alt Hacker NewsEveryone in Seattle hates AI
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
'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' ).
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.
I’m all for neurodivergent acceptance but it has caused monumentally obnoxious people like this to assume everyone else is the problem. A little self awareness would solve a lot of problems.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Tech professionals that depend on their work to survive and have not been thinking about capital vs labor are on delulu land.
The name "Wanderfugl" is wanderfully fugly.
Oddly, the screenshots in the article show the name as "Wanderfull".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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 ..."
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.
False.
- The entire community @ https://seattlefoundations.org
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)