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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#441

Post by surgical_fire »

PKop wrote: post #341
surgical_fire wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing. That comparison is awful. I work with quite a few Junior developers and they can be competent. Certainly don't make the silly mistakes that LLMs do, don't need nearly as much handholding, and te…

Did you miss the "except" in his sentence? He was making the point this is worse than junior devs for all reasons listed.

I was agreeing with him, by saying that the comparison is awful.

Not sure how it can be read otherwise.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#442

Post by surgical_fire »

preisschild wrote: post #170
surgical_fire wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing. That comparison is awful. I work with quite a few Junior developers and they can be competent. Certainly don't make the silly mistakes that LLMs do, don't need nearly as much handholding, and te…

> That said, I really don't see how it could meaningfully replace an intern however And even if it could, how do you get senior devs without junior devs? ^^

What is making it difficult for Junior devs to be hired is not AI. That is a diversion.

The raise in interest rates a couple of years ago triggered many layoffs in the industry. When that happens salaries are squeezed. Experienced people work for less, and juniors have trouble finding job because they are now competing against people with plenty of experience.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#443

Post by nottorp »

codyvoda wrote: post #413
nottorp wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The gotcha is you seem to consider it normal to push code that doesn't qualify even for "it works on my machine".

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#444

Post by the-lazy-guy »

sensanaty wrote: post #377
the-lazy-guy wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn't M$ just fire like 7000 people, many of which were involved in big important M$ projects? The CPython guys, for example.

Hot take: CPython is not an important project for Microsoft, and it is not lead by them. The faster CPython project had questionable acheivement on top of that.

Half of Microsoft (especially server-side) still runs on dotnet. And there are no real contributors outside of microsoft. So it is a vital project.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#445

Post by asadotzler »

TonyTrapp wrote: post #319
automatic6131 wrote: post #301

Satya said "nearly 30% of code written at microsoft is now written by AI" in an interview with Zuckerberg, so underlings had to hurry to make it true. This is the result. Sad!

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…

It's worse than that. What he actually said was "Maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software."

Translation: maybe some of the code in some of our projects is probably written by software.

Seriously. That's what he said. Maybe some of the code in some of our projects is probably written by software.

How this became "30% of MS code is written by LLMs" is beyond me. It's wild. It's ridiculous.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#446

Post by mrguyorama »

nonethewiser wrote: post #90
diggan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the plan? Call me old school, but I find the workflow of "divide and conquer" to be as helpful when working with LLMs, as without them. Although what is needed to be considered a "large scale task" varies by LLMs and implementation. Some models/implementations (seemingly Copilot) struggles with even the smallest change, while others breeze through them. Lots of trial and error is needed to find that line for…

Its hard for me to think of a small, clearly defined coding problem an LLM cant solve.

There are several in the linked post, primarily:

"Your code does not compile" and "Your tests fail"

If you have to tell an intern that more than once on a single task, there's going to be conversations.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#447

Post by the-lazy-guy »

low_tech_love wrote: post #372
the-lazy-guy wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love the fact that they seem to be asking it to do simple things because ”AI can do the simple boring things for us so we can focus on the important problems” and then it floods them with so many meaningless mumbo jumbo that they could have probably done the simple thing in a fraction of the time they take to keep correcting it continuously.

It is called experimentation. That is how people evaluate new technology. By trying to do small things with it first. And if it doesn't work well - retrying later, once bigger issues are fixed.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#448

Post by Quarrelsome »

kamaal wrote: post #242
safety1st wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something. After dozens of hours billed you will, in f…

>>These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are…

> This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are actually getting good work done

I used upwork (when it was elance) quite a lot in a startup I was running at the time, so I have direct experience of this and its _not_ a lie or "mostly exaggerated", it was a very real effect.

The trick was always to weed out these types by posting a very limited job for a cheap amount and accepting around five or more bids from broad prices in order to review the developers. Whoever is actually competent then gets the work you actually wanted done in the first place. I found plenty of competant devs at competitive prices this way but some of the submissions I got from the others were laughable. But you just accept the work, pay them their small fee, and never speak to them again.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#449

Post by codyvoda »

sensanaty wrote: post #439
codyvoda wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hilario…

it’s not magic. it can make meaningful contributions (if you actually invest in learning the tools + best practices for using them)

you’re taking an anecdote and blowing it out of proportion to fit your preformed opinion. yes, when you start with the tool and do literally no work it makes bad PRs. yes, it’s early and experimental. that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (I have plenty of anecdotes that it does!)

the truth lies in between and the mob mentality it’s magic or complete bullshit doesn’t help. I’d love to come to a thread like this and actually hear about real experiences from smart people using these kind of tools, but instead we get this bullshit

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#450

Post by asadotzler »

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.

"brand new"? really? we've had these slop bots for years now. what's with all the fanboys pretending it was just released this month or something. it's not brand new. it's old and failing and executives who bet billions are now dismantling their engineering capabilities to try to make something out of those burned billions. claiming it's brand new is just silly.
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