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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#491

Post by sensanaty »

Related: GitHub Developer Advocate Demo 2025 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqWUsKp5tmo&t=403s

The timestamp is the moment where one of these coding agents fails live on stage with what is one of the simplest tasks you could possibly do in React, importing a Modal component and having it get triggered on a button click. Followed by blatant gaslighting and lying by the host - "It stuck to the style and coding standards I wanted it to", when the import doesn't even match the other imports which are path aliases rather than relative imports. Then, the greatest statement ever, "I don't have time to debug, but I am pretty sure it is implemented."

Mind you, it's writing React - a framework that is most definitely over-represented in its training data and from which it has a trillion examples to stea- I mean, "borrow inspiration" from.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#492

Post by snackernews »

nashashmi wrote: post #71
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.

I sometimes feel like that is the right outcome for bad management and bad instructions. Only this time they can’t blame the junior engineer and are left to only blame themselves.

I think we all know they won’t.

I am genuinely curious though to see the strategies they employ to absolve themselves of guilt and foolishness.

Is there precedent for the entire exec and management class embracing a new trend to this kind of extent, then it blowing up in their faces?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#493

Post by Kwpolska »

pier25 wrote: post #489
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.

Yeah it's quite disheartening. I recently spent a couple of months studying C# and .NET and working on my first project with it. .NET, Blazor, etc are not known for a fast release schedule... but if things are going to become even slower with this AI crap I wonder if I made the right call. I'm quite happy how things are today for making web APIs but I wish Blazor and other frameworks were in a much better shape.

.NET has major releases every year. How is that slow for a programming platform/framework?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#494

Post by nirui »

I recently, meaning hours ago, had this delightful experience watching the Eric of Google, which everybody love, including he's extra curricular girl friend and wife, talking about AI. He seemed to believe AI is under-hyped after tried it out himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4YRO7G0wE

He also said in the video:

> I brought a rocket company because it was like interesting. And it's an area that I'm not an expert in and I wanted to be a expert. So I'm using Deep Research (TM). And these systems are spending 10 minutes writing Deep Papers (TM) that's true for most of them. (Them he starts to talk about computation and "it typically speaks English language", very cohesively, then stopped the thread abruptly) (Timestamp 02:09)

Let me quote out the important in what he said: "it's an area that I'm not an expert in".

During my use of AI (yeah, I don't hate AI), I found that the current generative (I call them pattern reconstruction) systems has this great ability to Impress An Idiot. If you have no knowledge in the field, you maybe thinking the generated content is smart, until you've gained some depth enough to make you realize the slops hidden in it.

If you work at the front line, like those guys from Microsoft, of course you know exactly what should be done, but, the company leadership maybe consists of idiots like Eric who got impressed by AI's ability to choose smart sounding words without actually knowing if the words are correct.

I guess maybe one day the generative tech could actually write some code that is correct and optimal, but right now it seems that day is far from now.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#496

Post by gf000 »

baalimago wrote: post #167
gf000 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A junior dev is (most often) a bright human being, with not much coding experience yet. They can certainly execute instructions and solve novel problems on their own, and they most certainly don't need 100k PRs to pick up new skills. Equating LLMs to humans is pretty damn.. stupid. It's not even close (otherwise how come all the litany of office jobs that require far less reasoning than software development are not r…

A junior dev may also swap jobs, require vacation days, perks and can't be scaled up at a the click of a button. There are no such issues with an agent. So, if I were a FANG higher-up, I'd invest quite a bit into training LLM-agents who make pesky humans redundant. Doing so has low risk, the senior devs may perhaps get fed up and quit, and the company might be a laughing stock on public PRs. But the potential value f…

I mean, a Furby could respond to you all day, each hour, but that doesn't make them any more useful..

Not saying that LLMs are useless, but that's a false equivalency. Sure, my auto complete is also working 0-24, but I would rather visit my actual doctor who is only available in a very limited time frame.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#497

Post by cratermoon »

Kwpolska wrote: post #493
pier25 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's quite disheartening. I recently spent a couple of months studying C# and .NET and working on my first project with it. .NET, Blazor, etc are not known for a fast release schedule... but if things are going to become even slower with this AI crap I wonder if I made the right call. I'm quite happy how things are today for making web APIs but I wish Blazor and other frameworks were in a much better shape.

.NET has major releases every year. How is that slow for a programming platform/framework?

Go has a six month release cycle. Rust releases a new stable every six weeks.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#498

Post by pier25 »

Kwpolska wrote: post #493
pier25 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's quite disheartening. I recently spent a couple of months studying C# and .NET and working on my first project with it. .NET, Blazor, etc are not known for a fast release schedule... but if things are going to become even slower with this AI crap I wonder if I made the right call. I'm quite happy how things are today for making web APIs but I wish Blazor and other frameworks were in a much better shape.

.NET has major releases every year. How is that slow for a programming platform/framework?

Yes but the improvements are very gradual. It takes years for something to reach maturity. At least for the web stuff which is what I know of.

Eg:

Minimal APIs were released in 2021 but it won't be until .NET 10 that they will have validation. Amazing that validation was not a day one priority for an API. I'm not certain if even in .NET 10 Minimal APIs will have full parity of features with MVC.

Minification of static assets didn't come until .NET 9 released in 2024. This was already commonplace in the JS world a decade earlier. It could have been a quick win so long ago for .NET web apps.

Blazor was released in 2018. 7 years later they still haven't fixed plenty of circuit reconnection issues. They are working on it but progress is also quite slow. Supposedly with .NET 10 session state will be able to be persist etc but it remains to be seen.

OpenAPI is also hit and miss. Spec v3.1 released in 2021 is still not supported. Supposedly it will come with .NET 10.

Not from .NET but they have a project called Kiota for generating clients from OpenAPI specs. It's unusable because of this huge issue that makes all properties in a type nullable. It's been open since 2023. [1]

Etc.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/kiota/issues/3911

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#499

Post by disqard »

nirui wrote: post #494

I recently, meaning hours ago, had this delightful experience watching the Eric of Google, which everybody love, including he's extra curricular girl friend and wife, talking about AI. He seemed to believe AI is under-hyped after tried it out himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4YRO7G0wE He also said in the video: > I brought a rocket company because it was like interesting. And it's an area that I'm not an ex…

Thank you for sharing this!

When I use AI, I keep it on a short leash.

Meanwhile, folks like this ("I bought a rocket company") are essentially using it to decide where to plough their stratospheric wealth, so they can grow it even further.

Perhaps they'll lose a cufflink in the eventual crash, but they're so rich, I don't think they'll lose their shirt. Meanwhile, the tech job market is f**ed either way.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#500

Post by disqard »

some_random wrote: post #371
shultays wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one day both sides will be AI so we can all relax and enjoy our mojitos

when that day arrives we'll won't be relaxing, we will be put through a wood chipper

...to turn us into soylent-flavored mojitos?
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