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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#511

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

jayGlow wrote: post #465
dmix wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind" If they weren't experimenting with AI and coding and took a more conservative approach, while other companies like Anthropic was running similar experiments, I'm sure HN would also be critiquing them for not keeping up as a stodgy big corporation. As long as they are willing to take risks by trying and failing on…

exactly ignoring new technologies can be a death sentence for a company even one as large as Microsoft. even if this technology doesn't pay off its still a good idea to at least look into potential uses.

Only in very specific circumstances where there are clear moats to be built (mobile was one of these that Microsoft missed, but that's a PLATFORM in a way no AI product at the moment comes close to). As far as I can tell, there is no evidence of such a thing with the current applications of AI and I am unconvinced that there ever will be. It's just going to ride on top of previous platforms. So you may need some sort of service for customers that are interested, but having the absolute best AI story just isn't something customers are going to care about at the end of the day if it means they would have to say migrate clouds.

At the moment, I'd arguing doing much more than what say Apple is doing would be what is potentially catastrophic. Not doing anything would be minimally risky, and doing just a little bit would be the no risk play. I think Microsoft is making this mistake in a big way and will continue to lose market share over it and burn cash, albeit slowly since they are already giants. The point is, it's a giant that has momentum going in the opposite direction than what they want, and they are incapable of fixing the things causing it to go in that direction because their leadership has become delusional.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#512

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

sbarre wrote: post #304
mhuffman wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership Interesting because "them" very much have an antagonistic mentality vs "us". "Them" would fire you in a fucking heartbeat to save a relatively small amount (10%). "Them" also want to aggressively pay you the least amount for which they can get you to do work for them, not what they "value" you at. "Us" depends…

Yep maybe I've been lucky but in my 30-year career, I've worked at over a dozen companies (big and small), and I've always been well-treated and respected, and I've never felt the kind of dynamic you describe. But that isn't to say that I don't think it exists or happens. I'm sure it does. It's everyone's personal choice to put their own lens on how they believe other people think - like your take on how "leadership"…

I'm lucky currently but have been unlucky in the past and very much understand where the person you are responding to is coming from. I think you've had an exceedingly long string of luck that is very rare if you've never had upper management that was misaligned with the long term goals of the employees and the company.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#513

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #105

rah, we might be in trouble here. The primary issue at play is that we don't have a reliable means of measuring developer performance, outside of subjective judgement like end of year reviews. This means its probably quite hard to measure the gain or the drag of using these agents. On one side, its a lot cheaper than a junior, but on the other side it pulls time from seniors and doesn't necessarily follow instruction…

Yes it's going to cause many problems forcompanies I think, but at least they will deserve it (the employees won't unfortunately unless they've drank the kool-aid, I rarely meet ICs that have drank it fwiw, which means I'm either in a serious bubble, or this is being pushed from the top down). The only clear winners are going to be chip companies.

There's never going to be an industry standard measure either. Measuring productivity as I'm sure you know is incredibly dumb for a job like this because the beneficialness of our work product can be both insanely positive and put the company on top or it can be so negative that it goes bankrupt. And ultimately a lot of what goes into people choosing whether they like the work product or not is subjective. A large part of our work is more of an art than a science and I say that as somebody that works about as far away from the frontend as one can get.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#514

Post by saati »

empath75 wrote: post #333
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.

The point of this exercise for Microsoft isn't to produce usable code right now, but to use and improve copilot.

They can do that in private repos just as easily, this a pr stunt that backfired very badly.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#515

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #322
ehnto wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not intern level. Even if it could perform at a similar level to an intern at a programming task, it lacks a great deal of the other attributes that a human brings to the table, including how they integrate into a team of other agents (human or otherwise). I won't bother listing them, as we are all humans. I think the hype is missing the forest for the trees, and I think exactly this multi-agent dynamic migh…

The real missing the forest for the trees is thinking that software and the way users will use computers is going to remain static. Software today is written to accommodate every possible need of every possible user, and then a bunch of unneeded selling point features on top of that. These massive sprawling code bases made to deliver one-size fits all utility. I don't need 3 million LOC Excel 365 to keep track of who…

I don't know. I guess it depends on what you classify as being change. I don't really view software as having changed all that much since around maybe the mid 70s as HLLs began to become more popular. What programmers do today and what they did back then would be easily recognizable to both groups if we had time machines. I don't see how AI really changes things all that much. It's got the same scalability issues that low code/no code solutions have always had and those go way back. The main difference is that you can use natural language, but I don't see that as being inherently better than say drawing a picture using some flowcharting tools in a low code platform. You just introduce the same problem natural languages always have had and why we didn't choose them in the first place, i.e. they are not strict enough and need lots of context. Giving an AI very specific sentences to define my project in natural language and making sure it has lots of context begins to look an awful lot like psuedocode to me. So as you learn to approach using AI in such a way that it produces what you want you naturally get closer and closer to just specifying the code.

What HAS indisputably changed is the cost of hardware which has driven accessibility and caused more consumer facing software to be made.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#516

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

Havoc wrote: post #145

At least it's clearly labelled as copilot. Much more worried about what this is going to do to the FOSS ecosystem. We've already seen a couple maintainers complain and this trend is definitely just going to increase dramatically. I can see the vision but this is clearly not ready for prime time yet. Especially if done by anonymous drive-by strangers that think they're "helping"

If they are just messing with their own projects then I guess I don't think it's immoral. If they start submitting AI slop to other projects then they ought to be banned by those projects' maintainers.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#517

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

ethanol-brain wrote: post #59

Are people really doing coding with agents through PRs? This has to be a huge waste of resources. It is normal to preempt things like this when working with agents. That is easy to do in real time, but it must be difficult to see what the agent is attempting when they publish made up bullshit in a PR. It seems very common for an agent to cheat and brute force solutions to get around a non-trivial issue. In my experie…

No not most people. A much larger percentage (I would wager greater than 50% of professionals) aren't using AI in any capacity in their professional work. It's banned in a lot of places for good reasons, and many more teams haven't found a use case.

So no I don't think any of this is normal. That's why it made the top of HackerNews, because it's very abnormal.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#518

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

snickerbockers wrote: post #379

It's pretty cringe and highlights how inept LLMs being shoehorned into positions where they don't belong wastes more company time than it saves, but aren't all the people interjecting themselves into somebody else's github conversations the ones truly being driven insane here? The devs in the issue aren't blinking torture like everybody thinks they are. It's one thing to link to the issue so we can all point and laug…

If people doing that truly wasn't a consideration before going ahead with this then the people that made the call are just as dumb as if they hadn't. Fwiw I don't think anybody is being driven "insane". More like humiliated and frustrated.

Remember, Microsoft publicized that they would be doing this and wanted to make sure everybody knew.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#519

Post by BugheadTorpeda6 »

blibble wrote: post #258
mrweasel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when they can't prove that and development efficiency starts falling, because developers spend 50% of their time battling copilot?

they'll just add more and more half-baked features it's not as if Microsoft's share price has ever reflected the quality of their products

I think it did, then they built up a most that made it very hard to turn momentum the other direction. It's turned now but it happened very slowly. Who knows if it ever falls of a cliff, all I know is that moats are only broken when momentum is going in the wrong direction and so they are certainly more vulnerable now than they would otherwise have been if they hadn't pissed so many people off about their products.

At one point, their desktop user experience was actually pretty good. And that was all their products back then. They definitely didn't get to where they are now by selling products that were bad. You could make the argument that some of them were bad but they were cheap, but if price is a big aspect of what makes a product good in the eyes of the consumer at the time and nobody else is competing on price, then that isn't "bad" in the sense I'm using the word.

I don't think I'd have called them out for always making terrible products all the way through till about Windows 7. I had no major complaints about that release, cloud was in its infancy, no pushing 365 etc. After that, quality started to go downhill. To the point that I'd argue with a straight face that most major community supported Linux DEs provide an objectively better and more stable user experience for both technical and non technical users.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#520

Post by saati »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #487
dttze wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low code/no code/visual programming has been around forever. They all had issues. LLMs will also have the same issues and cost even more.

I'm not aware of any that you speak/type plain English to.

You never heard of COBOL? It's original premise was you can now use something resembling English to write programs.
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