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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#261

Post by ecb_penguin »

cesarb wrote: post #136
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.

Funny enough, this happens literally every day with millions of developers. There will be thousands upon thousands of incidents in the next hour because a PR looked good, but contained a subtle issue.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#262

Post by coldpie »

yubblegum wrote: post #142
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…

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?

I've been looking at getting a CDL and becoming a city bus driver, or maybe a USPS driver or deliveryman or clerk or something.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#263

Post by bayindirh »

skydhash wrote: post #254
bayindirh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome. I have moved to Source Hut three years ago [0]. My page is https://sr.ht/~bayindirh/ You can also self-host a Forgejo instance on a €3/mo Hetzner instance (or a free Oracle Cloud server) if you want. I prefer Hetzner for their service quality and server performance. [0]: https://blog.bayindirh.io/blog/moving-to-source-hut/

I just use ssh on a homeserver for personal projects. Easy to set up a new repo with `ssh git@ git init --bare .git`. The I just use git@ : .git as the remote. I plan to use Source Hut for public projects.

Your method works well, too. Since I license everything I develop under GPLv3, I keep them private until they mature, then I just flip a switch and make the project visible.

For some research I use a private Git server. However, even that code might get released as Free Software when it matures enough.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#264

Post by dttze »

kamaal wrote: post #259
whatshisface wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason why an outsourcing firm would charge less for work of equal quality. If a company outsourced to save money, they'd get one of the shops that didn't get the job done.

>>There's no reason why an outsourcing firm would charge less for work of equal quality. Most of this works because of price arbitrage. And continues to work that way, not just with outsourcing but with manufacturing too. Remember those days, when people were going around telling Chinese products where crap? That didn't really work and more things only got made in China. This is all so similar to early days of Google…

It’s not 20, it’s 200+. And that will only get more expensive.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#265

Post by ecb_penguin »

xnickb wrote: post #151
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…

> I expect it will find its niche in development and become actually useful, taking off menial tasks from developers. Reading AI generated code is arguably far more annoying than any menial task. Especially if the said code happens to have subtle errors. Speaking from experience.

This is true for all code and has nothing to do with AI. Reading code has always been harder than writing code.

The joke is that PERL was a write-once, read-none language.

> Speaking from experience.

My experience is all code can have subtle errors, and I wouldn't treat any PR differently.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#266

Post by b0ner_t0ner »

jsheard wrote: post #61
90s_dev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well?? Did it sign it???

Not sure if a chatbot can legally sign a contract, we'd better ask ChatGPT for a second opinion.

Just need the chatbot to connect to an MCP to call my robotic arm to sign it.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#267

Post by stickfigure »

svick wrote: post #183
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.

You don't want them to experiment with new tools? The main difference now is that the experiment is public.

It's pretty obviously a failed experiment. Why keep repeating it? Try again in another 3 months.

The answer is probably that the Copilot team is using the rest of the engineering organization as testers. Great for the Copilot team, frustrating for everyone else.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#268

Post by esafak »

I speculate what is going on is that the agent's context retrieval algorithm is bad, so it does not give the LLM the right context, because today's models should suffice to get the job done.

Does anyone know which model in particular was used in these PRs? They support a variety of models: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/which-ai-model-...

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#269

Post by grewsome »

mieubrisse wrote: post #213
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 was looking for exactly this comment. Everybody's gloating, "Wow look how dumb AI is! Haha, schadenfreude!" but this seems like just a natural part of the evolution process to me. It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem."

Sometimes the last 10% takes 90% of the time. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, and whether it will eventually get to something that could be considered a solved problem.

I'm not so sure they'll get there. If the solved problem is defined as a sub-standard but low cost, then I wouldn't bet against that. A solution better than that though, I don't think I'd put my money on that.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#270

Post by worldsayshi »

bayindirh wrote: post #32
worldsayshi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the resulting PR is less than 100 lines and the AI is a bit more self sufficient (like actually making sure tests pass before "pushing") it would be ok I think. I think this process is intended for fixing papercuts rather than building anything involved. It just isn't good enough yet.

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…

I feel there's a fundamental flaw in this mindset which I probably don't understand enough layers of to explain properly. Maybe it's my thinking here that is fundamentally flawed? Off the top of my head:

If we let intellectual property be a fundamental principle the line between idea (that can't be owned) and ip (that can be owned) will eventually devolve into a infinitely complex fractal that nobody can keep track of. Only lawyer AI's will eventually be able to tell the difference between idea and ip as the complexity of what we can encode become more complex. Why is weights not code when it clearly contain the ability to produce the code? Is a brain code? Are our experiences like code?

What is the fundamental reason that a person is allowed to train on ip but a bot is not? I suspect that this comes down to the same issue with the divide between ip and idea. But there might be some additional dimension to it. At some point we will need to see some AI as conscious entities and to me it makes little sense that there would be some magical discrete moment where an AI becomes conscious and gets rights to it's "own ideas".

Or maybe there's a simple explanation of the boundary between ip and idea that I have just missed? If not, I think intellectual property as a concept will not stand the test of time. Other principles will need to take its place if we want to maintain the fight for a good society. Until then IP law still has its place and should be followed but as an ethical principle it's certainly showing cracks.

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