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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#121

Post by jodrellblank »

nonethewiser wrote: post #90
diggan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the plan? Call me old school, but I find the workflow of "divide and conquer" to be as helpful when working with LLMs, as without them. Although what is needed to be considered a "large scale task" varies by LLMs and implementation. Some models/implementations (seemingly Copilot) struggles with even the smallest change, while others breeze through them. Lots of trial and error is needed to find that line for…

Its hard for me to think of a small, clearly defined coding problem an LLM cant solve.

"Find a counter example to the Collatz conjecture".

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#123

Post by infecto »

ethanol-brain wrote: post #82
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.

I guess it probably depends on what you are doing. Outside of layers on top of these things (tooling), I personally haven't seen much progress.

What a time we live in. I guess it depends how pessimistic you are.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#124

Post by yxhuvud »

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.

> Word that's so nasty in meaning that it apparently does not exist except in German language.

Except it does, we have "skadeglädje" in Swedish.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#125

Post by gf000 »

baalimago wrote: post #64

Well, the coding agent is pretty much a junior dev at the moment. The seniors are teaching it. Give it a 100k PRs with senior developer feedback and it'll improve just like you'd anticipate a junior would. There is no way that FANG aren't using the comments by the seniors as training data for their next version. It's a long-term play to have pricey senior developers argue with an llm

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 replaced?).

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#126

Post by sbarre »

surgical_fire wrote: post #109
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…

> I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing. That comparison is awful. I work with quite a few Junior developers and they can be competent. Certainly don't make the silly mistakes that LLMs do, don't need nearly as much handholding, and te…

I think that was the point of the comparison..

It's not like a regular junior developer, it's much worse.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#127

Post by rsynnott »

margorczynski wrote: post #8

With how stochastic the process is it makes it basically unusable for any large scale task. What's the plan? To roll the dice until the answer pops up? That would be maybe viable if there was a way to automatically evaluate it 100% but with a human in the loop required it becomes untenable.

I suspect that the plan is that MS has spent a lot, really a LOT, of money on this nonsense, and there is now significant pressure to put, something, anything, out even if it is worse than useless.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#128

Post by xyst »

llms are already very expensive to run on a per query basis. Now it’s being asked to run on massive codebases and attempt to fix issues.

Spending massive amounts of:

- energy to process these queries

- wasting time of mid-level and senior engineers to vibe code with copilot to ensure train and get it right

We are facing a climate change crisis and we continue to burn energy at useless initiatives so executives at big corporation can announce in quarterly shareholder meetings: "wE uSe Ai, wE aRe tHe FuTuRe, lAbOr fOrCe rEdUceD"

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#129

Post by loloquwowndueo »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #68
bayindirh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a matter of principle I don't use any network which is trained on non-consensual data ripped of its source and license information. Other than that, I don't think this is bad tech, however, this brings another slippery slope. Today it's as you say: > I think this process is intended for fixing papercuts rather than building anything involved. It just isn't good enough yet. After sufficient T somebody will rephrase…

> AI will never be a core and irreplaceable part of my development workflow. Unless AI use becomes a KPI in your annual review. Duolingo did that just recently, for example. I am developing serious regrets for conflating "computing as a medium for personal expression" with "computing for livelihood" early on.

> Unless AI use becomes a KPI in your annual review.

That’d be an insta-quit for me :)

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#130

Post by linker3000 »

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.

Would you buy a car that's been thrown together by a immature production and testing system with demonstrable and significant flaws, and just keep bringing it back to the dealership for refinements and the fixing of defects when you discover them? Assuming it doesn't kill you first?

These tools should be locked away in an R&D environment until sufficiently perfected.

MVP means 'ship with solid, tested basic features', not 'Ship with bugs and fix in production'.

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