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

381–390 of 580 posts

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#381

Post by vel0city »

kamaal wrote: post #274
dttze wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Again I don't know what people mean when they say it will get more expensive. This is a wrong way of looking at the issue. Pretty sure cars are more expensive than horse carriage, or that iPhones are/were more expensive than button phones. You can cite so many such examples. Like photocopying machines, or cameras, or wrist watches, or even things like radio, television etc. More importantly, sometimes how you do thin…

> Pretty sure cars are more expensive than horse carriage

Basic car ownership can be quite a bit cheaper than a horse + carriage.

The horse will probably eat $10-20/day in food. $600/mo in just food costs. Not including vet bills and what not.

A decent and cheap horse will probably cost you $3k up front. Add in several thousand dollars more for the carriage.

A horse requires practically daily maintenance. A carriage will still require some maintenance.

A horse requires a good bit more land, plus the space to store the carriage. Plus, all the extra time and work mounting and unmounting your horse whenever you need to go.

A horse and carriage isn't really cheaper than a cheap car and way less functional.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#382

Post by [deleted] »

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."

[deleted]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#383

Post by ryandrake »

ecocentrik wrote: post #276
salawat wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's hard to find anything wrong with your conclusions except that you're leaving out the part where they're trying to automate our contributions to devalue our skills. I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. These expensive toys will inevitably introduce catastro…

> I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US.

This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN! Every tech CEO on earth is salivating over AI coding because they want it to devalue and/or replace their expensive human software developers. Whether or not that will actually happen, that's the purpose of building all of these "agentic" coding tools. And here we are, dumbass software engineers, cheerleading for and building the means of our own destruction! We downplay it with bullshit like "Oh, but AI is just a way to augment our work, it will never really replace us or lower our compensation!" Wild how excited we all are about this.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#384

Post by spacemadness »

camdenreslink wrote: post #227
sweman wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

Sounds like the type of person OP was complaining about. Usually executives or very lucky ones who started at Nvidia 6-7 years ago, etc.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#385

Post by tossandthrow »

le-mark wrote: post #47

The real tragedy is the management mandating this have their eyes clearly set on replacing the very same software engineers with this technology. I don’t know what’s more Kafka than Kafka but this situation certainly is!

Management obviously also know, that when they do not have anybody to manage, then they are also obselete.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#386

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#387

Post by marcosdumay »

egorfine wrote: post #31
mtmail wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At Microsoft, because they sell that stuff and it would be really bad for their image if they insisted they work better by not using it.

(Or, rather, I have no idea how this compares with the image of they actually not delivering because they use it. But that's a next quarter problem.)

At every other place where management is strongly pushing it, I honestly have no idea. It makes zero sense for management to do that everywhere, yet management is doing that everywhere.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#388

Post by aaronbaugher »

ryandrake wrote: post #383
ecocentrik wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to find anything wrong with your conclusions except that you're leaving out the part where they're trying to automate our contributions to devalue our skills. I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. These expensive toys will inevitably introduce catastro…

> I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN! Every tech CEO on earth is salivating over AI coding because they want it to devalue and/or replace their expensive human software developers. Whether or not that will ac…

I think it's similar to a thread we had here recently about why it's impossible to unionize tech workers. Basically, most tech workers don't like other tech workers (or other people, really) very much, so there's very little camaraderie of the sort you need to get people to team up and take on a shared enemy. Instead, we all think we're smarter than the other guy, so he'll be the one who gets fired while I thrive in the new situation.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#389

Post by rco8786 »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #355
rco8786 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satya says: "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software". Zuckerberg says: "Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there". It's hard to square those statements up with what we're seeing happen on t…

These are AI companies selling AI to executives, there's no need to square the circle, the people that they are talking to have no interest in what's happening in a repo, it's about convincing people to buy in early so they can start making money off their massive investments.

Why shouldn’t we judge a company’s capabilities against what their CEOs claim them to be capable of?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#390

Post by nottorp »

codyvoda wrote: post #344
nottorp wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what i see is a human telling the "AI" that the code does not compile what use is a bot if it can't do at least this simple step?

it can do this step. once again, this launched 2 days ago and people are using it for the first time if you have used it for more than a few hours (or literally just read the docs) and aren’t stupid, you know this is easily solved you’re giving into mob mentality

So everyone who doesn't worship "AI" is stupid? :)
Post reply on HN