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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#141

Post by thraway2079081 »

mtmail wrote: post #7
cebert wrote: post #2

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? 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…

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at a non-tech megacorp that you've heard of. This company's (I will not say "our"!) CEO is very close to Nadella, they meet regularly. Management here is also pushing Github Copilot onto devs, aggressively, and including it in their HR reviews. Dev-adjacent roles (product, QA, BAs) are also seeing aggressive push.

This feels like it will end badly.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#142

Post by yubblegum »

diggan wrote: post #5

Interesting 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…

This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic, from the interview process, to imitating "big tech" songs and dances by small fry companies, and now this. Is there any joy left in being a professional software developer?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#143

Post by sbarre »

globalise83 wrote: post #21

Malicious compliance should be the order of the day. Just approve the requests without reviewing them and wait until management blinks when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire. Then quit your job and become a troubleshooter on x3 the pay.

I know this is meant to sound witty or clever, but who actually wants to behave this way at their job?

I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership, or people who think that you should be actively sabotaging things or be "maliciously compliant" when things aren't perfect or you don't agree with some decision that was made.

To each their own I guess, but I wouldn't be able to sleep well at night.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#144

Post by fernandotakai »

codyvoda wrote: post #113
nottorp wrote: post #24

So, to achieve parity, they should allow humans to also commit code without checking that it at least compiles, right? Or MS already does that?

the code goes through a PR review process like any other? what are you talking about?

i don't know about you, but i would never EVER submit a PR that fails to compile. not tests are failing, those happen (specially flaky ci), but not compiling.

that's literally the bare minimum.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#145

Post by Havoc »

At least it's clearly labelled as copilot.

Much more worried about what this is going to do to the FOSS ecosystem. We've already seen a couple maintainers complain and this trend is definitely just going to increase dramatically.

I can see the vision but this is clearly not ready for prime time yet. Especially if done by anonymous drive-by strangers that think they're "helping"

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#146

Post by kruuuder »

A comment on the first pull request provides some context:

> The stream of PRs is coming from requests from the maintainers of the repo. We're experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools can do today and preparing for what they'll be able to do tomorrow. Anything that gets merged is the responsibility of the maintainers, as is the case for any PR submitted by anyone to this open source and welcoming repo. Nothing gets merged without it meeting all the same quality bars and with us signing up for all the same maintenance requirements.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#147

Post by UncleMeat »

cesarb wrote: post #136
balazstorok wrote: post #38

At least opening PRs is a safe option, you can just dump the whole thing if it doesn't turn out to be useful. Also, trying something new out will most likely have hiccups. Ultimately it may fail. But that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. The thing may rapidly evolve if it's being hard-tested on actual code and actual issues. For example it will be probably changed so that it will iterate until tests are actual…

> At least opening PRs is a safe option, you can just dump the whole thing if it doesn't turn out to be useful. There's however a border zone which is "worse than failure": when it looks good enough that the PRs can be accepted, but contain subtle issues which will bite you later.

Yep. I've been on teams that have good code review culture and carefully review things so they'd be able to catch subtle issues. But I've also been on teams where reviews are basically "tests pass, approved" with no other examination. Those teams are 100% going to let garbage changes in.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#148

Post by bakugo »

infecto wrote: post #70
ethanol-brain wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I look back over the past 2-3 years and am pretty amazed with how quick change and progress have been made. The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast. Not defending the promise but “taking a very long time” does not seem to be an accurate representation.

> I look back over the past 2-3 years and am pretty amazed with how quick change and progress have been made.

Now look at the past year specifically, and only at the models themselves, and you'll quickly realize that there's been very little real progress recently. Claude 3.5 Sonnet was released 11 months ago and the current SOTA models are only marginally better in terms of pure performance in real world tasks.

The tooling around them has clearly improved a lot, and neat tricks such as reasoning have been introduced to help models tackle more complex problems, but the underlying transformer architecture is already being pushed to its limits and it shows.

Unless some new revolutionary architecture shows up out of nowhere and sets a new standard, I firmly believe that we'll be stuck at the current junior level for a while, regardless of how much Altman & co. insist that AGI is just two more weeks away.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#149

Post by Frost1x »

balazstorok wrote: post #38

At least opening PRs is a safe option, you can just dump the whole thing if it doesn't turn out to be useful. Also, trying something new out will most likely have hiccups. Ultimately it may fail. But that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. The thing may rapidly evolve if it's being hard-tested on actual code and actual issues. For example it will be probably changed so that it will iterate until tests are actual…

It might be a safer option in a forked version of the project that the public can’t see. I have to wonder about the optics here from a sales perspective. You’d think they’d test this out more internally before putting it in public access.

Now when your small or medium size business management reads about CoPilot in some Executive Quarterly magazine and floats that brilliant idea internally, someone can quite literally point to these as examples of real world examples and let people analyze and pass it up the management chain. Maybe that wasn’t thought through all the way.

Usually businesses tend to hide this sort of performance of their applications to the best of their abilities, only showcasing nearly flawless functionality.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#150

Post by sexy_seedbox »

petetnt wrote: post #86

GitHub has spent billions of dollars building an AI that struggles with things like whitespace related linting errors on one of the most mature repositories available. This would be probably okay for a hobbyist experiment, but they are selling this as a groundbreaking product that costs real money.

Nat Friedman must be rolling in his grave...

oh wait

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