8 ms·

> 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

• throwout4110 10mo 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 10mo 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)
    • throwout4110 10mo ago
      Yes ok then I definitely agree
    • pydry 10mo ago
      Shells around chatgpt are fine if they provide value. Way better than AI jammed into every crevice for no reason.
  • mingus88 10mo ago
    Not OP but for starters LLMs != AI LLMs are not an intelligence, and people who treat them as if they are infallible Oracles of wisdom are responsible for a lot of this fatigue with AI
    • pixl97 10mo ago
      >Not OP but for starters LLMs != AI Please don't do this, make up your own definitions. Pretty much anything and everything that uses neural nets is AI. Just because you don't like how the definition has been since the beginning doesn't mean you get to reframe it. In addition, if humans are not infallible oracles of wisdom, they wouldn't be an intelligence in your definition.
      • ponector 10mo ago
        Why then there is an AI-powered dishwasher, but no AI car?
        • fedsocpuppet 10mo ago
          https://www.tesla.com/fsd https://www.tesla.com/fsd ? I also don't understand the LLM ⊄ AI people. Nobody was whining about pathfinding in video games being called AI lol. And I have to say LLMs are a lot smarter than A*.
          • ponector 10mo ago
            Cannot find any mention of AI there. Also it's funny how they add (supervised) everywhere. It looks like "Full self driving (not really)"
            • fedsocpuppet 10mo ago
              Yes one needs some awareness of the technology. Computer vision: unambiguously AI, motion planning: there are classical algorithms but I believe tesla / waymo both use NNs here too. Look I don't like the advertising of FSD, or musk himself, but we without a doubt have cars using significant amounts of AI that work quite well.
• mips_avatar 10mo ago
  I do assume that, I legitimately think it's the most important thing happening in the next decade in tech. There's going to be an incredible amount of traditional software written to make this possible (new databases, frameworks, etc.) and I think people should be able to see the opportunity, but the awful cultures in places like Microsoft are hindering this.
• pjmlp 10mo ago
  In European consulting agencies the trend now is to make AI part of each RFP reply, you won't go through the sales team, if AI isn't crammed there as part of the solution being delivered, and we get evaluated for it. This takes all the joy away, even traditional maintenance projects of big corps seems attractive nowadays.
  • mr_toad 10mo ago
    I remember when everything had a have the word ‘digital’ in it. And I’m old enough to remember when ‘multimedia’ was a buzzword that was crammed into anywhere it would fit.
    • Paianni 10mo ago
      or 'interactive' or 'cloud' (early 2010s).
    • pjmlp 10mo ago
      Same, doesn't make this hype phase more bearable though.
    • Fordec 10mo ago
      You know what, this clarifies something for me. PC, Web and Smartphone hype was based on "we can now do [thing] never done before". This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people" It all feels much more like a wealth grab for the corporations than a promise of improving a standard of living for end customers. Much closer to a Cloud or Server (replacing Mainframes) cycle.
      • munificent 10mo ago
        100%. "You should be using AI in your day to day job or you won't get promoted" is the 2025 equivalent of being forced to train the team that your job is being outsourced to.
      • james_marks 10mo ago
• zzzeek 10mo ago
  the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. The sudden appearance of LLMs has had a really destabilizing effect on everything, and a vast portion of what LLMs can do and/or are being used for runs from intellectually stifling (using LLMs to write your term papers) to revolting (all kinds of non-artists/writers/musicians using LLM to suddenly think they are "creators" and displacing real artists, writers, and musicians) to utterly degenerate (political / sexual deepfakes of real people, generation of antivax propaganda, etc). Put on top of that the way corporate America is absolutely doing the very familiar "blockchain" dance on this and insisting everyone has to do AI all the time everywhere is a huge problem that hopefully will shake out some in the coming years. But despite all that, for writing, refactoring, and debugging computer code, LLM agents are still completely game changing. All of these things are true at the same time. There's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible.
  • senordevnyc 10mo ago
    The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. It’s sad, I always thought of my fellow engineers as more open-minded.
    • blibble 10mo ago
      > The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. so, people with experience?
      • zzzeek 10mo ago
        ive been programming for more than 40 years
• averyvery 10mo ago
  Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossible (but the AI lies about them). A lot of us tried it and just said, "huh, that's interesting" and then went back to work. We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate. There's just not much value in chasing the endless AI news cycle, constantly believing that I'll fall behind if I don't read the latest details of Gemini 3.1 and ChatGPT 6.Y (Game Of The Year Edition). The engineers I know who use AI don't seem to have any particular insights about it aside from an encyclopedic knowledge of product details, all of which are changing on a monthly basis anyway. New products that use gen AI are — by default — uninteresting to me because I know that under the hood, they're just sending text and getting text back, and the thing they're sending to is the same thing that everyone is sending to. Sure, the wrapper is nice, but I'm not paying an overhead fee for that.
  • SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
    This isn’t “unfair”, but you are intentionally underselling it. If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. I’m not making any case for anything, but it’s just not that hard to get excited for something that sure does seem like magic sometimes. Edit: lol this forum :)
    • ggerni 10mo ago
      [flagged]
    • rconti 10mo ago
      > If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. Or your job isn't what AI is good at? AI seems really good at greenfield projects in well known languages or adding features. It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases.
• bwfan123 10mo 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 product I think there is a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane. In the people-persuation plane, it is all about convincing someone of something, and hype plays here, and marketing, religion and political persuation too. In the real world plane, it is all about tangible outcomes, and working code or results play here, and gravity and electromagnetism too. Sometimes there is a reflex loop between the two. I chose the engineering career because, what i produce is tangible, but I realize that a lot of my work is in the people-plane.
  • balamatom 10mo ago
    >a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane This right here is the real thing which AI is deployed to upset. The Enlightenment values which brought us the Industrial Revolution imply that the disparity between the people-persuasion-plane and the real-world-facts-plane should naturally decrease. The implicit expectation here is that as civilization as a whole learns more about how the universe works, people would naturally become more rational, and thus more persuadable by reality-compliant arguments and less persuadable by reality-denying ones. That's... not really what I've been seeing. That's not really what most of us have been seeing. Like, devastatingly not so. My guess is that something became... saturated? I'd place it sometime around the 1970s, same time Bretton Woods ended, and the productivity/wages gap began to grow. Something pertaining to the shared-culture-plane. Maybe there's only so much "informed" people can become before some sort of phase shift occurs and the driving force behind decisions becomes some vague, ethically unaccountable ingroup intuition ("vibes", yo), rather than the kind of explicit, systematic reasoning which actually is available to any human, except for the weird fact how nobody seems to trust it very much any more.
    • saubeidl 10mo ago
      This sounds a lot like the Marxist concept of alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
• binary132 10mo ago
  Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value
  • airstrike 10mo ago
    If you can't point to real use cases at scale, it's hard to argue it has intrisinc value even though it may have speculative value.
  • rpcope1 10mo ago
    There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive either.
    • triceratops 10mo ago
      I'd argue even dogshit has more practical use than Bitcoin, if no one paid money for Bitcoin. You can throw it for self-defence, compost it (under high heat to kill the germs), put it on your property to scare away raccoons (it works sometimes).
      • FrancisMoodie 10mo ago
        Bitcoin and other crypto coins have a practical use. You can use them to buy whatever is being sold on the darkweb with the main product categories being drugs and guns. I honestly believe much of the valuation of Crypto is tied to these marketplaces.
        • nutjob2 10mo ago
          Don't forget scamming people out of billions of dollars of their hard earned life savings.
    • sodafountan 10mo ago
      And by "dog feces," I assume you mean fiat currency, correct? Cryptocurrency solves the money-printing problem we've had around the world since we left the gold standard. If governments stopped making their currencies worthless, then bitcoin would go to zero.
• hinkley 10mo ago
  I wonder if objectively Seattle got hit harder than SF in the last bust cycle. I don’t have a frame of comparison. But if the generational trauma was bigger then so too would the backlash against new bubbles.
• balamatom 10mo ago
  >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. Spot. Fucking. On. Thank you.
• layer8 10mo ago
  > 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. I understood “they think they can’t” to refer to the engineers thinking that management won’t allow them to, not to a lack of confidence in their own abilities.
• antonvs 10mo ago
  > often companies with real products will mix in tidbits of hype The wealthiest person in the world relies entirely on his ability to convince people to accept hype that surpasses all reason.
• jacquesm 10mo ago
  > But moving toward one pole moves you away from the other. My assumption detector twigged at that line. I think this is just replacing the dichotomy with a continuum between two states. But the hype proponents always hope - and in some cases they are right - that those two poles overlap. People make and lose fortunes on placing those bets and you don't necessarily have to be right or wrong in an absolute sense, just long enough that someone else will take over your load and hopefully at a higher valuation. Engineers are not usually the ones placing the bets, which is why they're trying to stay away from hype driven tech (to them it is neutral with respect to the outcome but in case of a failure they lose their job, so better to work on things that are not hyped, it is simply safer). But as soon as engineers are placing bets they are just as irrational as every other class of investor.
• bartread 10mo ago
  I've never worked at Microsoft. However, I do have some experience with the company. I worked building tools within the Microsoft ecosystem, both on the SQL Server side, and on the .NET and developer tooling side, and I spent some time working with the NTVS team at Microsoft many years ago, as well as attending plenty of Microsoft conferences and events, working with VSIP contacts, etc. I also know plenty of people who've worked at or partnered with Microsoft. And to me this all reads like classic Microsoft. I mean, the article even says it: whatever you're doing, it needs to align with whatever the current key strategic priority is. Today that priority is AI, 12 years ago it was Azure, and on and on. And, yes, I'd imagine having to align everything you do to a single priority regardless of how natural that alignment is (or not) gets pretty exhausting, and I'd bet it's pretty easy to burn out on it if you're in an area of the business where this is more of a drag and doesn't seem like it delivers a lot of value. And you'll have to dogfood everything (another longtime Microsoft pattern) core to that priority even if it's crap compared with whatever else might be out there. But I don't think it's new: it's simply part and parcel of working at Microsoft. And the thing is, as a strategy it's often served them well: Windows[0], Xbox, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Azure, Sharepoint, Office, etc. Doesn't always work, of course: Windows Phone went really badly, but it's striking that this kind of swing and a miss is relatively rare in Microsoft's history. And so now, of course, they're doing it with AI. And, of course, they're a massive company, so there will be plenty of people there who really aren't having a good time with it. But, although it's far from a foregone conclusion, it would not be a surprise for Microsoft to come from behind and win by repeating their usual strategy... again. [0] Don't overread this: I'm not necessarily saying I'm a huge fan. In fact I do think Windows, at is core, is a decent operating system, and has been for a very long time. On the back end it works well, and I have no complaints. But I viscerally despise Windows 11 as a desktop operating system. That's right: DESPISE. VISCERALLY. AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL.
• pico303 10mo ago
  This somewhat reflects my sentiment to this article. It felt very condescending. This "self-limiting beliefs" and the implication that Seattle engineers are less than San Francisco engineers because they haven't bought into AI...well, neither have all the SF engineers. One interesting take away from the article and the discussion is that there seem to be two kinds of engineers: those that buy into the hype and call it "AI," and those that see it for the fancy search engine it is and call it an "LLM." I'm pretty sure these days when someone mentions "AI" to me I roll my eyes. But if they say, "LLM," ok, let's have a discussion.