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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#421

Post by square_usual »

daveguy wrote: post #368
svaha1728 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This comment thread is incredible. It's like fanfiction of a real person. Of course this engineer I respect shares my opinion. Not only that, he's obviously going to quit because of this. And then he'll write a blog post I'll get to enjoy.

Anyway, this is his public, stated opinion on this: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762#issuecomment-2...

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#422

Post by Verdex »

spiffytech wrote: post #411
Verdex wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. A…

I'm willing to accept this as a possibility but the case analysis still doesn't make much sense to me.

If LLM usage is easy then I can't be left behind because it's easy. I'll pick it up in a weekend.

If LLM usage is hard AND I can otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing then I can't be left behind if I just do the hard things.

Still the only way I can be left behind is if LLM usage is nonsense or the same as just doing it yourself AND the important thing is telling managers that you've been using it for a long time.

Is the superpower bamboozling management with story time?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#423

Post by beefnugs »

sbarre wrote: post #165
rsynnott wrote: post #41

Beyond every other absurdity here, well, maybe Microsoft is different, but I would never assign a PR that was _failing CI_ to somebody. That that's happening feels like an admission that the thing doesn't _really_ work at all; if it worked even slightly, it would at least only assign passing PRs, but presumably it's bad enough that if they put in that requirement there would be no PRs.

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…

This is the exact reason AI sucks : there is no proper feedback loop.

EVERY single prompt should have the opportunity to get copied off into a permanent log where the end user triggers it : log all input, all output, human writes a summary of what he wanted to happen but did not, what he thinks might have went wrong, what he thinks should have happened (domain specific experts giving feedback about how things are fucking up) And then its still only useful with long term tracking like how someone actually made a training change to fix this exact failure scenario.

None of that exists, so just like "full self driving" was a pie in the sky bullshit dream that proved machine learning has an 80/20 never gonna fully work problem, same thing here

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#424

Post by ryandrake »

aaronbaugher wrote: post #388
ryandrake wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think a lot of software engineers (especially those who post on HN) think of themselves as top-1% Captains Of Industry, who would never benefit from a union. "Unions only help those guys lower on the totem pole than me!" says every software engineer out there, so they disregard it as something that could help them. We all think we are Temporarily Embarrassed John Carmacks.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#425

Post by einsteinx2 »

Twirrim wrote: post #362
codyvoda wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) > h…

> 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.

Given how often leet code questions are used in the interview process across the entire industry I think it’s a fair assumption that they fail to understand this.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#426

Post by simonw »

diggan wrote: post #211
ipsi wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet that's not enough, even when someone very definitely knows better: https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mail... Turns out that under certain conditions, such as severe exhaustion, that "sus filter" just... doesn't turn on quickly enough. The aim of passkeys is to ensure that it _cannot_ happen, no matter how exhausted/stressed/etc someone is. I'm not familiar enough with passkeys to pass ju…

If you're saying something is less secure because the users might suffer from "severe exhaustion", then I know that there aren't any proper arguments for migrating to it. Thanks for confirming I can continue using OTP without feeling like I might be missing something :)

Passkeys genuinely do protect against severe exhaustion attacks.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#427

Post by mrguyorama »

static_void wrote: post #339
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.

Tests are one of the areas where it performs least well. I can ask an LLM to summarize the functionality of code and be happy with the answer, but the tests it writes are the most facile unit tests, just the null hypothesis tests and the like. "Here's a test that the constructor works." Cool.

They are the exact same unit tests I never needed help to write, and the exact same unit tests that I can just blindly keep hitting tab to write with Intellij's NON-AI autocomplete.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#428

Post by ecocentrik »

BugheadTorpeda6 wrote: post #409
ryandrake wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

HackerNews is driven by a particular kind of radical libertarian philosophy believing person. You don't come up with the sorts of pump and dump start up ideas that typically come out of Y Combinator without being either sociopathic or delusional in the above way. Anybody who thinks this place represents the average working or middle class programmer hasn't been paying much attention. They fool a lot of people by bein…

HN is obviously not the right forum for the skill value dilution discussion but not seeing deep discussion about responsible LLM usage from developers or major software companies is really troubling. If Microsoft is stupid enough to dogfood their unrefined LLM based tools on critical software in the name of increased earnings and shareholder value, I'm sure the entire enterprise stack is hoping to do the same.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#429

Post by Traubenfuchs »

esafak wrote: post #268

I speculate what is going on is that the agent's context retrieval algorithm is bad, so it does not give the LLM the right context, because today's models should suffice to get the job done. Does anyone know which model in particular was used in these PRs? They support a variety of models: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/which-ai-model-...

The cynic in me says, that they were probably using an unreleased state of the art version of their best model not available to normal customers and that‘s the best it could do.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#430

Post by Draiken »

Dlanv wrote: post #354
throwaway844498 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pushing the state of the art" and experimenting on a critical software development framework is probably not the best idea.

Why not, when it goes through code review by experienced software engineers who are experts on the subject in a codebase that is covered by extensive unit tests?

I don't know about you, but it's much more likely for me to let a bug slip when I'm reviewing someone else's code than when I'm writing it myself.

This is what's happening right now: they are having to review every single line produced by this machine and trying to understand why it wrote what it wrote.

Even with experienced developers reviewing and lots of tests, the likelihood of bugs in this code compared to a real engineer working on it is much higher.

Why not do this on less mission critical software at the very least?

Right now I'm very happy I don't write anything on .NET if this is what they'll use as a guinea pig for the snake oil.

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