get the same sense of disgust as OPs ex coworker. I don‘t want to try this app, I don’t want to see it, just get it away from me.
• gverrilla 11mo ago
  Tech professionals that depend on their work to survive and have not been thinking about capital vs labor are on delulu land.
• Animats 11mo ago
  A sizable fraction of current AI results are wrong. The key to using AI successfully is imposing the costs of those errors on someone who can't fight back. Retail customers. Low-level employees. Non-paying users. A key part of today's AI project plan is clearly identifying the dump site where the toxic waste ends up. Otherwise, it might be on top of you.
• ElijahLynn 11mo ago
  "everyone"? Clickbait.
  • geldedus 11mo ago
    author doesn't like unpleasant truths and downvotes them
• tomlockwood 11mo ago
  I don't know if anyone has been reading cover letters recently but it seems that people are prompting the LLMs with the same shit, dusting their hands and thinking "done" and what the reader then sees is the same repetitive, uncreative and instantly recognizable boilerplate. The people prompting don't seem to realize what's coming out the other end is boilerplate dreck, and you've got to think - if you're replaceable with boilerplate dreck maybe your skills weren't all that, anyway? The hate is justified. The hype, is not.
• keeda 11mo ago
  As I've said before: AI mandates, like RTO mandates, are just another way to "quiet fire" people, or at least "quiet renegotiate" their employment. That said, AI resistance is real too. We see it on this forum. It's understandable because the hype is all about replacing people, which will naturally make them defensive, whereas the narrative should be about amplifying them. A well-intentioned AI mandate would either come with a) training and/or b) dedicated time to experiment and figuring out what works well for you. Instead what we're seeing across the industry is "You MUST use AI to do MORE with LESS while we layoff even more people and move jobs overseas." My cynical take is, this is an intentional strategy to continue culling headcount, except overindexing on people seen as unaligned with the AI future of the company.
  • charles_f 11mo ago
    > AI mandates, like RTO mandates, are just another way to "quiet fire" people That's a recurring argument, and I don't believe it, especially in large tech companies. They have no problem doing multiple large non-quiet lay-offs, why would they need moustache-twirling level schemes to get people to quit. I don't believe companies to be well intentioned, but the simplest explanation is often the best: 1. RTO are probably driven by people in power who either like to be in the office, believe being in the office is the most efficient way to work (be that it's true or not), or have financial stakes in having people occupy said offices. 2. "AI" mandate is probably driven by people in power who either do see value in AI, think it's the most efficient way to work (be that it's true or not), have FOMO on AI, or have financial stakes in having people use it.
    • keeda 11mo ago
      > They have no problem doing multiple large non-quiet lay-offs, why would they need moustache-twirling level schemes to get people to quit. So the thing about all large layoffs is that there is actually some non-obvious calculus behind them. One thing for instance, is that typically in the time period soon after layoffs, there is some increased attrition in the surviving employees, for a multitude of reasons. So if you layoff X people you actually end up with X + Y lower headcount shortly after. There are also considerations like regulations. What this means is that planning layoffs has multiple moving parts: 1) The actual monetary amount to cut -- it all starts with $$$; 2) The absolute number of headcount that translates to; 3) The expected follow-on attrition rate; 4) The severance (if any) to offer; 5) The actual headcount to cut with a view of the attrition and severance; 6) Local labor regulations (e.g. WARN) and their impact, monetary or otherwise; 7) Consideration, impact on internal morale and future recruitment. So it's a bit like tuning a dynamic system with several interacting variables at play Now the interesting bit of tea here is that in the past couple of years, the follow-on (and all other) attrition has absolutely plummeted, which has thrown the standard approaches all out of whack. So companies are struggling a bit to "tune" their layoffs and attrition. I had an exec frankly tell me this after one of the earliest waves of layoffs a couple years ago, and I heard from others that this was happening across the industry. Sure enough, there have been more and more seemingly haphazard waves of layoffs and the absolute toxicity this has introduced into corporate culture. Due to all this and the overal economy and labor market, employee power has severely weakened, so things like morale and future recruitment are also lower priorities. Given all this calculus, a company can actually save quite some money (severance) and trouble if people quit by themselves, with minimal negative repercussions. Not quite moustache-twirling but not quite savory either.
• a1exyz 11mo ago
  There are a few clashing forces. One is the power of startups - what people love is what will prevail. It made macs and iphones grab marketshare back from "corporate" options like windows and palm pilot. Its what keeps tiktok running. An opposing force is corporate momentum. Its unfortunately true that people are beholden to what companies create. If there are only a few phones available, you will have to pick. If there are only so many shows streaming, you'll probably end up watching the less disgusting of the options. They are clashing. The ppl's sentiment is AI bad. But if tech keeps making it and pushing it long enough, ppl will get older, corporate initiatives will get sticky, and it will become ingrained. And once its ingrained, its gonna be here forever.
• coliveira 11mo ago
  The problem with AI is that the media and the tech hype machine wants everyone to believe that it is more than a glorified randomized text generator. Yes, for many problems this is just what you need, but not to create reliable software. Somehow, they want everyone to go into a state of disbelief and agree that it is a superior intelligence or at least the clear sign of something of this sorts, and that we should stop everything we're doing right now to give more money and attention to this endeavor.
• officeplant 11mo ago
  Seattle sounds kinda nice now. AI fatigue is real. I just had to swap eye doctors because they changed their medical records to some AI powered bullshit and wanted me to re-enter all my info into the new system in order to check-in for my appointment. A website that when I looked at their EULA page redirected to an empty page, no clear mention of HIPAA anywhere on the website's other pages. The eye doctor seemed confused why I wanted to stop using them after ten years as a patient even after I pointed out the flaws. It's madness.
• kizer 11mo ago
  In my opinion, the issue in AI is similar to the issue in self driving cars. I think the last “five percent” of functionality for agents etc. will be much, much more difficult to nail down for production use, just like snow weather and strange roads proved to be much more difficult for self-driving car technology rollout. They got to 95% and assumed they were nearing completion but it turned out there was even more work to be done to get to 100%. That’s kind of my take on all the AI hype. It’s going to take a lot more work to get the final five percent done.
• LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
  The thing about dismissing AI in 2025 is that it's on par with dismissing the wearable computing group at MIT in the 1980s. But admittedly, if one had tried to productize their stuff in the 1980s it would have been hilarious. So the rewards here are going to go to the people who read the right tea leaves and follow the right path to what's inevitable. In the short term, a lot of not so smart, people are going to lose a lot of money believing some of the ludicrous short-term claims. But when has that not been the case? This is not the right time of year to pitch in Seattle. The days are short and the people are cranky. But if they want to keep hating on AI as a technology because of Microsoft and Amazon, let them, and build your AI technology somewhere else. San Francisco thinks the AGI is coming any day now so it all balances out, no?
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    I might have written in broad strokes but I was really annoyed. Like I want to get out of the Amazon/Microsoft bubble. And yeah everyone is cranky rn
    • LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
      Microsoft and Amazon people in Seattle are as annoying as Hollywood people in LA. I feel your disenchantment with the monoculture.
• School-Cotton 11mo ago
  This is making me gain significant respect for Seattle.
• raincole 11mo ago
  > Instead, she reacted to it with a level of negativity I'd never seen her direct at me before. A few months ago, a friend of mine showed a poem she wrote for her newborn. Or more specifically, she asked ChatGPT to write for her newborn. I almost acted like this ex-Microsoft senior. Tbh if I didn't know it was for her own child, I would have acted this way. I (thought that I) managed ignoring my opinions about whether writing poems is a good use of AI and steering the topic to baby formula milk instead.
• rr808 11mo ago
  We have these weekly rah rah AI meetings where we swap tips on what we've achieved with copilot and devin. Mostly crickets but everyone is talking with lots of enthusiasm. Its starting to get silly though now, most people can't even get the tools to do anything useful more than trivial things we used to see on stack overflow.
• mrandish 11mo ago
  > But you weren't allowed to fix them—that was the AI org's turf. You were supposed to use them, fail to see productivity gains, and keep quiet. Yep, big orgs doing big org things. Don't miss it a bit.
• aviel 11mo ago
  False. - The entire community @ https://seattlefoundations.org https://seattlefoundations.org
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    Are they good?
• comeondude 11mo ago
  I live in seattle and I love AI lol. But yea, AI companies should pay into a UBI fund. The value of collective creative output of humanity should go back to the living not the select few.
  • adastra22 11mo ago
    UBI will never make financial sense.
    • waterTanuki 11mo ago
      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.
      • adastra22 11mo ago
        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.
        • marssaxman 11mo ago
          Depends on how you define it, I suppose. The State of Alaska has been providing a universal basic income to its residents for almost half a century now, and that seems to work just fine.
          • hollerith 11mo ago
            Not enough to live on. In 2022, the payment was $3,284 per eligible resident, and the 2023 payment was $1,312. I could not easily find the 2024 figure. This is is paid once a year, not monthly. It is called the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.
• comeondude 11mo ago
  I live in seattle and I love AI lol. My main problem is that at this point, the value of entire collective creative output of humanity should go to the living not the select few. IMHO AI companies should pay into some kind of UBI fund/ Sovergeign fund. Time for capitalism to evolve, yo!
• r0m4n0 11mo ago
  I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread. I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for. I need to write about some absolutely life changing scenarios, including: got me thousands of dollars after it drafted a legal letter quoting laws I knew nothing about, saved me countless hours troubleshooting an RV electrical problem, found bugs in code that I wrote that were missed by everyone around me, my wife was impressed with my seemingly custom week long meal plan that fit her short term no soy/dairy allergy diet, helped me solve an issue with my house that a trained professional completely missed the mark on, completely designed and wrote code for a halloween robot decoration I had been trying to build for years, saves my wife hundreds of hours as an audio book narrator summarize characters for her audio books so she doesn't have to read the entire book before she narrates the voices. I'm worried about some of the problems LLMs will create for humanity in the future but those are problems we can solve in the future too. Today it's quite amazing to have these tools at our disposal and as we add them in smart ways to systems that exist today, things will only get better. Call me glass half full... but maybe it's because I don't live in Seattle
  • Esophagus4 11mo ago
    > I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread Yep. I feel like actually, being negative on AI is the common view now, even though every other HN commenter thinks they’re the only contrarian in the world to see the light and surely the masses must be misguided for not seeing it their way. The same way people love to think they’re cooler than the masses by hating [famous pop artist]. “But that’s not real music!” they cry. And that’s fine. Frankly, most of my AI skeptic friends are missing out on a skill that’s helped me a fair bit in my day to day at work and casually. Their loss. Like it or not, LLMs are here to stay. The same way social media boomed and was here to stay, the same way e-commerce boomed and was here to stay… there’s now a whole new vertical that didn’t exist before. Of course there will be washouts over time as the hype subsides, but who cares? LLMs are still wicked cool to me. I don’t even work in AI, I just think they’re fascinating. The same way it was fascinating to me when I made a computer say “Hello, world!” for the first time.
• spaceguillotine 11mo ago
  the author makes the connection, people see AI as Asbestos, shoved in everything by profit hungry corps that don't care about what damage it will do in the long term. Seattle has been screwed over so many times in the last 20 years that its a shell of itself.
• pdovj 11mo ago
  Is it that everyone in Seattle hates AI, or that Seattle is the only place you know people well enough they’ll tell you the truth? The bar for that is much lower in Seattle too, compared to say, Japan. And the author seems tone deaf enough to not know the difference.
• evil-olive 11mo ago
  in the first paragraph, he drops a link to the startup he's working on: > I wanted her take on Wanderfugl, the AI-powered map I've been building full-time. this seems to me like pretty obvious engagement-bait / stealth marketing - write a provocative blog post that will get shared widely, and some fraction of those people will click through to see what the product is all about. but, apparently it's working because this thread is currently at 400+ comments after 3 hours.
  • ares623 11mo ago
    I’ve been really tempted to put up a “wall of baiters” for such cases.
• chrsw 11mo ago
  Tech company leadership sees AI as a shortcut to success. You know how in project planning meetings engineers are usually asked how they can pull in the schedule by x number of months? AI is now that thing. Obviously, this is a mistake. The cult of AI maximalists aren't helping the situation.
• jansommer 11mo ago
  AI is such a blessing. I use it almost every day at work, and I've spent this evening getting a Bluetooth to USB mapper for a ps4 controller working by having ChatGPT write it for me, for a bigger project I'm working on. Yes, it's going to take some time to fully understand the code and adjust it to my own standards, but i've been playing a game a few hours now and I feel zero latency and plenty of controller rumble that I'm having fun giving some extra power. It pretty much worked with the first 250 lines of C it spew out. What's gonna be super interesting is that I'm going to have an rpi zero 2 power up my machine when I press the controller's ps-button. That means I might need to solder and do some electrical voodoo that I've never tried. Crossing my fingers that the plan ChatGPT has come up with won't electrocute me.
• scotty79 11mo ago
  That kind of explained half of comments on HN. When it's your induatry that's being disrupted suddenly a lot of people are on the edge.
• sparrc 11mo ago
  I'm in Seattle at AWS and haven't encountered this attitude towards AI at all. All of my coworkers pretty much love using Cline and Kiro.
• huey77 11mo ago
  I stopped reading after the third em dash. I'm sorry if you use them, but they are my AI copy/paste blog red flag these days
• spit2wind 11mo ago
  > Bring up AI in a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you're advocating asbestos. I don't know who first uses the asbestos analogy, but it's 1000% on point. I think Cory Doctrow says it best, "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our society — and our descendants will be digging it out for generations." I believe that's exactly the language to combat AI hype.
• th0ma5 11mo ago
  This submarines a few blame the AI haters ideas while promoting some honest aspects of reality.
• nextworddev 11mo ago
  I’m pretty sure the other 80% of non-tech Seattlites would love AI to take away the techies
• j2kun 11mo ago
  > 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.
• marssaxman 11mo ago
  Roughly a third of the engineers in the greater Seattle area work for Microsoft, so we needn't conjure up any strange quality of the local culture to explain this.
• satisfice 11mo ago
  Negative? You mean realistic. You mean “refuse to tell lies.” Just stop lying about AI. Thank you. The author’s AI app looks like something that drains all the fun and challenge out of travel planning.
• ch_fr 11mo ago
  I have some trouble reconciling the conclusion of this article with everything else it described. How is "Clearly my coworker just wasn't believing hard enough in AI, and it harms everyone!" the conclusion the author comes to? It might just be an ESL issue on my end, but I seriously feel some huge dissonance between the explanations of "how the tech was made the main KPI, used to justify layoffs and forced in a way that hinders productivity", and the conclusion that seems to say "the real issue with those people complaining is that they just don't believe in AI". I don't understand this article, it seems to explain all the reasons people in Seattle might have grievances, and then completely dismisses those to adopt the usual "you're using it wrong". Is this article just a way to advertise for Wanderfugl? Because this reads like the usual "Okay your grievances are fine and all, but consider the following: it allows me to make a SaaS really fast!" that I became accustomed to see in HN discussions.
• nice_byte 11mo ago
  Reading some of these comments from fellow seattleites, I'm really quite thankful for having the privilege of being able to completely ignore all of this noise. There is zero push in my org to use any of these tools. I don't really use them at all but know some coworkers who do and that's fine. Sounds like this is a rare and lucky arrangement.
• alex1138 11mo ago
  AI/LLMs provide an absolutely perfect excuse for halfwit managers and other fail upwards type people I hate the entire premise even though some of it has been useful but at worst you're creating code and/or information that's just wrong and "can get someone killed" (metaphorical, but also probably literal), you're creating absolutely unrealistic expectations Zuck said they'd be able to replace engineers with AI. Well, that tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it? With all of the scandals Facebook properties have had over the years. A real engineer/competent CEO wouldn't say that
• j45 11mo ago
  Why did OP have to mention AI and just ask for feedback on the solution itself and let anything come up organically? Big tech workers might be perceiving writing on the wall sooner - there have already been some layoffs. I also find a lot of technpeollemsurprisinglynhabent spent as much time with AI over the past 3 years compared to other techs.
• jaredcwhite 11mo ago
  Hating AI in Portland too! :wave:
• CommenterPerson 11mo ago
  The 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).
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• queenkjuul 11mo ago
  Been meaning to visit Seattle, seems like my kinda place
• hm-nah 11mo ago
  Maybe change the title to: “Everyone in Seattle (Everywhere?) Hates Microsoft’s AI”
• shadowtree 11mo ago
  Everyone in Detroit hates EVs.
• fencepost 11mo ago
  From someone who's mostly avoided the AI craze so far, I think it comes down to a combination of two things. 1) "AI" is in many ways like the unreliable coworker so many of us have had in the past - maybe someone who talked a good game in interviews, but after you'd worked with them for a while you realize that you have to double-check everything they do for stupid/careless problems. In the worst case, you also have to do some hand-holding as they ask you for help with things that they should know how to do. They can produce good output but they can't be trusted to produce good (or even marginal) output so they're a net time sink. 2) In a frightening number of companies right now, that problem coworker is the owner's or manager's relative and cannot be avoided. So boom, there you go, bad coworkers and a toxic culture that not just protects but promotes them.
• BrenBarn 11mo ago
  Reminds me of this post from a week or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027290
• almosthere 11mo ago
  I think we should be honest and consistent about losing our jobs to AI. For decades we justified automation by saying things like: "Sure, the toothpaste tube machine replaced 30 workers, but someone will need to maintain and operate it." And whenever someone pointed out that one mechanic doesn't replace those 30 lost jobs, everyone went quiet. Now we're using the same logic again: "Well, you just need to learn to use the AI before someone else does." And if anyone doubts that the world can move on without the software engineer, remember that it moved on just fine after eliminating the toothpaste tube fillers. The world kept turning, just a little colder and more indifferent each time another role disappeared. Maybe instead of pretending this time is different, we should focus on writing the best epitaph we can.
• stogot 11mo ago
  > And then came the final insult: everyone was forced to use Microsoft's AI tools whether they worked or not. Copilot for Word. Copilot for PowerPoint. Copilot for email. Copilot for code. Worse than the tools they replaced. Worse than competitors' tools. Sometimes worse than doing the work manually. This is revolting. Three years ago I’d have said this is a terrible black mirror plot
• chimerasaurus 11mo ago
  I’m never leaving Seattle. iykyk
• QuiEgo 11mo ago
  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.”
• danieltanfh95 11mo ago
  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.
• ggerni 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• johnnienaked 11mo ago
  I feel like a lot of people hate AI
• LunicLynx 11mo ago
  Is this a sophisticated ad?
• MobiusHorizons 11mo ago
  Well written! I’m Seattle based (although at Google) I think the mood is only slightly better than what you describe. But the general feeling that the company has no interest in engineering innovation is alive and well. Everything needs to be standardized and engineers get shuffled between products in a way that discourages domain knowledge.
  • mips_avatar 11mo ago
    Thanks!
• didibus 11mo ago
  The article seems full of made up things. The "coworker" isn't a real person, some kind of "composite of people", I'm then curious if the "she" is simply used as "a random made up person". Then it says: "Engineers don't try because they think they can't." They don't try AI is what I understand, but that contradicts the whole article, that every engineer in Seattle is actively using AI, even forced too. Then it says: "now believes she's both unqualified for AI work", why would they believe that? She's supposedly has been using AI constantly, has not been part of those "layed off", so must be a great AI talent. Finally it says: "now believes she's both unqualified for AI work and that AI isn't worth doing anyway. She's wrong on both counts, but the culture made sure she'd land there." Which is completely usubstantiated and also coming from a person trying to grift us with their AI product which they want to promote and sell. I don't know, it read like a shill article from a grifter.
• siliconc0w 11mo ago
  Most codebases are pretty proprietary and so out of distribution for the AI which causes poor performance and you really have to fight some of the training to use internal libraries and conventions. Still useful but certainly not PhD-level when it imports X, you remind it's instructions are to use Y, it apologizes, imports Y but then immediately imports X again. So when your project gets cancelled for AI and haven't gotten a raise while AI researchers in the same company are getting generational wealth- it does feel pretty bad.
• MarkLowenstein 11mo ago
  According to demos, AI coding tools are allowing neophytes to instantly create working apps and websites with mere descriptions of what they want. According to devs, they're 10x as productive because certain time-consuming tasks are condensed like unit test writing, code reviews, and code refactors and clean-up. So we're to assume that in the age when the typical App Store offers a million apps we'll never be interested in, soon that number will be a billion. In comes Wanderfugl. A tool for traveling that I will never need, where just trying to figure out what it does used more time than I wanted to spend on it. Now with AI, there will be several shiny new travel apps like Wanderfugl for you to learn and choose from literally every time you go on another vacation. Wanderfugl may be wonderful, and an achievement. But the reaction of this Seattleite is "What's the point anymore?" This is why I am uninterested in the AI coding trend. It's just a part of a lot of new stuff I don't need.
• elendee 11mo ago
  AI for decades has been the word to mean "frontier capability which is not fully developed yet". It is not a pitch for end users. Perhaps your product produces quality code. Perhaps it produces highly novel trip itineries. Say that, but don't say AI. The end user does not know the difference between a neural net and a for loop.
• petterroea 11mo ago
  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, because the winner of the AI arms race won't be the company that waits until they have a perfect, polished product. I have myself had "fun" trying to discuss LLMs with non technical people, 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. 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. Combine that with how every "wow!" LLM example is actually just the LLM regurgitating a very common thing to write tutorials about, and people tend to over-estimate its abilities. I use claude multiple times a week because even though LLM-generated code is trash I am open to try new tools, but my general experience is that Claude is unable to do anything well that I can't have my non-technical partner do. It has given me a sort of superiority complex where I immediately disregard the opinion of any developer who thinks its a wondertool, because clearly they don't have high standards for the work they were already doing. I think most developers with any skill to their name agree. Looking at how Microsoft developers are handling the forced AI, they do seem desperate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 even though they respond with the most "cope" answers I've ever read when confronted about how poorly it is going.
  • finaard 11mo ago
    > 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.
• pfannkuchen 11mo ago
  Did he try any control topics? It’s possible that no matter what he asked, the people of Seattle would respond negatively.
• fergie 11mo ago
  I did some contract work for Microsoft a few years ago (2011-2013). It was striking how much pressure was put on you to dogfood Microsoft stuff at the expense of basically everything. I can only imagine what it must be like at the moment.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 11mo ago
  I'm surprised that nobody at the tech companies seems to realize basic psychology: The harder you try to force something on people, the less they want it.
• erikerikson 11mo ago
  I live and work in Seattle and I don't hate AI. Further, I know people here that are just as overly excited about AI as it's proponents on HN. I've also heard complaints about the mandatory use of the tools in the office and the pageantry involved. I've seen people in love with garbage they produced with AI. I'm annoyed by the way they are being pushed in my face but hate is really too strong. I've tried using them and gotten total garbage. I think that's because my prompting sucks because I know people that love the tools and have shared great output from them. Those people are a minority in my opinion. Trying to over simplify the experiences of humanity is a fool's game.
• p0w3n3d 11mo ago
  Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI. AI is about centralisation of power So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work). For me AI is just a natural language query model for texts. So if I need to find something in text, make join with other knowledge etc. things I'd do in SQL if there was an SQL processing natural language, I do in LLM. This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened. I know a person who resigned CS course because AI was solving algorithmic exercises better than him. This might cause global depression, as we no longer are on the "top". Moreover he went to medicine, where people basically will be using AI to diagnose people and AI operators are required (i.e. there are no threats of reductions because of AI in Public Health Service) So the world is changing, the power is being gathered, there is no longer possibility to "run your local cloud with open office, and a mail server" to take that power from the giants.
  • lerp-io 11mo ago
    but the opposite is actually true. u can use ai to bypass a lot of SaaS solutions
    • entropi 11mo ago
      So you are saying now that you can bypass a lot of solutions offered by a mix of small/large providers by using a single solution from a huge provider, this is the opposite of a centralization of power?
      • lerp-io 11mo ago
        with ai specialized hardware you can run the open source models locally too and without without the huge provider stealing your precious IP
        • entropi 11mo ago
• thefz 11mo ago
  > Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building Believe me, the same reflexive, critical, negative response is true for most of Europe too
• thefz 11mo ago
  I mean how can you blame her for not being excited at yet-another-AI-powered planner.
• solaarphunk 11mo ago
  Seattle is the type of economy that is heavily threatened by AI. Desk jobs that Claude basically already knows how to do, and just needs to be integrated into the existing systems to have impact. Most people in Seattle "tech" are middle management with no discernible skills other than organizational deckchair arrangement. It is a place to optimize for work-life balance, and not take risk - this is why the region, despite its technology density, has such a disproportionately small startup scene. AI IS a huge threat to a place like this and I am not optimistic about the ability for people to adapt.
• JensRantil 11mo ago
  This sentiment is not only in Seattle.
• jtrn 11mo ago
  I believe that most headlines with the format "everybody thinks X" would be more honest if rewritten as "I believe X". Or should I say... Everybody thinks that titles using the format "everybody thinks X" would be more honest if they instead said: "I believe X."
• Rochus 11mo ago
  When companies mandate tools regardless of effectiveness and punish engineers for not using them, it's governance failure dressed as innovation. The distinction between "real products" (solving actual problems) and "hype products" (exciting investors) reflects a pragmatic engineering perspective. The situation seems less about AI itself and more about corporate dysfunction using AI as cover for broader organizational failures.
• donny2018 11mo ago
  I'm a former AI-hater and sceptic. I do B2B consultancy/development work for my clients. I understand why people are irritated by this. However, recently I tried the GitHub Copilot agent with VS Code using Claude Opus 4.5. It literally implemented, tested and fixed entire new features in minutes, that otherwise would have taken days or even weeks of routine repetitive work from me. All while mimicking style and patterns in my existing codebase which made me instantly understand exactly what it was doing. I found it to be an insane productivity boost and I can see how it might be affecting hiring processes in numerous industries, especially in software engineering space.
• mlavrent 11mo ago
  I was at Microsoft until July of this year until I left for an SF-based company (not AI though). The difference between the two with regards to AI tool usage couldn’t be more different- at Microsoft, they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools, which often were under par and you didn’t have a choice in. At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver. And, shocker, turns out they actually spend a lot building and getting feedback on internal AI tooling and so it gets a lot of use! The Microsoft culture is a sort of toxic “get AI usage by forcing it down the engineer throats” vs the new “make it actually useful and win users” approach at that new place. The Microsoft approach builds resentment in the engineering base, but I’m convinced it’s the only way leadership there knows how to drive initiatives.
  • wseqyrku 11mo ago
    > they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools That is kind of insane right? They are practically mining their own people for data, one wonders what they would not do to their customers.
  • zeristor 11mo ago
    Perhaps the managers performance goals are linked to take up, this sometimes happens and it all becomes too blunt.
  • stickfigure 11mo ago
    Microsoft is forcing the company to dogfood their own tools. They do this because they need the feedback so they can improve their tools, and they think these tools are a critical part of their future. Presumably your new company isn't building AI tools, so they don't care what you use. Imagine a developer in 1990s Microsoft saying "I want to use Borland C++ because it's better than the Microsoft IDE". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not the point.
    • capr 11mo ago
      Maybe if they would've let their engineers use Borland C++ they would've learned a thing or two for their own product.
• geldedus 11mo ago
  So, they were laid-off because they stubbornly resisted adopting AI? Remember those who were laid-off in the 90s because they resisted working at a computer because they hated computers? History repeating.
• T3RMINATED 11mo ago
  [dead]
• code_for_monkey 11mo ago
  something I havent seen mentioned: the people who are AI's biggest proponents are distinctly unlikeable humans. Look at Elon Musk with Grok, its disgusting. Look at Sam Altman, Alex Karp, look at Peter "Im not sure humanity should continue" Thiel. These people are wildly misanthropic, of course it gives the whole thing an unpleasant miasma.
• fgauer 11mo ago
  40+ year software developer here (not saying this for ego, just that I've been doing this a long time and I've seen a lot of things). Here's how I've re-framed things in my mind due to AI: The centralization of 'power' in AI will be the entities that want to run the bigger, more general-purpose models. Fine. So be it. Knock yourself out. Good luck building the data centers and finding power. After that, AI now becomes a 'field leveler', and I say this with the utmost of sincerity and confidence. Need a supply chain system? Goodbye big boys. Goodbye vendor lock. Now there will be dozens, if not hundreds of small teams that can provide this for you at a fraction of the cost. Accounting you ask? Goodbye Intuit. We'll whip up what you need and you'll be off and running and you can kiss the global monsters goodbye. You get the idea. This is a defining moment and it's awesome. Sure there will be some initial pain. Mindsets will have to change. Priorities will shift. My fundamental point is, all of the big boy/fat cats rushing in the AI race are literally rushing to completely undermine their own leverage and power. Each and every day I am amazed at what I can do, after a lifetime of staring at screens, with a $25.00/month Claude Code license. I am reaching out and lifting my neighbors, who have no technical experience at all, into a completely new playing field where they compete against entities they had no chance of competing with ever before. Forgive my optimism, but it's hard not to be as I can now use my experience, with a tight group of trusted friends and colleagues, and a little bit of coding help (which goes a long way) to go wherever we want to go now.
• user____name 11mo ago
  Just rebrand any existing context sensitive features as "AI" so you can work on those. The other day I saw some productivity software that advertised their recently-opened-files as AI powered.
• 6thbit 11mo ago
  I wonder how is Satya perceived internally? He's above the 10 year mark, which is a long time for fortune 500 ceos.
• wartywhoa23 11mo ago
  This fell from HN top suspiciously quick.
• Slava_Propanei 11mo ago
  [dead]
• MagicMoonlight 11mo ago
  >wanderfugl That’s probably the worst name for an app I’ve ever heard.
• skx001 11mo ago
  The industry will truly only find out how well AI adoption is going if it allows users both internal (employees, tech workers) and external (general users/consumers) to fully opt-out. AI is being forced down peoples' throat. Millions want to but cannot disable Gemini from Gmail. Many SWEs don't want to use AI tools but managers are forcing them to do so. How do you know if something is really liked/needed/wanted when there is no opt-out?
• jitbit 11mo ago
  I don’t work at Microsoft and I have (almost) no friends there, but— My team has relied on the Microsoft stack for over a decade (dotnet, GitHub Actions, VS Code, MS extensions), and I can say that the overall quality and “polish” of their releases has declined. I try to help where I can—filing issues for outdated docs, contributing to dotnet/core, joining discussions about .NET 10 still not being available in Ubuntu APT feeds, reporting and helping resolve issues with MSSQL drivers and SqlClient on GitHub, etc. But every time I interact with someone at Microsoft, I can’t help but read between the lines: they seem slightly demotivated by the company's shift toward an AI-first focus. It's sad.
• esoterae 11mo ago
  Where does one begin with this kind of fallacy-ridden mud slinging? Appeals to both authority and majority, and guilt by location just to name the first three. So what if "everyone in Seattle hates AI"? What gives The Author the right to simultaneously invalidate Seattle's comparatively immeasurably larger advantage in experience, qualification, and education? If even the ludicrously biased title had even the barest hint of truth to it, they've stacked the deck against themselves in credibility unless they've already mentally biased themselves to blindly dismiss anyone that doesn't mirror their own now blatant fanaticism. Which we've already established now includes all of Seattle. So put this out on the curb with the rest of the garbage meant to inflame and divide, because on it's face it is neither reasonable nor factual.
• Lapsa 11mo ago
  Charlie, say it like it's fun: "Bing!"
• etruong42 11mo ago
  Those in power (such as those in the corporate managerial class) are trying to consolidate power by replacing humans with AI. There is the nice story of trying to improve overhead and increase efficiencies. There is also the ugly story of those in power trying to leverage AI for expert opinions even in the face of dissenting human experts. For now, the human dissenters have a lot of leverage because AI still makes very clear and obvious errors sometimes, and it would be a political nightmare for a decision-maker to be accused of erring on the side of AI by recognized human experts who dissented. I wonder if there will come a time that AI opinion would be on par or even favored over the human expert because the human would be considered more fallible. This doesn't even have to be true - it only has to be sufficiently perceived to be sufficiently true.
• poutrathor 11mo ago
  please rework your color gradient text on the landing page of Wanderfugl. On dark mode it is rendered as a rectangle of gradient. My dark mode is handled by Dark Reader the firefox addon. It breaks the flow of presentation. Also, at the bottom, the beta is opened but it closes the November 15th, so it's close and open at the same time :) (else it's November 2026?)