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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#351

Post by Quarrel »

candiddevmike wrote: post #191
Quarrel wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can't, as I understand it, have copyright over anything they do. Nor can it be an entity to sign anything. I assume the "not-copyrightable" issue, doesn't in anyway interfere with the rights trying to be protected by the CLA, but IANAL .. I assume they've explicitly told it not to sign things (perhaps, because they don't want a sniff of their bot agreeing to things on behalf of MSFT).

Are LLM contributions effectively under public domain?

This is my understanding, at least in US law.

I can't remember the specific case now, but it has been ruled in the past, that you need human-novelty, and there was a case recently that confirmed this that involved LLMs.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#352

Post by einrealist »

This is one good example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy: generative AI has cost so much money, acknowledging its shortcomings is now becoming more and more impossible.

This AI bubble is far worse than the Blockchain hype.

Its not yet clear whether productivity gains are real and whether the gains are eaten by a decline in overall quality.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#353

Post by ehnto »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #322
ehnto wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't believe it will remain static, in fact it's done nothing but change every year for my entire career.

I do like the idea of smaller programs fitting smaller needs being easy to access for everyone, and in my post history you would see me advocate for bringing software wages down so that even small businesses can have software capabilities in house. Software has so much to give to society outside of big VC flips and tech monoliths. Maybe AI is how we get there in the end.

But I think that supplanting humans with an AI workforce in the very near future might be stretching the projection of its capabilities too far. LLMs will be augmenting how businesses operate from now and into the future, but I am seeing clear roadblocks that make an autonomous AI agent unviable, and it seems to be fundamental limitations of LLMs, eg continuity and context. Advances recently seem to be from supplemental systems that try to patch those limitations. That suggests those limits are tricky, and until a new approach shows up, that is what drives my lack of faith in an AI agent revolution.

But it is clear to me that I could be wrong, and it could be a spectacular miscalculation. Maybe the robots will make me eat my hat.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#354

Post by Dlanv »

throwaway844498 wrote: post #326
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.

Why not, when it goes through code review by experienced software engineers who are experts on the subject in a codebase that is covered by extensive unit tests?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#355

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

rco8786 wrote: post #332
JB_Dev wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

These are AI companies selling AI to executives, there's no need to square the circle, the people that they are talking to have no interest in what's happening in a repo, it's about convincing people to buy in early so they can start making money off their massive investments.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#356

Post by the-lazy-guy »

abxyz wrote: post #210
kruuuder wrote: post #146

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…

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…

This is Stephen Toub, who is the lead of many important .NET projects. I don't think he is worried about losing job anytime soon.

I think, we should not read too much into it. He is honestly exploring how much this tool can help him to resolve trivial issues. Maybe he was asked to do so by some of his bosses, but unlikely to fear the tool replacing him in the near future.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#357

Post by derektank »

owebmaster wrote: post #206
derektank wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI alone is on track to generate as much revenue as Asus or US Steel this year ($10-$15 billion). I don't know how you can say AI has had no positive economic impact.

That is not even 1 month of a big tech revenue, it is a global negligible impact. 3 years talking about AI changing the world, 10bi revenue and no ecosystem around making money besides friends and VCs pumping and dumping LLM wrappers.

There's a pretty wide gulf between being one of the most important companies in the global marketplace as Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are and "having no economic impact".

I agree that most of the AI companies describe themselves and their products in hyperbolic terms. But that doesn't mean we need to counter that with equally absurd opposing hyperbole.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#358

Post by static_void »

georgemcbay wrote: post #94
smartmic wrote: post #80

reddit may not have the best reputation, but the comments there are on point! So far much better than what has been posted here by HN users on this topic/thread. Anyway, I hope this is good fodder to show the limits (and they are much narrower than hype-driven AI enthusiasts like to pretend) of AI coding and to be more honest with yourself and others about it.

> reddit may not have the best reputation reddit is a distillation of the entire internet on to one site with wildly variable quality of discussion depending upon which subreddit you are in. Some are awful, some are great.

And yet the low quality of the front page is an indictment of the site as a whole.

It's just that some internet extremophiles have managed to eke out a pleasant existence.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#359

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

> It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE.

That's right on the mark. It will save you a little bit of work on tasks that aren't the bottleneck on your productivity, and disrupt some random tasks that may or may not be important.

It's makes so little difference that plenty of people in 2025 don't use an IDE, and looking at their performance from the outside one just can't tell.

Except that LLMs have less potential to improve your tasks and more potential to be disruptive.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#360

Post by marcosdumay »

shultays wrote: post #257
mikrl wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember before mass LLM adoption, reading an issue on GitHub where an increasingly frustrated user was failing to properly describe a blocking issue, and the increasingly frustrated maintainer was failing to get them to stick to the issue template. Now you don’t even need the frustrated end user!

one day both sides will be AI so we can all relax and enjoy our mojitos

Well, people have been putting M-x doctor to talk with M-x eliza for decades.
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