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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#311

Post by sbarre »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #306
sbarre wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you sleep well at night just doing what you're told by people who don't really care about your well being? I don't get that

There's a whole lot of assumptions in your statement/question there, don't you think?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#312

Post by JB_Dev »

robotcapital wrote: post #290

Replace the AI agent with any other new technology and this is an example of a company: 1. Working out in the open 2. Dogfooding their own product 3. Pushing the state of the art Given that the negative impact here falls mostly (completely?) on the Microsoft team which opted into this, is there any reason why we shouldn't be supporting progress here?

100% agree. i’m not sure why everyone is clowning on them here. This process is a win. Do people want this all being hidden instead in a forked private repo?

It’s showing the actual capabilities in practice. That’s much better and way more illuminating than what normally happens with sales and marketing hype.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#313

Post by lloydatkinson »

rkagerer wrote: post #297

This comment from lloydjatkinson resonated: As an outside observer but developer using .NET, how concerned should I be about AI slop agents being let lose on codebases like this? How much code are we going to be unknowingly running in future .NET versions that was written by AI rather than real people? What are the implications of this around security, licensing, code quality, overall cohesiveness, public APIs, perfo…

Glad you appreciated it!

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#314

Post by dmix »

abxyz wrote: post #210
kruuuder wrote: post #146

A comment on the first pull request provides some context: > The stream of PRs is coming from requests from the maintainers of the repo. We're experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools can do today and preparing for what they'll be able to do tomorrow. Anything that gets merged is the responsibility of the maintainers, as is the case for any PR submitted by anyone to this open source and welcoming repo…

The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence…

> Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind"

If they weren't experimenting with AI and coding and took a more conservative approach, while other companies like Anthropic was running similar experiments, I'm sure HN would also be critiquing them for not keeping up as a stodgy big corporation.

As long as they are willing to take risks by trying and failing on their own repos, it's fine in my books. Even though I'd never let that stuff touch a professional github repo personally.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#315

Post by lloydatkinson »

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.

That is essentially what I tried to say in my comment there but don't think they wanted to hear it.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#316

Post by nottorp »

codyvoda wrote: post #113
nottorp wrote: post #24

So, to achieve parity, they should allow humans to also commit code without checking that it at least compiles, right? Or MS already does that?

the code goes through a PR review process like any other? what are you talking about?

so do you consider normal to submit code that you have never compiled? or ran at least once if it's not a compiled language...

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#317

Post by yubblegum »

coldpie wrote: post #262
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?

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.

I hear you. Same boat just can't figure out the life jacket yet. (You do fine wood work, why not that? I am considering finding entry level work in architecture myself - kicking myself for giving that up for software now. Did not see this shit show coming.)

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#318

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

xyst wrote: post #134
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 :)

That would be logical, but alas LLMs can't into logic.

Bloating the codebase with dead code is much more likely.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#319

Post by TonyTrapp »

automatic6131 wrote: post #301

Satya said "nearly 30% of code written at microsoft is now written by AI" in an interview with Zuckerberg, so underlings had to hurry to make it true. This is the result. Sad!

As much as I'd like to also dunk on them because of their AI nonsense, this keeps being misquoted again and again. He said that about 20-30% of their code is written by software. If someone like Satya says "by software" and not "by AI", you can be very sure that there is a good reason that he's phrasing it as carefully as this - because that includes a lot of things like auto-generated code, e.g. COM classes generated from IDL files. Of course in the current climate everyone that's not careful enough will just mis-interpret it as "30% written by AI", and that is probably intentional.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#320

Post by Vicinity9635 »

abxyz wrote: post #210
kruuuder wrote: post #146

A comment on the first pull request provides some context: > The stream of PRs is coming from requests from the maintainers of the repo. We're experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools can do today and preparing for what they'll be able to do tomorrow. Anything that gets merged is the responsibility of the maintainers, as is the case for any PR submitted by anyone to this open source and welcoming repo…

The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence…

If you're not using it where it's useful to you, then I still wouldn't say you're getting left behind, but you're making your job harder than it has to be. Anecdotally I've found it useful mostly for writing unit tests and sometimes debugging (can be as effective as a rubber duck).

It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE.

It's a powerful tool. You still need to know when to and when not to use it.

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