Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 580 posts

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#221

Post by AbstractH24 »

safety1st wrote: post #160
surgical_fire wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something. After dozens of hours billed you will, in f…

> These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted

Those have long been the folks I’ve seen at the biggest risk of being replaced by AI. Tasks that didn’t rely on human interaction or much training, just brute force which can be done from anywhere.

And for them, that $3/hr was really good money.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#222

Post by whywhywhywhy »

sbarre wrote: post #143
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.

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…

> but who actually wants to behave this way at their job?

Almost no one does but people get ground down and then do it to cope.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#224

Post by codyvoda »

rco8786 wrote: post #218
sbarre wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like everyone is applying a worse-case narrative to what's going on here.. I see this as a work in progress.. I am almost certain the humans in the loop on these PRs are well aware of what's going on and have their expectations in check, and this isn't just "business as usual" like any other PR or work assignment. This is a test. You can't improve a system without testing it on real world conditions. How do we…

I think people would be more likely to adopt this view if the overall narrative about AI is that it’s a work in progress and we expect it to get magnitudes better. But the narrative is that AI is already replacing human software engineers.

[flagged]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#225

Post by Tade0 »

ehnto wrote: post #154
eterevsky wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are not intern level. Even if it could perform at a similar level to an intern at a programming task, it lacks a great deal of the other attributes that a human brings to the table, including how they integrate into a team of other agents (human or otherwise). I won't bother listing them, as we are all humans. I think the hype is missing the forest for the trees, and I think exactly this multi-agent dynamic migh…

My impression is that Copilot acts a lot like one of my former coworkers, who struggled with:

-Being a parent to a small child and the associated sleep deprivation.

-His reluctance to read documentation.

-There being a language barrier between him the project owners. Emphasis here, as the LLM acts like someone who speaks through a particularly good translation service, but otherwise doesn't understand the language spoken.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#226

Post by rco8786 »

codyvoda wrote: post #224
rco8786 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people would be more likely to adopt this view if the overall narrative about AI is that it’s a work in progress and we expect it to get magnitudes better. But the narrative is that AI is already replacing human software engineers.

[flagged]

That's a weird comment. I do think for myself. I wasn't even talking about my own personal thoughts on the matter. I can just plainly see that the overwhelming narrative in the public zeitgeist is that AI can do jobs that humans can do. And it's not true.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#227

Post by camdenreslink »

sweman wrote: post #180
yubblegum wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic, from the interview process, to imitating "big tech" songs and dances by small fry companies, and now this. Is there any joy left in being a professional software developer?

[flagged]

A very very small percentage of professional software developers get that.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#228

Post by mrweasel »

pydry wrote: post #181
mrweasel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least we can tell the junior developers to not submit a pull-request before they have the tests running locally. At what point does the human developers just give up and close the PRs as "AI garbage". Keep the ones that works, then just junk the rest. I feel that at some point entertaining the machine becomes unbearable and people just stops doing it or rage close the PRs.

When their performance reviews stop depending upon them not doing that. Microsoft's stock price is dependent on them proving that this is a success.

What happens when they can't prove that and development efficiency starts falling, because developers spend 50% of their time battling copilot?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#229

Post by mikrl »

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.

I remember before mass LLM adoption, reading an issue on GitHub where an increasingly frustrated user was failing to properly describe a blocking issue, and the increasingly frustrated maintainer was failing to get them to stick to the issue template.

Now you don’t even need the frustrated end user!

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#230

Post by salawat »

diggan wrote: post #169
yubblegum wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic, from the interview process, to imitating "big tech" songs and dances by small fry companies, and now this. Is there any joy left in being a professional software developer?

> 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 had been previously liberated; bicycles designed to monitor, or to undermine their owner, or more disgustingly, their "licensee".

So I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not going to continue making deliberately crippled, overly complex, legally encumbered bicycles for the mind, purely intended as subjects for ARR extraction.

Post reply on HN