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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.