Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane • Hacker News Board

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#331

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

SimianSci wrote: post #279

salawat wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue stems from the attitudes of the people we're doing it for. I started out doing it for humanity. To bring the bicycle for the mind to everyone. Then one day I woke up and realized the ones paying me were also the ones using it to run over or do circles around everyone else not equipped with a bicycle yet; and were colluding to make crippled bicycles that'd never liberate the masses as much as they themselves…

Have you considered contributing to the Free Software Movement? I am speculating that this "AI Revolution" may lead to some revitalization of the movement as it would allow individual contributors the ability to compete on the same levels as proprietary software providers who previously had to employ legions of developers to create their software.

Considered but that'll probably only happen once I've alternative sources of income lined up that doesn't shackle my IP contributions off hours to my employers, which means bringing in enough to get a couple hours with an attorney that knows what they are doing. I am not one. I have merely read some books on it.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#332

Post by rco8786 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

JB_Dev wrote: post #312

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?

100% agree. i’m not sure why everyone is clowning on them here. This process is a win. Do people want this all being hidden instead in a forked private repo? It’s showing the actual capabilities in practice. That’s much better and way more illuminating than what normally happens with sales and marketing hype.

Satya says: "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software".

Zuckerberg says: "Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there".

It's hard to square those statements up with what we're seeing happen on these PRs.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#333

Post by empath75 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

bramhaag wrote: post #58

Seeing Microsoft employees argue with an LLM for hours instead of actually just fixing the problem must be a very encouraging sight for businesses that have built their products on top of .NET.

The point of this exercise for Microsoft isn't to produce usable code right now, but to use and improve copilot.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#334

Post by cruffle_duffle » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

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…

It’s probably the junior devs that get to review these PRs. That and interns.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#335

Post by rchaud » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #295

kinda sad to see y'all brigading an OSS project, regardless of what you think of AI

how do you know it wasn't an AI bot account posting all those laugh emojis?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#336

Post by nottorp » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

codyvoda wrote: post #194

fernandotakai wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and you think this beta system that launched like 2 days ago can’t achieve that? it also opens the PR as its working session. there are a lot of dials, and a lot of redditor-ass opinions from people who don’t use or understand the tech

what i see is a human telling the "AI" that the code does not compile

what use is a bot if it can't do at least this simple step?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#337

Post by fragmede » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

SimianSci wrote: post #279

salawat wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue stems from the attitudes of the people we're doing it for. I started out doing it for humanity. To bring the bicycle for the mind to everyone. Then one day I woke up and realized the ones paying me were also the ones using it to run over or do circles around everyone else not equipped with a bicycle yet; and were colluding to make crippled bicycles that'd never liberate the masses as much as they themselves…

Have you considered contributing to the Free Software Movement? I am speculating that this "AI Revolution" may lead to some revitalization of the movement as it would allow individual contributors the ability to compete on the same levels as proprietary software providers who previously had to employ legions of developers to create their software.

But what's the business model? Why would I pay for support and/or development on an open source project if I can just run it through and LLM?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#338

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

owebmaster wrote: post #78

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.

> The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast And at the same time, absurdly slow? ChatGPT is almost 3 years old and pretty much AI has still no positive economic impact.

There is the huge blind spot where tech workers think LLMs are being made primarily to either assist them or replace them.

Nobody seems to consider that LLMs are democratizing programming, and allowing regular people to build programs that make their work more efficient. I can tell you that at my old school manufacturing company, where we have no programmers and no tech workers, LLMs have been a boon for creating automation to bridge gaps and even to forgo paid software solutions.

This is where the change LLMs will bring will come from. Not from helping an expert dev write boilerplate 30% faster.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#339

Post by static_void » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #320

abxyz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence…

If you're not using it where it's useful to you, then I still wouldn't say you're getting left behind, but you're making your job harder than it has to be. Anecdotally I've found it useful mostly for writing unit tests and sometimes debugging (can be as effective as a rubber duck). It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE. It's a powerful tool. You still need to know when to and when not to use it.

Tests are one of the areas where it performs least well. I can ask an LLM to summarize the functionality of code and be happy with the answer, but the tests it writes are the most facile unit tests, just the null hypothesis tests and the like. "Here's a test that the constructor works." Cool.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#340

Post by coldpie » Wed, May 21, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

yubblegum wrote: post #317

coldpie wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking at getting a CDL and becoming a city bus driver, or maybe a USPS driver or deliveryman or clerk or something.

I hear you. Same boat just can't figure out the life jacket yet. (You do fine wood work, why not that? I am considering finding entry level work in architecture myself - kicking myself for giving that up for software now. Did not see this shit show coming.)

> You do fine wood work, why not that?

Thank you. It's something I'm actively pursuing, I'm hoping to finish some chairs this spring and see if any local shops are interested in stocking them. But I'm skeptical I could find enough business to make it work full-time, pay for my family's health insurance, and so on. We'll see.