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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#71

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.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#72
post #36
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which almost feels unique to AI. I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face, other then perhaps when everyone lost their minds and decided to cram mobile interfaces onto every other platform.

> I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face Passkeys. As someone who doesn't see the value of it, every hype-driven company seems to be pushing me to replace OPT 2FA with something worse right now.

[deleted]

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#73
post #36
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which almost feels unique to AI. I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face, other then perhaps when everyone lost their minds and decided to cram mobile interfaces onto every other platform.

> I can't think of another feature so blatently pushed in your face Passkeys. As someone who doesn't see the value of it, every hype-driven company seems to be pushing me to replace OPT 2FA with something worse right now.

It's because OTP is trivially phishable: setup a fake login form that asks the user for their username and password, then forwards those on to the real system and triggers the OTP request, then requests THAT of the user and forwards their response.

Passkeys fix that.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#74

With how stochastic the process is it makes it basically unusable for any large scale task. What's the plan? To roll the dice until the answer pops up? That would be maybe viable if there was a way to automatically evaluate it 100% but with a human in the loop required it becomes untenable.

The plan is to improve AI agents from their current ~intern level to a level of a good engineer.

Yes but they are supposed to be PhD level 5 years ago if you are listening to sama et al.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#77
post #27

> This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue? Exactly. LLM does not know how to use a debugger. LLM does not have runtime contexts. For all we know, the LLM could’ve fixed the issue simply by commenting out the assertions or sanity checks and everything seemed fine and dandy until every client’s device catches on fire.

And if you were to attach a debugger to a SOTA LLM, give it a compute environment, have it constantly redo work when CI fails, I can easily imagine each of these PRs burning hundreds of dollars and still have a good chance at failing the task.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#78
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like that is taking a very long time, on top of some very grandiose promises being delivered today.

I look back over the past 2-3 years and am pretty amazed with how quick change and progress have been made. The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast. Not defending the promise but “taking a very long time” does not seem to be an accurate representation.

> The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast

And at the same time, absurdly slow? ChatGPT is almost 3 years old and pretty much AI has still no positive economic impact.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#79
post #7
post #2

Do we know for a fact there are Microsoft employees who were told they have to use CoPilot and review its change suggestions on projects? We have the option to use GitHub CoPilot on code reviews and it’s comically bad and unhelpful. There isn’t a single member of my team who find it useful for anything other than identifying typos.

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 languages where LLMs struggle, with become more niche, leaving LLMs struggling even more.

C# / .NET is something LLMs seem particularly bad at, and I suspect that's partly caused by having multiple different things all called the same name. EF, ASP, even .NET itself are names that get slapped on a range of different technologies. The EF API has changed so much that they had to sort-of rename it to "EF Core". Core also gets used elsewhere such as ".NET core" and "ASP.NET Core". You (Or an LLM) might be forgiven for thinking that ASP.NET Core and EF Core are just those versions which work with .NET Core (now just .NET ) and the other versions are those that don't.

But that isn't even true. There are versions of ASP.NET Core for .NET Framework.

Microsoft bundle a lot of good stuff into the ecosystem, but their attitude when they hit performance or other issues is generally to completely rewrite how something works, but then release the new thing under the old name but with a major version change.

They'll make the new API different enough to not work without work porting, but similar enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to maintain both.

They've made things like authentication, which actually has generally worked fine out-of-the-box for a decade or more, so confusing in the documentation that people mostly tended to run for a third party solution just because at least with IdentityServer there was just one documented way to do it.

I know it's a bit of a cliche to be an "AI-doomer", and I'm not really suggesting all development work will go the way of the dinosaur, but there are specific ecosystem concerns with regard to .NET and AI assistance.

(1) Positive in the sense of feedback that increased output increases output. It's not positive in the sense of "good thing".

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#80
reddit may not have the best reputation, but the comments there are on point! So far much better than what has been posted here by HN users on this topic/thread. Anyway, I hope this is good fodder to show the limits (and they are much narrower than hype-driven AI enthusiasts like to pretend) of AI coding and to be more honest with yourself and others about it.
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