Everyone in Seattle Hates AI
I grabbed lunch with a former Microsoft coworker I've always admired—one of those engineers who can take any idea, even a mediocre one, and immediately find the gold in it. I wanted her take on Wanderfugl 🐦, the AI-powered map I've been building full-time. I expected encouragement. At worst, overly generous feedback because she knows what I've sacrificed.
Instead, she reacted to it with a level of negativity I'd never seen her direct at me before.
When I finally got her to explain what was wrong, 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.
The AI Layoffs
Her PM had been laid off months earlier. The team asked why. Their director told them it was because the PM org "wasn't effective enough at using Copilot 365."
I nervously laughed. This director got up in a group meeting and said that someone lost their job over this?
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.
I left the lunch deflated and weirdly guilty, like building an AI product made me part of the problem.
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."
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