Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane • Hacker News Board

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#321

Post by rchaud » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

Frost1x wrote: post #234

diggan wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using the comments by the seniors as training data for their next version Yeah, I'm sure 100k comments with "Copilot, please look into this" and "The test cases are still failing" will massively improve these models.

Some of that seems somewhat strategic. With a junior you might do the same if you’re time pressured, or you might sidebar them in real life or they may come to you and you give more helpful advice. Any senior dev at these organizations should know to some degree how LLMs work and in my opinion would to some degree, as a self protection mechanism, default to ambiguous vague comments like this. Some of the mentality is…

Sidebar? With a junior developer making these mistakes over and over again, they wouldn't even make it past the probationary period in their employment contract.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#322

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #154

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.

They are not intern level. Even if it could perform at a similar level to an intern at a programming task, it lacks a great deal of the other attributes that a human brings to the table, including how they integrate into a team of other agents (human or otherwise). I won't bother listing them, as we are all humans. I think the hype is missing the forest for the trees, and I think exactly this multi-agent dynamic migh…

The real missing the forest for the trees is thinking that software and the way users will use computers is going to remain static.

Software today is written to accommodate every possible need of every possible user, and then a bunch of unneeded selling point features on top of that. These massive sprawling code bases made to deliver one-size fits all utility.

I don't need 3 million LOC Excel 365 to keep track of who is working on the floor on what day this week. Gemini 2.5 can write an applet that does that perfectly in 10 minutes.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#323

Post by fragmede » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #274

dttze wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not 20, it’s 200+. And that will only get more expensive.

Again I don't know what people mean when they say it will get more expensive. This is a wrong way of looking at the issue. Pretty sure cars are more expensive than horse carriage, or that iPhones are/were more expensive than button phones. You can cite so many such examples. Like photocopying machines, or cameras, or wrist watches, or even things like radio, television etc. More importantly, sometimes how you do thin…

The worry, that is borne out by the pricing of Uber, isn't that LLMs are more expensive than the generation before, but that it's a VC play. Get into market, undercut your competitors until they go bust, then raiser prices. Ubers used to be $1, which was obviously totally unsustainable. Now Uber's only competing platform is Lyft, and Uber is making money as of their latest quarter. Ubers are not at least $10 if not $50 $100. ChatGPT's $20/month looks like $1 Ubers to some. Only insiders know how much it actually costs OpenAI to support ChatGPT users. I will note, however, that GitHub free private repos are supported by corporations paying for their own private GitHub, so it's unclear that ChatGPT's $20/month ever has to be raised with enough $200 or $2,000 or $20,000/month users.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#324

Post by mrweasel » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

latentsea wrote: post #281

mrweasel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when they can't prove that and development efficiency starts falling, because developers spend 50% of their time battling copilot?

All that's required is enough mental gymnastics for someone to feel like they can call it a success. At no point is it actually required to be one.

You're probably correct: "Our developers a very happy with CoPilot. They now spend 50% of their time interacting with our AI offerings, either via VSCode, Github or Clippy."

No need to specify why they are interact with it, all engagement is good engagement.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#325

Post by Traubenfuchs » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

> These defines do not appear to be defined anywhere in the build system.

> @copilot fix the build error on apple platforms

> @copilot there is still build error on Apple platforms

Are those PRs some kind of software engineer focused comedy project?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#326

Post by throwaway844498 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

robotcapital wrote: post #290

Replace the AI agent with any other new technology and this is an example of a company: 1. Working out in the open 2. Dogfooding their own product 3. Pushing the state of the art Given that the negative impact here falls mostly (completely?) on the Microsoft team which opted into this, is there any reason why we shouldn't be supporting progress here?

"Pushing the state of the art" and experimenting on a critical software development framework is probably not the best idea.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#327

Post by bluefirebrand » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #311

bluefirebrand wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you sleep well at night just doing what you're told by people who don't really care about your well being? I don't get that

There's a whole lot of assumptions in your statement/question there, don't you think?

Sorry, you are right. I was unnecessarily snarky

I read some of your other comments in this thread and I'm not sure what to make of your experience. If you've never felt mistreated or exploited in a 30 year career you are profoundly lucky to have avoided that sort of workplace

I've only been working in software for half as long, but I've never had a job that didn't feel unstable in some ways, so it seems impossible to me that you have avoided it for a career twice as long as mine

I have watched my current employer cut almost half of our employees in the past two years, with multiple rounds of layoffs

Now AI is in the picture and it feels inevitable that more layoffs will eventually come if they can figure out how to replace us with it

I do not sleep well knowing my employer would happily and immediately replace me with AI if they could

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#328

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #138

infecto wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel like we've made barely any progress. It's still good at the things Chat GPT was originally good at, and bad at the things it was bad at. There's some small incremental refinement but it doesn't really represent a qualitative jump like Chat GPT was originally. I don't see AI replacing actual humans without another step jump like that.

As a non-programmer non-software engineer, the programs I can write with modern SOTA models are at least 5x larger than the ones GPT-4 could make.

LLMs are like bumpers on bowling lanes. Pro bowlers don't get much utility from them. Total noobs are getting more and more strikes as these "smart" bumpers get better and better at guiding their ball.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#329

Post by constantcrying » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

robotcapital wrote: post #290

Replace the AI agent with any other new technology and this is an example of a company: 1. Working out in the open 2. Dogfooding their own product 3. Pushing the state of the art Given that the negative impact here falls mostly (completely?) on the Microsoft team which opted into this, is there any reason why we shouldn't be supporting progress here?

Who is "we" and how and why would "we" "support" or not "support" anything.

Personally I just think it is funny that MS is soft launching a product into total failure.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#330

Post by Traubenfuchs » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

margorczynski wrote: post #8

With how stochastic the process is it makes it basically unusable for any large scale task. What's the plan? To roll the dice until the answer pops up? That would be maybe viable if there was a way to automatically evaluate it 100% but with a human in the loop required it becomes untenable.

> to roll the dice

This was discussed here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988913