The Seattle AI Crowd

After going to a few programming and AI events around Seattle in the past month or so, here are some brief observations about AI, Seattle, and crowds.

July 2, 2025

Cred checks. Some groups have an open-door policy, and others don't. Get ready to show your credentials, whether via GitHub commits or a super-cool weekly newsletter about what you're building. Or just say "Kubernetes."

Read the room. Some groups are about fundraising/pitching/VC, and other groups are for AI practitioners only. The people in the first group will tell you what they're building but not how; the people in the second group tell you how they're building but not what.

A golf analogy. The AI cognoscenti are looking for holes-in-one. They try out different models, different AI coding agents, different prompting strategies. And it's a tempting vision. If you can reliably solve a programming problem with a "one-shot" prompt, you can automate the process of solving programming problems; and if you can do that, you can build any software with a single prompt. But I think that's the wrong golf game. The better approach is frisbee golf, where instead of using a set of different clubs to whack a tiny little ball for hundreds of yards into a distant hole, you use your own arm to toss a disc within your line of sight. And since that's a slightly labored analogy, I'll spell it out: Use AI coding to solve tiny programming problems with the answer right in front of you. Repeat.

No more hidden figures. If you've ever purchased a condo, you'll probably remember getting a packet of financial statements and meeting minutes, and if you were extremely thorough, perhaps you found something in those documents worth bringing up for information or negotiating leverage, or even as a reason to walk away. In today's market (especially for techie Seattle buyers), AI makes it trivial to process those documents for an instant evaluation. I'm not saying those evaluations are entirely correct, as there may be other factors at play, but I believe these automated analyses have already started factoring into buying decisions and listing prices. If you don't believe me, feed your condo's latest financial report and reserve study into a chatbot and ask for an analysis from the buyer's side. (Oof.)

If you're not here, you're missing out. If you want to take part in the upcoming robot revolution, in my opinion there's no better place than Seattle. Or I'm just saying that because I just ran my condo's latest financial report into a chatbot. Either way, I'm totally serious.

Expect miracles. I know it may not seem like it yet, but once masses of people figure out how to produce software with AI coding tools, there's going to be a literal explosion of software -- and of business models, legacy companies, and people's brains.