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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#51

Post by MonkeyClub »

egorfine wrote: post #31
mtmail wrote: post #7

Earlier 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?

On the surface, because they're told to push it.

Further down, so that developers are used to train the AI that would replace both developers and managers.

It's a situation like this:

Mgr: Go dig a six-foot-deep rectangular hole.

Eng: What should the rectangle's dimensions be?

Mgr: How tall and wide are you?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#53

Post by hoistbypetard »

XorNot wrote: post #15
jsheard wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Which almost feels unique to AI. I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face, other then perhaps when everyone lost their minds and decided to cram mobile interfaces onto every other platform.

"social" in the mid '00s was like that.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#54

Post by linza »

diggan wrote: post #22
mtmail wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

> Depends on team but seems management is pushing it The graphic "Internal structure of tech companies" comes to mind, given if true, would explain why the process/workflow is so different between the teams at Microsoft: https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png Imagine the Copilot team has a KPI about usage, matching the company OKRs or whatever about making sure the world is using Microsoft's AI enough, so they have a mandat…

Well, what you describe is not terrible way to run things. Eat your own dogfood. To get better at it you need to start doing it.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#55

Post by tossandthrow »

vachina wrote: post #27

> This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue? Exactly. LLM does not know how to use a debugger. LLM does not have runtime contexts. For all we know, the LLM could’ve fixed the issue simply by commenting out the assertions or sanity checks and everything seemed fine and dandy until every client’s device catches on fire.

This was my latest experience of using agents. It created code with hard coded values from the tests.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#56

Post by srean »

egorfine wrote: post #48
srean wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In companies this large and old, the answer most often is a 'no'. The under-performers can now be justifiable laid off with under-performers worthy severance, till morale improves.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#57

Post by DrillShopper »

ethanol-brain wrote: post #25
eterevsky wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plan is to improve AI agents from their current ~intern level to a level of a good engineer.

Seems like that is taking a very long time, on top of some very grandiose promises being delivered today.

Third AI Winter from overpromise/underdeliver when?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#59

Post by ethanol-brain »

Are people really doing coding with agents through PRs? This has to be a huge waste of resources.

It is normal to preempt things like this when working with agents. That is easy to do in real time, but it must be difficult to see what the agent is attempting when they publish made up bullshit in a PR.

It seems very common for an agent to cheat and brute force solutions to get around a non-trivial issue. In my experience, its also common for agents to get stuck in loops of reasoning in these scenarios. I imagine it would be incredibly annoying to try to interpret a PR after an agent went down a rabbit hole.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#60

Post by diggan »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #50
mtmail wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

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 th…

> the only way to do that is to replace them with AI

I guess money-wise it kind of makes sense when you're outsourcing the LLM inference. But for companies like Microsoft, where they aren't outsourcing it, and have to actually pay the cost of hosting the infrastructure, I wonder if the calculation still make sense. Since they're doing this huge push, I guess someone somewhere said it does make sense, but looking at the infrastructure OpenAI and others are having to build (like Stargate or whatever it's called), I wonder how realistic it is.

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