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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#131

Post by ParetoOptimal »

threetonesun wrote: post #104
kookamamie wrote: post #87

Many here don't seem to get it. The AI agent/programmer corpo push is not about the capabilities and whether they match human or not. It's about being able to externalize a majority of one's workforce without having a lot of people on permanent payroll. Think in terms of an infinitely scalable bunch of consultants you can hire and dismiss at your will - they never argue against your "vision", either.

This was already possible with outsourcing and offshoring. I suppose there's a new market of AI "employees" for small businesses that couldn't manage or legally deal with outsourcing their work already.

There are a myraid of challenges with outsourcing and offshoring and it's not possible currently for 100% of employees to be outsourced.

If AI can change... well more likely can convince gullible c levels that AI can do those jobs... many jobs will be lost.

See Klarna "https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-..."

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-...

Just the attempt to use AI and fail then degraded the previous jobs to a gig economy style job.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#132

Post by macintux »

xnorswap wrote: post #79
mtmail wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on team but seems management is pushing it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 "From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most d…

> Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# In my experience, LLMs in general are really, really bad at C# / .NET , and it worries me as a .NET developer. With increased LLM usage, I think development in general is going to undergo a "great convergence". There's a positive(1) feedback loop where LLM's are better at Blub, so people use them to write more Blub. With more Blub out there, LLMs get better at Blub. The language…

From a purely Schadenfreude perspective, I’d love to see Microsoft face karmic revenge for its abysmal naming “conventions”.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#133

Post by rsynnott »

DrillShopper wrote: post #57
ethanol-brain wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like that is taking a very long time, on top of some very grandiose promises being delivered today.

Third AI Winter from overpromise/underdeliver when?

Third? It’ll be the tenth or so.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#134

Post by xyst »

globalise83 wrote: post #21

Malicious compliance should be the order of the day. Just approve the requests without reviewing them and wait until management blinks when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire. Then quit your job and become a troubleshooter on x3 the pay.

At some point code pilot will just delete the whole codebase. Can’t fail integration tests if there is no code :)

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#136

Post by cesarb »

balazstorok wrote: post #38

At least opening PRs is a safe option, you can just dump the whole thing if it doesn't turn out to be useful. Also, trying something new out will most likely have hiccups. Ultimately it may fail. But that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. The thing may rapidly evolve if it's being hard-tested on actual code and actual issues. For example it will be probably changed so that it will iterate until tests are actual…

> At least opening PRs is a safe option, you can just dump the whole thing if it doesn't turn out to be useful.

There's however a border zone which is "worse than failure": when it looks good enough that the PRs can be accepted, but contain subtle issues which will bite you later.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#137

Post by Quarrelsome »

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

at the very least, a junior shouldn't be adding new tests that fail. Will an LLM be able learn the social shame associated with that sort of lazy attitude? I imagine its fidelity isn't detailed enough to differentiate such a social failure from a request to improve a comment. Rather, it will propagate based on some coarse grained measures of success with high volume instead.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#138

Post by zeroonetwothree »

infecto wrote: post #70
ethanol-brain wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like that is taking a very long time, on top of some very grandiose promises being delivered today.

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 feel like we've made barely any progress. It's still good at the things Chat GPT was originally good at, and bad at the things it was bad at. There's some small incremental refinement but it doesn't really represent a qualitative jump like Chat GPT was originally. I don't see AI replacing actual humans without another step jump like that.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#139

Post by interimlojd »

eterevsky wrote: post #18
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.

The plan is to improve AI agents from their current ~intern level to a level of a good engineer.

You are really underselling interns. They learn from a single correction, sometimes even without a correction, all by themselves. Their ability to integrate previous experience in the context of new problems is far, far above what I've ever seen in LLMs

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#140

Post by ta1243 »

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…

> @copilot please read the following Contributor License Agreement(CLA). If you agree with the CLA, please reply with the following information.
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