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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

> 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?

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value