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

431–440 of 580 posts

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#431

Post by [deleted] »

diggan wrote: post #169
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?

> This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic I feel the same way today, but I got started around 2012 professionally. I wonder how much of this is just our fading optimism after seeing how shit really works behind the scenes, and how much the industry itself is responsible for it. I know we're not the only two people feeling this way either, but it seems all of us hav…

[deleted]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#432

Post by mrguyorama »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #215
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…

This is important context given that it would be absurd for the managers to have already drawn a definitive conclusion about the models’ capabilities. An explicit understanding that the purpose of the exercise is to get a better idea of the current strengths and weaknesses of the models in a “real world” context makes this actually very reasonable.

So why in public, and why in the most ham-fisted way, and why on important infrastructure, and why in such a terrible integration that it can't even verify that things compile before opening a PR!

In my org, we would have had to bypass precommit hooks to do this!

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#433

Post by ecocentrik »

ryandrake wrote: post #424
aaronbaugher wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't explain why doctors that see themselves as top earners didn't have a problem banding together. Social organization doesn't require unions in socialist/communist sense. It can also be accomplished through other professional organizations like AMC.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#435

Post by xeonmc »

mock-possum wrote: post #406
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.

You don’t think he’s having fun getting laid a ton for playing with computers?

I don’t imagine getting laid with computers are particularly enjoyable for humans.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#436

Post by [deleted] »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #429
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.

[deleted]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#437

Post by mrguyorama »

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?

>supporting progress

This presupposes AI IS progress.

Nevermind that what this actually shows is an executive or engineering team that so buys their own hype that they didn't even try to run this locally and internally before blasting to the world that their system can't even ensure tests are passing before submitting a PR. They are having a problem with firewall rules blocking the system from seeing CI outcomes and that's part of why it's doing so badly, so why wasn't that verified BEFORE doing this on stage?

"Working out in the open" here is a bad thing. These are issues that SHOULD have been caught by an internal POC FIRST. You don't publicly do bullshit.

"Dogfooding" doesn't require throwing this at important infrastructure code. Does VS code not have small bugs that need fixing? Infrastructure should expect high standards.

"Pushing the state of the art" is comedy. This is the state of the art? This is pushing the state of the art? How much money has been thrown into the fire for this result? How much did each of those PRs cost anyway?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#438

Post by yubblegum »

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…

Because other professional fields have not been subjected to a long running effort to commoditize software engineers. And further, most other (cognitive) professionals are not subject to 'age shaming' and discounting of experience.

We should not forget that on the other side of this issue are equally smart and motivated people and they too are aware of the power dynamics involved. For example, the phenomena of younger programmers poo pooing experienced engineers was a completely new valuation paradigm pushed by interested parties at some point around the dotcom bubble.

Doctors with n years in the OR will not take shit from some intern that just came out of school. But we were placed in that situation at some point after '00. So the fundamental issue is that there is an (engineered imho) generational divide, and coupled with age discrimination in hiring (again due to interested parties' incentives) has a created a situation where one side is accumiliating generational wealth and power and the other side (us developers) are divided by age and the ones with the most skin in the game are naive youngsters who have no clue and have been taught to hate on "millenials" and "old timers" etc.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#439

Post by sensanaty »

codyvoda wrote: post #111
jeswin wrote: post #85

I find it amusing that people (even here on HN) are expecting a brand new tool (among the most complex ever) to perform adequetely right off the bat. It will require a period of refinement, just as any other tool or process.

this entire thread is very reddit-y this stuff works. it takes effort and learning. it’s not going to magically solve high-complexity tasks (or even low-complexity ones) without investment. having people use it, learn how it works, and improve the systems is the right approach a lot of armchair engineers in here

People, specifically managers and C-levels, are being sold on this crap on the idea that it can replace people now, today as-is. Billions upon billions of dollars are being shoved in indiscriminately, toothbrushes are coming with "AI" slapped on somehow from how insane the hype bubble is.

And here we have many examples from the biggest bullshit pushers in the whole market of their state of the art tool being hilariously useless in trivial cases. These PRs are about as simple as you can get without it being a typo fix, and we're all seeing it actively bullshit and straight up contradict itself many times, just as anyone who's ever used LLMs would tell you happens all the time.

The supposed magic, omnipotent tool that is AI apparently can't even write test scaffolding without a human telling it exactly what it has to do, yet we're supposed to be excited about this crap? If I saw a PR like this at work, I'd be going straight to my manager to have whoever dared push this kind of garbage reprimanded on the spot, except not even interns are this incompetent and annoying to work with.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#440

Post by mrguyorama »

sbarre wrote: post #143
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.

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

Your manager understands it. Their manager understands it. Department heads understand it. The execs understand it. The shareholders understand it.

Who does it benefit for the laborers to refuse to understand it?

It's not like I hate my job. It's just being realistic that if a company could make more money by firing me, they would, and if you have good managers and leadership, they will make sure you understand this in a way that respects you as a human and a professional.

Post reply on HN