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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#451

Post by belter »

diggan wrote: post #5

Interesting that every comment has "Help improve Copilot by leaving feedback using the or buttons" suffix, yet none of the comments received any feedback, either positive or negative. > This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue? This is also my experience when you haven't setup a proper system prompt to address this for everything an LLM does. Funniest PRs are the ones that "resolves" t…

This whole thread from yesterday take a whole different meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432

Comment in the GitHub discussion:

"...You and I and every programmer who hasn't been living under a rock knows that AI isn't ready to be adopted at this scale yet, on the premier; 100M-user code-hosting platform. It doesn't make any sense except in brain-washed corporate-talk like "we are testing today what it can do tomorrow".

I'm not saying that this couldn't be an adequate change some day, perhaps even in a few years but we all know this isn't it today. It's 100% financial-driven hype with a pinch of we're too big to fail mentality..."

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#452

Post by 0x500x79 »

vel0city wrote: post #381
kamaal wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Theres a 3 point way to say this. Usually technology: * More efficient * Higher Quality * Less effort

Most successful technologies provide multiple of these benefits. What is terrible, and the direction we are going right now, is that these new systems (or offshoring like we are talking about here) seem/are "Less Effort" but do not hit the other two axioms. This is a very dangerous place to be.

People would rather be lazy than roll their sleeves up and focus, especially in our attention diverting world.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#453

Post by the-lazy-guy »

Draiken wrote: post #430
Dlanv wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

That is exactly what you want to evaluate the thechnology. Not make a buggy commit into softwared not used by nobody and reviewed by an intern. But actually review it by domain professionals, in real world very well-tested project. So they could make an informed decision on where it lacks in capabilities and what needs to be fixed before they try it again.

I doubt that anyone expected to merge any of these PRs. Question is - can the machine solve minor (but non-trivial) issues listed on github in an efficient way with minimal guidance. Current answer is no.

Also, _if_ anything was to be merged, dotnet is dogfooded extensively at Microsoft, so bugs in it are much more likely to be noticed and fixed before you get a stable release on your plate.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#454

Post by solarwindy »

strogonoff wrote: post #247
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!

When tasked to train a technology that deprecates yourself, it’s relatively OK (you’re getting paid handsomely, and many of the developers at Microsoft etc. are probably ready to retire soon anyway). It’s another thing to realize that the same technology will also deprecate your children.

The managers may believe that's what they're asking their developers to do, but doesn't this whole charade expose the fact that this technology just does not have even close to the claimed capabilities?

I see it as wishful thinking in the extreme to suppose that probabilistic mashing together of plagiarized jigsaw pieces of code could somehow approach human intelligence and reasoning—and yet, the parlour trick is convincing enough that this has escalated into a mass delusion.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#455

Post by javier2 »

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…

I feel like most people that swear by their AI are also the ones using text editors instead of full IDEs with actually working refactoring, relevant auto complete or never write tests

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#456

Post by 0x500x79 »

einrealist wrote: post #352

This is one good example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy: generative AI has cost so much money, acknowledging its shortcomings is now becoming more and more impossible. This AI bubble is far worse than the Blockchain hype. Its not yet clear whether productivity gains are real and whether the gains are eaten by a decline in overall quality.

Agree, the problem is that investors and companies see developer salaries and want to cut that out. It's all bottom-line at the end of the day.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#457

Post by mquander »

Verdex wrote: post #422
spiffytech wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The obvious case in which you would be "left behind" is the one in which LLM usage is hard, and you cannot otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing (or you can do them, but much slower and/or to a lower standard of quality.)

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#458

Post by ncr100 »

Q: Does Microsoft report its findings or learnings BACK to the open source community?

The @stephentoub MS user suggests this is an experiment (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762#issuecomment-2...).

If this is using open source developers to learn how to build a better AI coding agent, will MS share their conclusions ASAP?

EDIT: And not just MS "marketing" how useful AI tools can be.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#459

Post by djhn »

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…

To be fair, word processing is a skill that that a majority of professionals continue to lack.

Law, civil service, academia and those who learnt enough LaTeX and HTML to understand text documents are in the minority.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#460

Post by LunaSea »

bramhaag wrote: post #58

Seeing Microsoft employees argue with an LLM for hours instead of actually just fixing the problem must be a very encouraging sight for businesses that have built their products on top of .NET.

Microsoft closed their recently acquired advertisement buy-side platform Xander Invest because they are replacing it with an AI-only platform.

They only gave their customers 9 months to migrate away.

I'm expecting that Microsoft did this to artificially pump up their AI usage numbers for next year by forcibly removing non-AI alternatives.

This only one example in AdTech but I expect other industries to be hit as well.

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