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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#411

Post by spiffytech »

Verdex wrote: post #403
abxyz wrote: post #210

Earlier 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…

The "left behind" mantra that I've been hearing for a while now is the strange one to me. Like, I need to start smashing my face into a keyboard for 10000 hours or else I won't be able to use LLM tools effectively. If LLM is this tool that is more intuitive than normal programming and adds all this productivity, then surely I can just wait for a bunch of others to wear themselves out smashing the faces on a keyboard…

There's a third way things might go: on the way to "superpower for everyone", we go through an extended phase where AI is only a superpower in skilled hands. The job market bifurcates around this. People who make strong use of it get first pick of the good jobs. People not making effective use of AI get whatever's left.

Kinda like how word processing used to be an important career skill people put on their resumes. Assuming AI becomes as that commonplace and accessible, will it happen fast enough that devs who want good jobs can afford to just wait that out?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#412

Post by Quarrelsome »

rco8786 wrote: post #286
Quarrelsome wrote: post #105

rah, we might be in trouble here. The primary issue at play is that we don't have a reliable means of measuring developer performance, outside of subjective judgement like end of year reviews. This means its probably quite hard to measure the gain or the drag of using these agents. On one side, its a lot cheaper than a junior, but on the other side it pulls time from seniors and doesn't necessarily follow instruction…

> its a lot cheaper than a junior I’m not even sure if this is true when considering training costs of the model. It takes a lot of junior engineer salaries to amortize the billions spent building this thing in the first place.

sure, but for an org just buying tokens its cheaper and more disposable than an employee. At least it looks better on paper for the bean counters.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#413

Post by codyvoda »

nottorp wrote: post #390
codyvoda wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

is that what I said? if you can’t read documentation and follow basic instructions to get a tool to work you’re stupid. you asked a snarky question like it’s some gotcha. once again, if you actually use the tool and read the docs and can’t figure it out, I think it’s a skill issue

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#414

Post by linza »

sgarland wrote: post #83
linza wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what you describe is not terrible way to run things. Eat your own dogfood. To get better at it you need to start doing it.

Sure, but if the product in question is at best tangential to your core products, it sucks, and makes your work flow slow to a crawl, I don’t blame employees for not wanting to use it. For example, if tomorrow my company announced that everyone was being switched to Windows, I would simply quit. I don’t care that WSL exists, overall it would be detrimental to my workday, and I have other options.

True. i didn't mean "not terrible for employees" i meant "not terrible for company goals". Yes, these are intertwined, but assuming not everyone quits over introducing AI workflows it could make Microsoft a leader in that space.

Personally i would also not particularly like it.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#415

Post by [deleted] »

mhuffman wrote: post #248
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…

>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership Interesting because "them" very much have an antagonistic mentality vs "us". "Them" would fire you in a fucking heartbeat to save a relatively small amount (10%). "Them" also want to aggressively pay you the least amount for which they can get you to do work for them, not what they "value" you at. "Us" depends…

[deleted]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#416

Post by TonyTrapp »

pera wrote: post #410
TonyTrapp wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generat…

This happened during LlamaCon while taking about Copilot/LLMs: if the percentages Satya was referring to were for any "auto-generated" code then he was being intentionally misleading. Besides, you could also say that 100% of code is generated "by software" no?

For reference, the quote is "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"

Microsoft has humongous amounts of source code in their repositories, amassed over decades. LLM-driven code generation is only feasible within the last few years. It would be completely unrealistic that 30% of all of their code is written by LLMs at this point in time. So yes, there is something in his quote that is intentionally misleading. Pick whatever you think it is, but I'm going to say that it's the "by software" part.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#417

Post by nashashmi »

daveguy wrote: post #366
nashashmi wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some randomization is intentionally introduced. We are not accounting for that. Otherwise, it should be able to give you the same information.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#418

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

rco8786 wrote: post #389
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh, we absolutely should, but I'm saying that the reason the messaging is so discordant when compared with the capabilities is that the messaging isn't aimed at the people who are able to evaluate the capabilities.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#419

Post by Draiken »

marcosdumay wrote: post #359
Vicinity9635 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE. That's right on the mark. It will save you a little bit of work on tasks that aren't the bottleneck on your productivity, and disrupt some random tasks that may or may not be important. It's makes so little difference that plenty of people in 2025 don't use an IDE, and looking at their performance from the outside one just can't tell. Except that LLMs have less poten…

You're right on the money. I've been amongst the most productive developers in every place I've worked at for the past 10 years while not using an IDE. AI is not even close to as revolutionary as it's being sold. Unfortunately, as always, the ones buying this crap are not the ones that actually do the work.

Even for writing tests, you have to proof-read every single line and triple check they didn't write a broken test. It's absolutely exhausting.

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