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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#551

Post by int_19h »

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"…

Respect is something humans do. A large enough company is an entity in its own right, separate from the people that comprise it, and that entity is literally incapable of respecting you (more generally, it is incapable of empathy). One can be lucky enough to never end up in a position where it is felt personally, but make no mistake, it is there.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#552

Post by int_19h »

xnorswap wrote: post #79
mtmail wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on team but seems management is pushing it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 "From talking to colleagues at Microsoft it's a very management-driven push, not developer-driven. Friend on an Azure team had a team member who was nearly put on a PIP because they refused to install the internal AI coding assistant. Every manager has "number of developers using AI" as an OKR, but anecdotally most d…

> Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# In my experience, LLMs in general are really, really bad at C# / .NET , and it worries me as a .NET developer. With increased LLM usage, I think development in general is going to undergo a "great convergence". There's a positive(1) feedback loop where LLM's are better at Blub, so people use them to write more Blub. With more Blub out there, LLMs get better at Blub. The language…

I rather suspect that it's bad at C# simply because there's much fewer open source C# code to train on out there than there is JavaScript, Python, or even Java. The vast majority of C# written out in real world is internal corporate apps. And while this is also true for Java, it has had a vast open source ecosystem associated with it for much longer than .NET.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#553

Post by Draiken »

the-lazy-guy wrote: post #453
Draiken wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Quest…

> Not make a buggy commit into software not used by nobody and reviewed by an intern.

If it can't even make a decent commit into software nobody uses, how can it ever do it for something even more complex? And no, you don't need to review it with an intern...

> can the machine solve minor (but non-trivial) issues listed on github in an efficient way with minimal guidance

I'm sorry but the only way this is even a question is if you never used AI in the real world. Anyone with a modicum of common sense would tell you immediately: it cannot.

You can't even keep it "sane" in a small conversation, let alone using tons of context to accomplish non-trivial tasks.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#556

Post by marcosdumay »

namaria wrote: post #532
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've encountered LLM generated comments that don't even reflect what the code is doing, or, worse, subtly describe the code inaccurately. The most insidious disenchanting code I've ever seen has been exactly of this sort, and it's getting produced by the boatload daily now.

I really don't understand what is going on. I try to, I read the papers, the threads, I think about it. But I can't figure this out. How can it be that people expect that pumping more energy into closed systems could do anything else than raise entropy? Because that's what it is. You attach GPU farms to your code base and make them pump code into it? You're pumping energy into a closed system. The result cannot be ot…

Hum... In theory the closed system includes a database with most of the humanity's written works, and the people that know how the thing works expect it to push some information from the database into the code. (Even though, I will argue that the people that know how the thing works barely use it.)

The reason LLMs fail so often are not related to the fundamental of "garbage in, garbage out".

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#557

Post by michaelcampbell »

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 people have with their employer's leadership,

When you see it as leadership having this mentality against the people that actually produce something of value you might.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#558

Post by low_tech_love »

the-lazy-guy wrote: post #447
low_tech_love wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In production?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#559

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

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 thing would be fucking hilarious if I didn't feel so bad for the humans who are on the other side of this.

Which will soon be anyone who directly or indirectly relies on Microsoft technologies. Some of these PRs, including at least one that I saw reworked certificate validation logic with not much more than a perfunctory “LGTM”, have been merged into main.

Coincidentally, I wonder if issues orthogonal to this slop is why I’ve been getting so many HTTP 500 errors when using GitHub lately.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#560

Post by deepdarkforest »

sensanaty wrote: post #471
codyvoda wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ...(if you actually invest in learning the tools + best practices for using them) So I keep being told, but after judiciously and really trying my damned hardest to make these tools work for ANYTHING other than the most trivial imaginable problems, it has been an abject failure for me and my colleagues. Below is a FAR from comprehensive list of my attempts at having AI tooling do anything useful for me that isn't t…

just wanted to say this was the most relatable take i have read so far, and i've read a lot. Exact same experiences. And you didnt even touch on the MCP's that enable these things to go wild as well. I think our takes are not being taken seriously for 2 reasons.

First marketing gaslighting from the faangs and hot startups with grifters that managed to raise and need to keep the bullshit windmill going.

Second is that these tools are relatively the best in boilerplate nextjs code that the vibecoders use to make a very simple dashboard and stuff, and they're the noisy minority on twitter.

There is basically zero financial incentive to admit LLM's are pushed dangerously beyond their current limits. I'm still figuring a way to go short this, apart from literally shorting the market.

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