Beyond every other absurdity here, well, maybe Microsoft is different, but I would never assign a PR that was _failing CI_ to somebody. That that's happening feels like an admission that the thing doesn't _really_ work at all; if it worked even slightly, it would at least only assign passing PRs, but presumably it's bad enough that if they put in that requirement there would be no PRs.
Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
41–50 of 580 posts
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on team but seems management is pushing it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 "From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most d…
> management is pushing it Why?
To validate the huge investment in openai - otherwise the leadership would appear to have overpaid and overplayed.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#43I do love one bot asking another bot to sign a CLA! - https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732#issuecomment-2...
Well?? Did it sign it???
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#44Do we know for a fact there are Microsoft employees who were told they have to use CoPilot and review its change suggestions on projects? We have the option to use GitHub CoPilot on code reviews and it’s comically bad and unhelpful. There isn’t a single member of my team who find it useful for anything other than identifying typos.
> Do we know for a fact there are Microsoft employees who were told they have to use CoPilot and review its change suggestions on projects? It wouldn't be out of character, Microsoft has decided that every project on GitHub must deal with Copilot-generated issues and PRs from now on whether they want them or not. There's deliberately no way to opt out. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749 Like Googles…
Holy sh*t I didn't know this was going on. It's like an AI tsunami unleashed by Microsoft that will bury the entire software industry... They are like Trump and his tariffs, but for the software economy.
What this tells me is that software enterprises are so hellbent in firing their programmers and reducing their salary costs they they are willing to combust their existing businesses and reputation into the dumpster fire they are making. I expected this blatant disregard for human society to come ten or twenty years into the future, when the AI systems would actually be capable enough. Not today.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#45We wanted a future where AIs read boring text and we wrote interesting stuff. Instead, we got…
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How are people reviewing that? 90% of the page height is taken up by "Check failure", Typically, you wouldn't bother manually reviewing something until the automated checks have passed.
I dunno, when I review code, I don't review what's automatically checked anyways, but thinking about the change/diff in a broader context, and whatever isn't automatically checked. And the earlier you can steer people in the right direction, the better. But maybe this isn't the typical workflow.
The reality is more nuanced, there are situations where you'd want to glance over it anyway, such as looking for an opportunity to coach a junior dev.
I'd rather hop in and get them on the right path rather than letting them struggle alone, particularly if they're struggling.
If it's another senior developer though I'd happily leave them to it to get the unit tests all passing before I take a proper look at their work.
But as a general principle, please at least get a PR through formatting checks before assigning it to a person.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#47The real tragedy is the management mandating this have their eyes clearly set on replacing the very same software engineers with this technology. I don’t know what’s more Kafka than Kafka but this situation certainly is!
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> management is pushing it Why?
To validate the huge investment in openai - otherwise the leadership would appear to have overpaid and overplayed.
There are other options to do just that instead of ruining developers' life and hence drastically lowering the performance of teams.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#49Interesting that every comment has "Help improve Copilot by leaving feedback using the or buttons" suffix, yet none of the comments received any feedback, either positive or negative. > This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue? This is also my experience when you haven't setup a proper system prompt to address this for everything an LLM does. Funniest PRs are the ones that "resolves" t…
> improve Copilot by leaving feedback using the or buttons" suffix, yet none of the comments received any feedback, either positive or negative
Why do they even need it? Success is code getting merged 1st shot, failure gets worse the more requests for changes the agent gets. Asking for manual feedback seems like a waste of time. Measure cycle time and rate of approvals and change failure rate like you would for any developer.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#50Do we know for a fact there are Microsoft employees who were told they have to use CoPilot and review its change suggestions on projects? We have the option to use GitHub CoPilot on code reviews and it’s comically bad and unhelpful. There isn’t a single member of my team who find it useful for anything other than identifying typos.
Depends on team but seems management is pushing it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 "From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most d…
The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why?
It seems to me to be coming from the CEO echo chamber (the rumored group chats we keep hearing about). The only way to keep the stock price increasing in these low growth high interest rate times is to cut costs every quarter. The single largest cost is employee salaries. So we have to shed a larger and larger percentage of the workforce and the only way to do that is to replace them with AI. It doesn't matter whether the AI is capable enough to actually replace the workers, it has to replace them because the stock price demands it.
We all know this will eventually end in tears.