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.

Everyone in Detroit hates EVs.

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.

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.

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 ..."

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.