kinda sad to see y'all brigading an OSS project, regardless of what you think of AI
how do you know it wasn't an AI bot account posting all those laugh emojis?
reactions are fine but cluttering the PR with comments? bad form
Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
361–370 of 580 posts
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
why does every engineer keep talking about it like it’s more than marketing hype? why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe? have you talked to the executives implementing these strategies? redbull does not give you wings. it’s disconcerting to see the lack of nuance in these discussions around these new tools (and yeah sorry this isn’t really aimed at you, but the zeitgeist, apologies)
> why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe?
Because we're literally seeing people being laid off with narratives about being replaced with AI (At a whole slew of companies). Because we're seeing company policies around hiring being changed to require hiring managers to provide exhaustive justifications why the work couldn't be handled by an AI (at e.g. Shopify, Salesforce and so on)
> have you talked to the executives implementing these strategies?
I have had a few conversations, yes. Have you? They're weirdly "true believers" that are buying the marketing hype hook line and sinker. They're doing small coding exercises themselves in these tools, seeing that they as an executive can manage to get valid code for the small exercise out the other side of it, and assuming that that means it can replace head count. Either deliberately or naively failing to understand that there is a world of difference between leet code style exercises, or quick small changes to code bases, and actual software development.
The weirdest conversation recently, which thankfully I got to just be on the periphery of, involved an engineering org that decided to try to replace the post-incident process with one entirely written by LLMs. It would take timelines from a ticket, and a small prompt to write up the entire post-incident report, tasks etc.
The whole project showed a gross misunderstanding of the point of post-incident stuff, eradicating "introspection" and "learning from your mistakes", turning it into a check box exercise for teams. Even their narrative around what they were doing was hilarious, because it came down to "Get the post-incident report out of the way so we can concentrate on the real work".
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#363Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#364_this_ is the Judgement Day we were warned about--not in the nuclear annihilation sense--but the "AI was then let loose on all our codez and the systems went down" sense
crazy times...
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast And at the same time, absurdly slow? ChatGPT is almost 3 years old and pretty much AI has still no positive economic impact.
OpenAI alone is on track to generate as much revenue as Asus or US Steel this year ($10-$15 billion). I don't know how you can say AI has had no positive economic impact.
And what is their burn rate?
Everyone fails to mention the amount they are spending for this return.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
They'll probably blame openai/the AI instead.
AI has reproducible outcomes. If someone else can make it work, then they should too.
This is just false. Do these models even have reproducible outcomes with a temperature of 0? Aren't they also severely restricted with a temp of 0?
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
why does every engineer keep talking about it like it’s more than marketing hype? why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe? have you talked to the executives implementing these strategies? redbull does not give you wings. it’s disconcerting to see the lack of nuance in these discussions around these new tools (and yeah sorry this isn’t really aimed at you, but the zeitgeist, apologies)
> why does every engineer keep talking about it like it’s more than marketing hype?
because it is more than marketing hype. real people are taking real action based on this narrative.
> why do you actually accept this is a real narrative real people believe?
largely because I witness real people believing this narrative with my own eyes on a daily basis.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially painful when one of said employee is Stephen Toub, who is famous for his .net performance blog posts.
I was thinking that too. He's a great programmer, and at this point I can't imagine he's having fun 'prompting' an LLM to write correct code.
I hope he writes a personal essay about the experience after he leaves Microsoft. Not that he will leave anytime soon, but the first hand accounts of how they are talking about these systems internally are going to be even more entertaining than the wtf PRs.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is Stephen Toub, who is the lead of many important .NET projects. I don't think he is worried about losing job anytime soon. I think, we should not read too much into it. He is honestly exploring how much this tool can help him to resolve trivial issues. Maybe he was asked to do so by some of his bosses, but unlikely to fear the tool replacing him in the near future.
They don’t have any problem firing experienced devs for no reason. Including on the .NET team (most of the .NET Android dev team was laid off recently).
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/microsofts_axe_softwa...
Perhaps they were fired for failing to show enthusiasm for AI?
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Remember what happened to the markets when deepseek came out?