Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane • Hacker News Board

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#481

Post by isaacremuant » Wed, May 21, 2025, 8:46 PM UTC

baalimago wrote: post #167

gf000 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A junior dev is (most often) a bright human being, with not much coding experience yet. They can certainly execute instructions and solve novel problems on their own, and they most certainly don't need 100k PRs to pick up new skills. Equating LLMs to humans is pretty damn.. stupid. It's not even close (otherwise how come all the litany of office jobs that require far less reasoning than software development are not r…

A junior dev may also swap jobs, require vacation days, perks and can't be scaled up at a the click of a button. There are no such issues with an agent. So, if I were a FANG higher-up, I'd invest quite a bit into training LLM-agents who make pesky humans redundant. Doing so has low risk, the senior devs may perhaps get fed up and quit, and the company might be a laughing stock on public PRs. But the potential value f…

It's probably easier to make the higher up redundant than to actually achieve high speed and predictable outcomes that satisfy real business needs and integrations in a cost effective way.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#482

Post by isaacremuant » Wed, May 21, 2025, 8:48 PM UTC

codyvoda wrote: post #111

jeswin wrote: post #85

I find it amusing that people (even here on HN) are expecting a brand new tool (among the most complex ever) to perform adequetely right off the bat. It will require a period of refinement, just as any other tool or process.

this entire thread is very reddit-y this stuff works. it takes effort and learning. it’s not going to magically solve high-complexity tasks (or even low-complexity ones) without investment. having people use it, learn how it works, and improve the systems is the right approach a lot of armchair engineers in here

Literally you're in a site where we are anything but armchair. We have years of experience. You're using your ad hominems wrong. Save them for a football thread and come up with actual arguments next time.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#483

Post by jimbokun » Wed, May 21, 2025, 8:52 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #230

diggan wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic I feel the same way today, but I got started around 2012 professionally. I wonder how much of this is just our fading optimism after seeing how shit really works behind the scenes, and how much the industry itself is responsible for it. I know we're not the only two people feeling this way either, but it seems all of us hav…

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…

What are you doing now instead?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#484

Post by Verdex » Wed, May 21, 2025, 8:54 PM UTC

mquander wrote: post #457

Verdex wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to accept this as a possibility but the case analysis still doesn't make much sense to me. If LLM usage is easy then I can't be left behind because it's easy. I'll pick it up in a weekend. If LLM usage is hard AND I can otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing then I can't be left behind if I just do the hard things. Still the only way I can be left behind is if LLM usage is nonsense or the same a…

The obvious case in which you would be "left behind" is the one in which LLM usage is hard, and you cannot otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing (or you can do them, but much slower and/or to a lower standard of quality.)

Sure. Although all of the hard things that I need to do I have a history of doing fast and to high standards.

Unless we're talking about hard things that I have up til now not been able to do. But do LLMs help with that in general?

This scenario breaks out of the hypothetical and the assertive and into the realm of the testable.

Provide for me the person who can use LLMs in a way that is hard but they are good at in order to do things which are hard but which they are currently bad at.

I will provide a task which is hard.

We can report back the result.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#485

Post by tdiff » Wed, May 21, 2025, 8:56 PM UTC

teleforce wrote: post #92

>I can't help enjoying some good schadenfreude Fun facts schadenfreude: the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another’s misfortune, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Word that's so nasty in meaning that it apparently does not exist except in German language.

злорадство in Russian

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#486

Post by Frost1x » Wed, May 21, 2025, 8:57 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #321

Frost1x wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it depends on how you view and interact with other people. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing their best to succeed. Why wouldn’t you want to help them as much as you reasonably can, unless they’re actively a terrible person?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#487

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

dttze wrote: post #401

Workaccount2 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not aware of any that you speak/type plain English to.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#488

Post by nyarlathotep_ » Wed, May 21, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #3

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.

> 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? It wouldn't be out of character, Microsoft has decided that every project on GitHub must deal with Copilot-generated issues and PRs from now on whether they want them or not. There's deliberately no way to opt out. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749 Like Googles…

>Like Googles mandatory AI summary at the top of search results, you know a feature is really good when the vendor feels like the only way they can hit their target metrics is by forcing their users to engage with it.

People like to compare "AI" (here, LLM products) to the iPhone.

I cannot make sense of these analogies; people used to line up around the block on release day for iPhone launches for years after the initial release.

Seems now most people collectively groan when more "innovative" LLM products get stuffed into otherwise working software.

This stuff is the literal opposite of demand.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#489

Post by pier25 » Wed, May 21, 2025, 9:22 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.

Yeah it's quite disheartening.

I recently spent a couple of months studying C# and .NET and working on my first project with it.

.NET, Blazor, etc are not known for a fast release schedule... but if things are going to become even slower with this AI crap I wonder if I made the right call.

I'm quite happy how things are today for making web APIs but I wish Blazor and other frameworks were in a much better shape.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#490

Post by rchaud » Wed, May 21, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

Frost1x wrote: post #486

rchaud wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it depends on how you view and interact with other people. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing their best to succeed. Why wouldn’t you want to help them as much as you reasonably can, unless they’re actively a terrible person?

As a senior dev or manager, you're responsible for the people you've hired. Their mistakes become your mistakes. If they make the same kind of mistake repeatedly, and aren't able to take responsibility, you will have to clean up after them. They're not able to fulfill their job description and must be let go. That's why the probationary period exists.

Realistically, the issues occurring here are intern-level mistakes where you can take the time to train them, because expectations are low and they're usually not working on production-level software. In a FT position the stakes are higher so things like this get evaluated during the interview. If this were a real person, they wouldn't have gotten an offer at Microsoft.