Everyone in Seattle hates AI

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Seattle, Big Tech, and AI Backlash

  • Several Seattle-area posters describe a long-running resentment toward big tech’s impact (Microsoft, Amazon) on rents, politics, and city culture. AI is seen as the latest phase of the same problem, not a separate issue.
  • Compared to SF, Seattle is portrayed as more change-averse and less “startup-y”: here “techbro” usually means megacorp employee, not someone trying something new.
  • Many locals conflate “AI” with the behavior of those employers: massive ad campaigns, lobbying, tax fights, and using AI as cover for layoffs and cost-cutting.

Inside Microsoft/Amazon: AI Mandates and Morale

  • Multiple accounts from inside or adjacent to Microsoft/Amazon describe:
    • Pressure or explicit requirements to use internal AI tools (Copilot across Office, code, email) even when they’re worse than existing workflows or competitors.
    • Performance reviews and hiring increasingly tied to “enthusiasm for AI” and recorded AI usage.
    • Teams rebranded as “not AI talent,” with worse comp and less status; “AI orgs” become protected classes.
    • Dogfooding rules that forbid non‑AI teams from fixing AI tools, while they’re still forced to depend on them.
  • This creates anxiety, burnout, and a sense that mediocre AI is being rammed through by leadership chasing hype metrics, not product quality.

Diverging Views on AI’s Real Utility

  • Many engineers say LLMs are helpful for boilerplate, quick scripts, docs, test scaffolding, or greenfield CRUD apps, but fall apart on large, complex, proprietary codebases or deep debugging.
  • Others report “mind‑blowing” productivity gains (especially with newer “agentic” tools) and can’t imagine going back; they argue skeptics haven’t really learned to use the tools.
  • There’s sharp pushback to that: experienced developers say they have tried in good faith, found net-negative productivity and more subtle bugs, and resent being told their skepticism is just fear or incompetence.

Economic, Ethical, and Cultural Concerns

  • Strong worry that AI is being used primarily as a justification for layoffs and a way to deskill and cheapen cognitive work, not to empower workers.
  • Broader critiques: centralization of power in a few AI/cloud vendors; energy, water, and RAM costs; “AI slop” flooding the web; weakening of human craft (writing, art, music); and parallels to previous hype cycles like blockchain.
  • Some non‑tech communities, artists, and European posters describe AI as something “done to us” by untrusted US tech elites; “asbestos” and “radium” analogies recur.

Reactions to the Author and Wanderfugl

  • Several readers see the essay as partly a stealth ad for the author’s AI travel‑planning map and find it tone‑deaf: it details real harms then concludes that the core problem is engineers’ limiting beliefs about AI.
  • The product itself draws skepticism mainly because it markets “AI” up front; some say they’d be more open if it were just “a better map” rather than labeled as yet another AI startup.