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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#31

Post by egorfine »

mtmail wrote: post #7
cebert wrote: post #2

Do we know for a fact there are Microsoft employees who were told they have to use CoPilot and review its change suggestions on projects? We have the option to use GitHub CoPilot on code reviews and it’s comically bad and unhelpful. There isn’t a single member of my team who find it useful for anything other than identifying typos.

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…

> management is pushing it

Why?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#32

Post by bayindirh »

worldsayshi wrote: post #20
bayindirh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the future envisioned by Microsoft. Vibe coding all the way down, social network style. They are putting this in front of the developers as take it or leave it deal. I left the platform, doing my coding old way, hosting it somewhere else. Discoverability? I don't care. I'm coding it for myself and hosting in the open. If somebody finds it, nice. Otherwise, mneh.

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 it as:

> I think this process is intended for writing small, personal utilities rather than building enterprise software. It just isn't good enough yet.

...and we will iterate from there.

So, it looks like I won't touch it for the foreseeable future. Maybe if the ethical problems with training material is solved (i.e. trained with data obtained with consensus and with correct licenses), I can use as alongside other analysis and testing tools I use, for a final pass.

AI will never be a core and irreplaceable part of my development workflow.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#33

Post by Frost1x »

XorNot wrote: post #15
jsheard wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we know for a fact there are Microsoft employees who were told they have to use CoPilot and review its change suggestions on projects? It wouldn't be out of character, Microsoft has decided that every project on GitHub must deal with Copilot-generated issues and PRs from now on whether they want them or not. There's deliberately no way to opt out. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749 Like Googles…

Which almost feels unique to AI. I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face, other then perhaps when everyone lost their minds and decided to cram mobile interfaces onto every other platform.

To some degree I think part of its “hey look here, we’re doing LLMs too we’re not just traditional search” positioning. They feel the pressure of competition and feel forced to throw whatever they have in the users face to drive awareness. Whether that’s the right approach or not, not so sure, but I suspect that’s a lot of it given that OpenAI is still the poster boy and many are switching to using things like ChatGPT entirely in place of traditional search engines.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#34

Post by spacecadet »

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 wonder if there is some difference in their internal processes that are leaking through here?"

Maybe, but likely it is reality and their true company culture leaking through. Eventually some higher eq execs might come to the very late realization that they cant actually lead or build a worthwhile and productive company culture and all that remains is an insane reflection of that.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#36

Post by diggan »

XorNot wrote: post #15
jsheard wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we know for a fact there are Microsoft employees who were told they have to use CoPilot and review its change suggestions on projects? It wouldn't be out of character, Microsoft has decided that every project on GitHub must deal with Copilot-generated issues and PRs from now on whether they want them or not. There's deliberately no way to opt out. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749 Like Googles…

Which almost feels unique to AI. I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face, other then perhaps when everyone lost their minds and decided to cram mobile interfaces onto every other platform.

> I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face

Passkeys. As someone who doesn't see the value of it, every hype-driven company seems to be pushing me to replace OPT 2FA with something worse right now.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#38

Post by balazstorok »

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 actually running (and maybe some static checking can help it, like not deleting tests).

Waiting to see what happens. I expect it will find its niche in development and become actually useful, taking off menial tasks from developers.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#39

Post by motoboi »

ankitml wrote: post #13

GitHub is not the place to write code. IDE is the place. Along with pre CI checks, some tests, coverage etc. they should get some PM before making decisions..

In day-to-day I interact with github PR via intellij github plugin. Ie: inspect the branch, the changes, the comments, etc.

Maybe that's how the microsoft employees are using it (in another IDE I suppose).

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#40

Post by MonkeyClub »

tantalor wrote: post #30
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.

> when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire Too late?

Just in time for marshmallows!
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