Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

Stupidity, greed, and straight-up evil intentions do a bunch of the work, but ultimately short-term thinking wins because it's an attractor state. The influence of the wealthy/powerful is always outsized, but attractors and common-knowledge also create a natural conspiracy that doesn't exactly have a center.

So with AI, the way the natural conspiracy works out is like this. Leaders at the top might suspect it's bullshit, but don't care, they always fail upwards anyway. Middle management at non-tech companies suspect their jobs are in trouble on some timeline, so they want to "lead a modernization drive" to bring AI to places they know don't need it, even if it's a doomed effort that basically defrauds the company owners. Junior engineers see a tough job market, want to devalue experience to compete.. decide that only AI matters, everything that came before is the old way. Owners and investors hate expensive senior engineers who don't have to bow and scrape, think they have to much power, would love to put them in their place. Senior engineers who are employed and maybe the most clear-eyed about the actual capabilities of technology see the writing on the wall.. you have to make this work even if it's handed to you in a broken state, because literally everyone is gunning for you. Those who are unemployed are looking around like well.. this is apparently the game one must play. Investors will invest in any horrible doomed thing regardless of what it is because they all think they are smarter than other investors and will get out in just in time. Owners are typically too disconnected from whatever they own, they just want to exit/retire and already mostly in the position of listening to lieutenants.

At every level for every stakeholder, once things have momentum they don't need be a healthy/earnest/noble/rational endeavor any more than the advertising or attention economy did before it. Regardless of the ethics there or the current/future state of any specific tech.. it's a huge problem when being locally rational pulls us into a state that's globally irrational

People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con.

Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily.

Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future.

Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingredients pretty often). She loves it.

This is where LLMs shine for regular people. She doesn't need it to create a 500k LOC turn-key baking tracking SaaS AWS back-end 5 million recipes on tap kitchen assistant app.

She just needs a bespoke one off check list.

I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."?

Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App (https://m365.cloud.microsoft/).

Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me? Like, Copilot could watch my daily habits and offer automation for recurring things.

This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too.

Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff.

You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / statistics based approach that worked well without suggesting outright rubbish.

In .NET we've had intellisense for 25 years that would only suggest properties that could exist, and then suddenly I found a while ago that vscode auto-completed properties that don't exist.

It's maddening! The least they could have done is put in a roslyn pass to filter out the impossible.