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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#401

Post by dttze »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #338
owebmaster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 aut…

Low code/no code/visual programming has been around forever. They all had issues. LLMs will also have the same issues and cost even more.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#402

Post by gthrowaway2342 »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #220
sbarre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s worth recognizing that the tension between labor and capital historical reality, not just a modern-day bad attitude. Workers and leadership don’t automatically share goals, especially when senior management incentives often prioritize reducing labor costs which they always do now (and no, this wasn't always universally so). Most employees want to do good work, but pretending there’s no structural divergence in i…

[dead]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#403

Post by Verdex »

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…

The "left behind" mantra that I've been hearing for a while now is the strange one to me.

Like, I need to start smashing my face into a keyboard for 10000 hours or else I won't be able to use LLM tools effectively.

If LLM is this tool that is more intuitive than normal programming and adds all this productivity, then surely I can just wait for a bunch of others to wear themselves out smashing the faces on a keyboard for 10000 hours and then skim the cream off of the top, no worse for wear.

On the other hand, if using LLMs is a neverending nightmare of chaos and misery that's 10x harder than programming (but with the benefit that I don't actually have to learn something that might accidentally be useful), then yeah I guess I can see why I would need to get in my hours to use it. But maybe I could just not use it.

"Left behind" really only makes sense to me if my KPIs have been linked with LLM flavor aid style participation.

Ultimately, though, physics doesn't care about social conformity and last I checked the machine is running on physics.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#404

Post by mystified5016 »

flmontpetit wrote: post #282
svick wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want them to experiment with new tools? The main difference now is that the experiment is public.

By all means. Just not on one of the most popular software development frameworks in the world. Maybe that can wait until after the concept is proven.

Yeah, seems to me that breaking .NET with this garbage will be, uh, extremely bad

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#405

Post by lawn »

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?

Because they're using it on an extremely popular repository that many people depend on?

And given the absolute garbage the AI is putting out the quality of the repo will drop. Either slop code will get committed or the bots will suck away time from people who could've done something productive instead.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#406

Post by mock-possum »

svaha1728 wrote: post #302
gwervc wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially painful when one of said employee is Stephen Toub, who is famous for his .net performance blog posts.

I was thinking that too. He's a great programmer, and at this point I can't imagine he's having fun 'prompting' an LLM to write correct code.

You don’t think he’s having fun getting laid a ton for playing with computers?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#407

Post by UncleMeat »

camdenreslink wrote: post #294
UncleMeat wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even when you review human-written code carefully, subtle bugs can sneak through. Software development is hard.

Of course. AI Agents throwing code at you merely makes it more likely.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#408

Post by bob1029 »

sensanaty wrote: post #377
the-lazy-guy wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn't M$ just fire like 7000 people, many of which were involved in big important M$ projects? The CPython guys, for example.

Now, consider the game theory of saying "no" when your boss tells you to go play with the LLM in public.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#409

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

ryandrake wrote: post #383
ecocentrik wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to find anything wrong with your conclusions except that you're leaving out the part where they're trying to automate our contributions to devalue our skills. I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. These expensive toys will inevitably introduce catastro…

> I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN! Every tech CEO on earth is salivating over AI coding because they want it to devalue and/or replace their expensive human software developers. Whether or not that will ac…

HackerNews is driven by a particular kind of radical libertarian philosophy believing person. You don't come up with the sorts of pump and dump start up ideas that typically come out of Y Combinator without being either sociopathic or delusional in the above way.

Anybody who thinks this place represents the average working or middle class programmer hasn't been paying much attention. They fool a lot of people by being social liberal to go along with their economic liberalism.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#410

Post by pera »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #319
automatic6131 wrote: post #301

Satya said "nearly 30% of code written at microsoft is now written by AI" in an interview with Zuckerberg, so underlings had to hurry to make it true. This is the result. Sad!

As much as I'd like to also dunk on them because of their AI nonsense, this keeps being misquoted again and again. He said that about 20-30% of their code is written by software . If someone like Satya says "by software" and not "by AI", you can be very sure that there is a good reason that he's phrasing it as carefully as this - because that includes a lot of things like auto-generated code, e.g. COM classes generat…

This happened during LlamaCon while taking about Copilot/LLMs: if the percentages Satya was referring to were for any "auto-generated" code then he was being intentionally misleading.

Besides, you could also say that 100% of code is generated "by software" no?

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