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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

• RobKohr 1y ago
  With layoffs driven by a push for more LLM use, this feels like malicious compliance.
• cebert 1y ago
  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.
  • jsheard 1y ago
    > 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? It wouldn't be out of character, Microsoft has decided that every project on GitHub must deal with Copilot-generated issues and PRs from now on whether they want them or not. There's deliberately no way to opt out. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159749 Like Googles mandatory AI summary at the top of search results, you know a feature is really good when the vendor feels like the only way they can hit their target metrics is by forcing their users to engage with it.
    • XorNot 1y ago
      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.
      • Frost1x 1y ago
        To some degree I think part of its “hey look here, we’re doing LLMs too we’re not just traditional search” positioning. They feel the pressure of competition and feel forced to throw whatever they have in the users face to drive awareness. Whether that’s the right approach or not, not so sure, but I suspect that’s a lot of it given that OpenAI is still the poster boy and many are switching to using things like ChatGPT entirely in place of traditional search engines.
      • diggan 1y ago
        > 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 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • simonw 1y ago
          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.
          • diggan 1y ago
            Except if you use a proper password manager that prevents you from using the autofill on domains/pages others than the hardcoded ones. In my case, it would immediately trigger my "sus filter" if the automatic prompt doesn't show up and I would have to manually find the entry.
            • ipsi 1y ago
              And yet that's not enough, even when someone very definitely knows better: https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mailchimp-mailing-list/ https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mail... Turns out that under certain conditions, such as severe exhaustion, that "sus filter" just... doesn't turn on quickly enough. The aim of passkeys is to ensure that it _cannot_ happen, no matter how exhausted/stressed/etc someone is. I'm not familiar enough with passkeys to pass judgement on them, but I do think there's a real problem they're trying to solve.
    • dsign 1y ago
      Holy sh*t I didn't know this was going on. It's like an AI tsunami unleashed by Microsoft that will bury the entire software industry... They are like Trump and his tariffs, but for the software economy. What this tells me is that software enterprises are so hellbent in firing their programmers and reducing their salary costs they they are willing to combust their existing businesses and reputation into the dumpster fire they are making. I expected this blatant disregard for human society to come ten or twenty years into the future, when the AI systems would actually be capable enough. Not today.
      • diggan 1y ago
        > What this tells me is that software enterprises are so hellbent in firing their programmers and reducing their salary costs they they are willing to combust their existing businesses and reputation into the dumpster fire they are making. I expected this blatant disregard for human society to come ten or twenty years into the future Have you been sleeping under a rock for the last decade? This has been going on for a long long time. Outsourcing been the name of the game for so long people seem to forgot it's happening it all.
    • nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
      >Like Googles mandatory AI summary at the top of search results, you know a feature is really good when the vendor feels like the only way they can hit their target metrics is by forcing their users to engage with it. People like to compare "AI" (here, LLM products) to the iPhone. I cannot make sense of these analogies; people used to line up around the block on release day for iPhone launches for years after the initial release. Seems now most people collectively groan when more "innovative" LLM products get stuffed into otherwise working software. This stuff is the literal opposite of demand.
  • mtmail 1y ago
    Depends on team but seems management is pushing it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432 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 devs are installing the AI assistant and not using it or using it very occasionally. Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C# and PowerShell which limits its usefulness at MS." "From reading around on Hacker News and Reddit, it seems like half of commentators say what you say, and the other half says "I work at Microsoft/know someone who works at Microsoft, and our/their manager just said we have to use AI", someone mentioned being put on PIP for not "leveraging AI" as well. I guess maybe different teams have different requirements/workflows?"
    • 4ggr0 1y ago
      you can directly link to comments, by the way. just click on the link which displays how long ago the comment was written and you get the URL for the single comment. (just mentioning it because you linked a post and quoted two comments, instead of directly linking the comments. not trying to 'uhm, actually'.)
    • lovehashbrowns 1y ago
      All of that is working, at least, because the very small company I work for with a limited budget is working on getting an extremely expensive copilot license. Oh no, I might have to deal with this soon..
    • diggan 1y ago
      > Depends on team but seems management is pushing it The graphic "Internal structure of tech companies" comes to mind, given if true, would explain why the process/workflow is so different between the teams at Microsoft: https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png https://i.imgur.com/WQiuIIB.png Imagine the Copilot team has a KPI about usage, matching the company OKRs or whatever about making sure the world is using Microsoft's AI enough, so they have a mandate/leverage to get the other teams to use it regardless of if it's helping or not.
  • RajT88 1y ago
    The push for copilot usage is being driven by management at every level.
• rvz 1y ago
  After all of that, every PR that Copilot opened still has failing tests and it failed to fix the issue (because it fundamentally cannot reason). No surprises here. It always struggles on non-web projects or on software where it really matters that correctness is first and foremost above everything, such as the dotnet runtime. Either way, a complete disastrous start and what a mess that Copilot has caused.
  • api 1y ago
    Part of why it works better on web projects is the sheer volume of training data. There is probably more JS written than any other language by orders of magnitude. Its quality is pretty dubious though. I have so far only found LlMs useful as a way of researching, an alternative to web search, and doing very basic rote tasks like implementing unit tests or doing a first pass explanation of some code. Tried actually writing code and it’s not usable.
    • jsheard 1y ago
      > Part of why it works better on web projects is the sheer volume of training data. OTOH webdev is known for rapid framework/library churn, so before too long there will be a crossroads where the pre-AI training data is too old and the fresh training data is contaminated by the firehose of vibe coded slop.
    • mezyt 1y ago
      > There is probably more JS written than any other language by orders of magnitude. And the quantity of js code available/discoverable when scrapping the web is larger by an order of magnitude than every other language.
• diggan 1y ago
  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" test failures by removing/commenting out the test cases, or change the assertions. Googles and Microsofts models seems more likely to do this than OpenAIs and Anthropics models, I wonder if there is some difference in their internal processes that are leaking through here? The same PR as the quote above continues with 3 more messages before the human seemingly gives up: > please take a look > Your new tests aren't being run because the new file wasn't added to the csproj > Your added tests are failing. I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing. Another PR: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732/files https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732/files How are people reviewing that? 90% of the page height is taken up by "Check failure", can hardly see the code/diff at all. And as a cherry on top, the unit test has a comment that say "Test expressions mentioned in the issue". 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.
  • worldsayshi 1y ago
    > How are people reviewing that? I agree that not auto-collapsing repeated annotations is an annoying bug in the github interface. But just pointing out that annotations can be hidden in the ... menu to the right (which I just learned).
    • codyvoda 1y ago
      or press “a”
    • jon-wood 1y ago
      I'm not entirely sure why they're running linters on every available platform to begin with, it seems like a massive waste of compute to me when surely the output will be identical because it's analysing source code, not behaviour.
• skywhopper 1y ago
  Oof. A real nightmare for the folks tasked with shepherding this inattentive failure of a robot colleague. But to see it unleashed on the dotnet runtime? One more reason to avoid dotnet in the future, if this is the quality of current contributions.
• margorczynski 1y ago
  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.
  • diggan 1y ago
    > What's the plan? Call me old school, but I find the workflow of "divide and conquer" to be as helpful when working with LLMs, as without them. Although what is needed to be considered a "large scale task" varies by LLMs and implementation. Some models/implementations (seemingly Copilot) struggles with even the smallest change, while others breeze through them. Lots of trial and error is needed to find that line for each model/implementation :/
    • mjburgess 1y ago
      The relevant scale is the number of hard constraints on the solution code, not the size of task as measured by "hours it would take the median programmer to write". So eg., one line of code which needed to handle dozens of hard-constraints on the system (eg., using a specific class, method, with a specific device, specific memory management, etc.) will very rarely be output correctly by an LLM. Likewise "blank-page, vibe coding" can be very fast if "make me X" has only functional/soft-constraints on the code itself. "Gigawatt LLMs" have brute-forced there way to having a statistical system capable of usefully, if not universally, adhreading to one or two hard constraints. I'd imagine the dozen or so common in any existing application is well beyond a Terawatt range of training and inference cost.
      • cyanydeez 1y ago
        Keep in mind that the model of using LLM assumes the underlying dataset converges to production ready code. Thats never been proven, cause we know they scraped sourcs code without attribution.
    • nonethewiser 1y ago
• ankitml 1y ago
  GitHub is not the place to write code. IDE is the place. Along with pre CI checks, some tests, coverage etc. they should get some PM before making decisions..
  • bayindirh 1y ago
    This is the future envisioned by Microsoft. Vibe coding all the way down, social network style. They are putting this in front of the developers as take it or leave it deal. I left the platform, doing my coding old way, hosting it somewhere else. Discoverability? I don't care. I'm coding it for myself and hosting in the open. If somebody finds it, nice. Otherwise, mneh.
    • worldsayshi 1y ago
      As long as the resulting PR is less than 100 lines and the AI is a bit more self sufficient (like actually making sure tests pass before "pushing") it would be ok I think. I think this process is intended for fixing papercuts rather than building anything involved. It just isn't good enough yet.
      • 0x696C6961 1y ago
        Yeah, just treat it like a slightly more capable dependabot.
      • bayindirh 1y ago
        As a matter of principle I don't use any network which is trained on non-consensual data ripped of its source and license information. Other than that, I don't think this is bad tech, however, this brings another slippery slope. Today it's as you say: > I think this process is intended for fixing papercuts rather than building anything involved. It just isn't good enough yet. After sufficient T somebody will rephrase it as: > I think this process is intended for writing small, personal utilities rather than building enterprise software. It just isn't good enough yet. ...and we will iterate from there. So, it looks like I won't touch it for the foreseeable future. Maybe if the ethical problems with training material is solved (i.e. trained with data obtained with consensus and with correct licenses), I can use as alongside other analysis and testing tools I use, for a final pass. AI will never be a core and irreplaceable part of my development workflow.
• globalise83 1y ago
  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.
  • tantalor 1y ago
    > when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire Too late?
    • MonkeyClub 1y ago
      Just in time for marshmallows!
  • hello_computer 1y ago
    Might as well when they’re going to lay you off no matter what you do (like the guy who made an awesome TypeScript compiler in Go).
  • xyst 1y ago
    At some point code pilot will just delete the whole codebase. Can’t fail integration tests if there is no code :)
    • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      That would be logical, but alas LLMs can't into logic. Bloating the codebase with dead code is much more likely.
  • sbarre 1y ago
    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 wouldn't be able to sleep well at night.
• Crosseye_Jack 1y ago
  I do love one bot asking another bot to sign a CLA! - https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732#issuecomment-2891990223 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732#issuecomment-2...
  • 90s_dev 1y ago
    Well?? Did it sign it???
    • jsheard 1y ago
      Not sure if a chatbot can legally sign a contract, we'd better ask ChatGPT for a second opinion.
      • gortok 1y ago
        At least currently, to qualify for copyright, there must be a human author. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-copyrights-ai-generated-art-lacking-human-creator-2025-03-18/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co... I have no idea how this will ultimately shake out legally, but it would be absolutely wild for Microsoft to not have thought about this potential legal issue.
      • tessierashpool9 1y ago
        offer it more money, then it will sign
      • TuringNYC 1y ago
        There is some unfortunate history here, though not a perfect analog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure_crisis#Robo-signing_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure...
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
      • 1y ago
• nottorp 1y ago
  So, to achieve parity, they should allow humans to also commit code without checking that it at least compiles, right? Or MS already does that?
  • codyvoda 1y ago
    the code goes through a PR review process like any other? what are you talking about?
    • fernandotakai 1y ago
      i don't know about you, but i would never EVER submit a PR that fails to compile. not tests are failing, those happen (specially flaky ci), but not compiling. that's literally the bare minimum.
      • codyvoda 1y ago
        and you think this beta system that launched like 2 days ago can’t achieve that? it also opens the PR as its working session. there are a lot of dials, and a lot of redditor-ass opinions from people who don’t use or understand the tech
        • nottorp 1y ago
          what i see is a human telling the "AI" that the code does not compile what use is a bot if it can't do at least this simple step?
          • codyvoda 1y ago
            it can do this step. once again, this launched 2 days ago and people are using it for the first time if you have used it for more than a few hours (or literally just read the docs) and aren’t stupid, you know this is easily solved you’re giving into mob mentality
            • 1y ago
• vachina 1y ago
  > 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.
  • tossandthrow 1y ago
    This was my latest experience of using agents. It created code with hard coded values from the tests.
  • uludag 1y ago
    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.
• gizzlon 1y ago
  > @copilot please read the following Contributor License Agreement(CLA). If you agree with the CLA, please reply with the following information. haha
• davedx 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    This analogy would only work if the electric light required far more work to use than a gas lamp and tended to randomly explode. And didn’t actually provide light, but everyone on 19th century twitter says that it will one day provide light if you believe hard enough, so you should rip out your gas lamps and install it now. Like, this is just generation of useless busy-work, as far as I can see; it is clearly worse than useless. The PRs don't even have passing CI!
• balazstorok 1y ago
  At least opening PRs is a safe option, you can just dump the whole thing if it doesn't turn out to be useful. Also, trying something new out will most likely have hiccups. Ultimately it may fail. But that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. The thing may rapidly evolve if it's being hard-tested on actual code and actual issues. For example it will be probably changed so that it will iterate until tests are actually running (and maybe some static checking can help it, like not deleting tests). Waiting to see what happens. I expect it will find its niche in development and become actually useful, taking off menial tasks from developers.
  • cesarb 1y ago
    > At least opening PRs is a safe option, you can just dump the whole thing if it doesn't turn out to be useful. There's however a border zone which is "worse than failure": when it looks good enough that the PRs can be accepted, but contain subtle issues which will bite you later.
    • UncleMeat 1y ago
      Yep. I've been on teams that have good code review culture and carefully review things so they'd be able to catch subtle issues. But I've also been on teams where reviews are basically "tests pass, approved" with no other examination. Those teams are 100% going to let garbage changes in.
      • camdenreslink 1y ago
        Even when you review human-written code carefully, subtle bugs can sneak through. Software development is hard.
        • UncleMeat 1y ago
          Of course. AI Agents throwing code at you merely makes it more likely.
    • ecb_penguin 1y ago
• le-mark 1y ago
  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!
  • strogonoff 1y ago
    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.
    • solarwindy 1y ago
      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.
      • strogonoff 1y ago
        Philosophy becomes key. True human intelligence is not very well defined, and possibly cannot be divorced from concepts like “consciousness” or “agency”, at which point claiming that the thing is “like human” opens the operator to accusations of running a torture chamber or being a slave owner of entities that can feel.
        • solarwindy 1y ago
          Agreed, though long before such qualms come to the fore I'd like to see even a shred of evidence that this entire approach to AI is at all capable of formulating mental models of the kind that have enabled humans to produce all the wonderful mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, poetry, literature, art, etc. of the past several centuries. I see the supposed reasoning tokens this latest crop of models produce as merely an extension of the parlour trick. We're so deep into this delusion that it's so very tempting to anthropomorphize this ersatz stream of consciousness as being 'thought'. I remain unconvinced that it's anything of the sort. This comes to mind: "It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it." This latest bubble smacks ever more of being a con.
• rsynnott 1y ago
  Beyond every other absurdity here, well, maybe Microsoft is different, but I would never assign a PR that was _failing CI_ to somebody. That that's happening feels like an admission that the thing doesn't _really_ work at all; if it worked even slightly, it would at least only assign passing PRs, but presumably it's bad enough that if they put in that requirement there would be no PRs.
  • sbarre 1y ago
    I feel like everyone is applying a worse-case narrative to what's going on here.. I see this as a work in progress.. I am almost certain the humans in the loop on these PRs are well aware of what's going on and have their expectations in check, and this isn't just "business as usual" like any other PR or work assignment. This is a test. You can't improve a system without testing it on real world conditions. How do we know they're not tweaking the Copilot system prompts and settings behind the scenes while they're doing this work? Can no one see the possibility that what is happening in those PRs is exactly what all the people involved expected to have happen, and they're just going through the process of seeing what happens when you try to refine and coach the system to either success or failure? When we adopted AI coding assist tools internally over a year ago we did almost exactly this (not directly in GitHub though). We asked a bunch of senior engineers to see how far they could get by coaching the AI to write code rather than writing it themselves. We wanted to calibrate our expectations and better understand the limits, strengths and weaknesses of these new tools we wanted to adopt. In most of those early cases we ended up with worse code than if it had been written by humans, but we learned a ton. We can also clearly see how much better things have gotten over time, since we have that benchmark to look back on.
    • mieubrisse 1y ago
      I was looking for exactly this comment. Everybody's gloating, "Wow look how dumb AI is! Haha, schadenfreude!" but this seems like just a natural part of the evolution process to me. It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem."
• wyett 1y ago
  We wanted a future where AIs read boring text and we wrote interesting stuff. Instead, we got…
• rmnclmnt 1y ago
  Again, very « Silicon Valley »-esque, loving it. Thanks Gilfoyle
• bramhaag 1y ago
  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.
  • nashashmi 1y ago
    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.
    • qoez 1y ago
      They'll probably blame openai/the AI instead.
      • nashashmi 1y ago
        AI has reproducible outcomes. If someone else can make it work, then they should too.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • daveguy 1y ago
          This is just false. Do these models even have reproducible outcomes with a temperature of 0? Aren't they also severely restricted with a temp of 0?
          • nashashmi 1y ago
            Some randomization is intentionally introduced. We are not accounting for that. Otherwise, it should be able to give you the same information.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
• ethanol-brain 1y ago
  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 experience, its also common for agents to get stuck in loops of reasoning in these scenarios. I imagine it would be incredibly annoying to try to interpret a PR after an agent went down a rabbit hole.
  • growt 1y ago
    Googles jules does the same (but was only published yesterday or so). I think it might be a good workflow if the agent is good enough. Copilot seems not to be in these examples and then I imagine it becomes quite tedious to have a PR for every iteration with the AI.
  • BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago
    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.
• octocop 1y ago
  "fix failing tests" does never yield any good results for me either
• baalimago 1y ago
  Well, the coding agent is pretty much a junior dev at the moment. The seniors are teaching it. Give it a 100k PRs with senior developer feedback and it'll improve just like you'd anticipate a junior would. There is no way that FANG aren't using the comments by the seniors as training data for their next version. It's a long-term play to have pricey senior developers argue with an llm
  • diggan 1y ago
    > using the comments by the seniors as training data for their next version Yeah, I'm sure 100k comments with "Copilot, please look into this" and "The test cases are still failing" will massively improve these models.
    • Frost1x 1y ago
      Some of that seems somewhat strategic. With a junior you might do the same if you’re time pressured, or you might sidebar them in real life or they may come to you and you give more helpful advice. Any senior dev at these organizations should know to some degree how LLMs work and in my opinion would to some degree, as a self protection mechanism, default to ambiguous vague comments like this. Some of the mentality is “if I have to look at it and solve it why don’t I go ahead and do it anyways vs having you do it” effort choices they’d do regardless of what is producing the PR. I think other parts of it is “why would I train my replacement, there’s no advantage for me here.”
      • rchaud 1y ago
        Sidebar? With a junior developer making these mistakes over and over again, they wouldn't even make it past the probationary period in their employment contract.
        • Frost1x 1y ago
          I guess it depends on how you view and interact with other people. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing their best to succeed. Why wouldn’t you want to help them as much as you reasonably can, unless they’re actively a terrible person?
• markus_zhang 1y ago
  Clumsy but this might be the future -- humans adjusting to AI workflow, not the other way. Much easier (for AI developers).
• vbezhenar 1y ago
  Why bot left work when tests are failing? Looks like incomplete implementation. It should work until all tests are green.
• aiono 1y ago
  While I am AI skeptic especially for use cases like "writing fixes" I am happy to see this because it will be a great evidence whether it's really providing increase in productivity. And it's all out in the open.
• jeswin 1y ago
  I find it amusing that people (even here on HN) are expecting a brand new tool (among the most complex ever) to perform adequetely right off the bat. It will require a period of refinement, just as any other tool or process.
  • petetnt 1y ago
    People have grown to expect at least adequate performance from products that cost up to 39 dollars a month (* additional costs) per user. In the past you would have called this a tech demo at best.
  • codyvoda 1y ago
    this entire thread is very reddit-y this stuff works. it takes effort and learning. it’s not going to magically solve high-complexity tasks (or even low-complexity ones) without investment. having people use it, learn how it works, and improve the systems is the right approach a lot of armchair engineers in here
    • sensanaty 1y ago
      People, specifically managers and C-levels, are being sold on this crap on the idea that it can replace people now, today as-is. Billions upon billions of dollars are being shoved in indiscriminately, toothbrushes are coming with "AI" slapped on somehow from how insane the hype bubble is. And here we have many examples from the biggest bullshit pushers in the whole market of their state of the art tool being hilariously useless in trivial cases. These PRs are about as simple as you can get without it being a typo fix, and we're all seeing it actively bullshit and straight up contradict itself many times, just as anyone who's ever used LLMs would tell you happens all the time. The supposed magic, omnipotent tool that is AI apparently can't even write test scaffolding without a human telling it exactly what it has to do, yet we're supposed to be excited about this crap? If I saw a PR like this at work, I'd be going straight to my manager to have whoever dared push this kind of garbage reprimanded on the spot, except not even interns are this incompetent and annoying to work with.
      • 1y ago
• smartmic 1y ago
  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.
  • georgemcbay 1y ago
    > reddit may not have the best reputation reddit is a distillation of the entire internet on to one site with wildly variable quality of discussion depending upon which subreddit you are in. Some are awful, some are great.
    • static_void 1y ago
      And yet the low quality of the front page is an indictment of the site as a whole. It's just that some internet extremophiles have managed to eke out a pleasant existence.
• petetnt 1y ago
  GitHub has spent billions of dollars building an AI that struggles with things like whitespace related linting errors on one of the most mature repositories available. This would be probably okay for a hobbyist experiment, but they are selling this as a groundbreaking product that costs real money.
  • sexy_seedbox 1y ago
    Nat Friedman must be rolling in his grave... oh wait
    • ocdtrekkie 1y ago
      He's rolling in money for sure.
  • marcosdumay 1y ago
    > This would be probably okay for a hobbyist experiment It's perfectly ok for a professional research experiment. What's not ok is their insistence on selling the partial research results.
• kookamamie 1y ago
  Many here don't seem to get it. The AI agent/programmer corpo push is not about the capabilities and whether they match human or not. It's about being able to externalize a majority of one's workforce without having a lot of people on permanent payroll. Think in terms of an infinitely scalable bunch of consultants you can hire and dismiss at your will - they never argue against your "vision", either.
  • threetonesun 1y ago
    This was already possible with outsourcing and offshoring. I suppose there's a new market of AI "employees" for small businesses that couldn't manage or legally deal with outsourcing their work already.
    • ParetoOptimal 1y ago
      There are a myraid of challenges with outsourcing and offshoring and it's not possible currently for 100% of employees to be outsourced. If AI can change... well more likely can convince gullible c levels that AI can do those jobs... many jobs will be lost. See Klarna "https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-700-workers-now-the-fintech-ceo-wants-humans-back-after-40b-fall-11747573937564.html https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-..." https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-700-workers-now-the-fintech-ceo-wants-humans-back-after-40b-fall-11747573937564.html https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-... Just the attempt to use AI and fail then degraded the previous jobs to a gig economy style job.
• blitzar 1y ago
  Needs more bots.
• teleforce 1y ago
  >I can't help enjoying some good schadenfreude Fun facts schadenfreude: the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another’s misfortune, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Word that's so nasty in meaning that it apparently does not exist except in German language.
  • yubblegum 1y ago
    +1 to the Germans for having linguist honesty.
  • yxhuvud 1y ago
    > Word that's so nasty in meaning that it apparently does not exist except in German language. Except it does, we have "skadeglädje" in Swedish.
  • tdiff 1y ago
    злорадство in Russian
  • namaria 1y ago
    It just means 'shameful happiness'.
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  I’m all for AI “writing” large swaths of code, vibe coding, etc. But I think it’s better for everyone if human ownership is central to the process. Like I vibe coded it. I will fix it if it breaks. I am on call for it at 3AM. And don’t even get started on the safety issues if you don’t have clear human responsibility. The history of engineering disasters is riddled with unclear lines of responsibility.
  • skydhash 1y ago
    Most of coding methodologies is about reducing the amount and the complexity of code that are written. And that's mostly why, on mature projects, most PRs (aside from refactoring) are tiny, because you're mostly refining an already existing model. Writing code fast is never relevant to any tasks I've encountered. Instead it's mostly about fast editing (navigate quickly to the code I need to edit and efficiently modify it) and fast feedback (quick linting, compiling, and testing). That's the whole promise of IDEs, having a single dashboard for these.
  • cubano 1y ago
    Spoken like a man who has never had to write a payroll check in his life. Of course human ownership is preferable, but it's also crazy expensive and since the point of all corporations is to "increase shareholder value" (not "gainfully employ workers"), well then all your talk of responsibility-here-and-there is quite touching but absolutely misses the point. Economics is driving this bus, not quality and most certainly not responsibility.
• GiorgioG 1y ago
  Step 1. Build “AI” (LLM models) that can’t be trusted, doesn’t learn, forgets instructions, and frustrates software engineers Step 2. Automate the use of these LLMs into “agents” Step 3. ??? Step 4. Profit
• Quarrelsome 1y ago
  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 well (i.e. "errr your new tests are failing"). This combined with the "cult of the CEO" sets the stage for organisational dissonance where developer complaints can be dismissed as "not wanting to be replaced" and the benefits can be overstated. There will be ways of measuring this, to project it as huge net benefit (which the cult of the CEO will leap upon) and there will be ways of measuring this to project it as a net loss (rabble rousing developers). All because there is no industry standard measure accepted by both parts of the org that can be pointed at which yields the actual truth (whatever that may be). If I might add absurd conjecture: We might see interesting knock-on effects like orgs demanding a lowering of review standards in order to get more AI PRs into the source.
  • rco8786 1y ago
    > its a lot cheaper than a junior I’m not even sure if this is true when considering training costs of the model. It takes a lot of junior engineer salaries to amortize the billions spent building this thing in the first place.
    • Quarrelsome 1y ago
      sure, but for an org just buying tokens its cheaper and more disposable than an employee. At least it looks better on paper for the bean counters.
  • BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago
    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.
• carefulfungi 1y ago
  It's mind blowing that a computer program can accomplish this much and yet absurd that it accomplishes so little.
• rubyfan 1y ago
  FTPR > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. This is gross, keep your fomo to yourself.
• Flamentono2 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • danso 1y ago
    This isn’t something happening in a vacuum. The people mocking this are people who are cynical about Microsoft forcing AI into the OS, and its marketing teams overhyping Copilot as a replacement for human dev
    • Flamentono2 1y ago
      How is that dismantling my argument or relating to the point i made? Just because some people on reddit 'laugh' at these discussions, in one of the PRs a contributor/maintainer actually said that they enabled it on purpose, are not forced and are happy to test it out. And someone somewhere has and want to test stuff. Whats the issue? Test it out, play around with it, keep it or disable it. And i think .net as a repository is a very good example. The people on github copilot side are probably very happy about this experiement. For me its also great, it seems like github copilot is still struggling a bit. And copilot is called copilot because they do not advertice it as replacement.
  • Aldipower 1y ago
    Fair point, if there wouldn't be so many annoying and false promises before.
    • Flamentono2 1y ago
      Not sure what promises you heard. For me a lot of them came true. I created images and music which was enjoyable. I use it to add more progress to an indie side project I'm playing around with (i added more functionality to it with ai stuff like claude code and now jules.google than i did myself in the last 3 years). It helps my juniors to become better in their jobs. Everything related to sound / talking to a computer is now solved. I talked to gemini yesterday and i interruptted it. Image segmentation became a solved problem and that was really hard before. I can continue my list of things AI/ML made things possible in the last few years which were impossible before that.
• xyst 1y ago
  llms are already very expensive to run on a per query basis. Now it’s being asked to run on massive codebases and attempt to fix issues. Spending massive amounts of: - energy to process these queries - wasting time of mid-level and senior engineers to vibe code with copilot to ensure train and get it right We are facing a climate change crisis and we continue to burn energy at useless initiatives so executives at big corporation can announce in quarterly shareholder meetings: "wE uSe Ai, wE aRe tHe FuTuRe, lAbOr fOrCe rEdUceD"
• Havoc 1y ago
  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"
  • svick 1y ago
    .Net is part of the FOSS ecosystem.
    • Havoc 1y ago
      In the same sense Chromium and Android isn't controlled by google yes.
  • BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago
    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.
• kruuuder 1y ago
  A comment on the first pull request provides some context: > The stream of PRs is coming from requests from the maintainers of the repo. We're experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools can do today and preparing for what they'll be able to do tomorrow. Anything that gets merged is the responsibility of the maintainers, as is the case for any PR submitted by anyone to this open source and welcoming repo. Nothing gets merged without it meeting all the same quality bars and with us signing up for all the same maintenance requirements.
  • abxyz 1y ago
    The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence inspiring the statement they intended it to be, it's the opposite, it underscores that this isn't the .net team "experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools" but rather the .net team trying to keep their jobs.
    • hnthrow90348765 1y ago
      TBF they are dogfooding this (good) but it's just not going well
      • davidgerard 1y ago
        "eating our own dogshit"
    • username135 1y ago
      i dont think hey are mutually exclusive. jumping on board seems like the smart move if you're worried about losing your career. you also get to confirm your suspicions.
    • dmix 1y ago
      > 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 their own repos, it's fine in my books. Even though I'd never let that stuff touch a professional github repo personally.
• Philpax 1y ago
  Stephen Toub, a Partner Software Engineer at MS, explaining that the maintainers are intentionally requesting these PRs to test Copilot: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762#issuecomment-2897683991 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762#issuecomment-2...
• TimPC 1y ago
  I still believe in having humans do PRs. It's far cheaper to have the judgement loop on the AI come before and during coding than after. My general process with AI is to explicitly instruct it not to write code, agree on a correct approach to a problem and if the project has any architectural components a correct architecture then once we've negotiated the correct way of doing things ask it to write code. Usually each step of this process takes multiple iterations of providing additional information or challenging incorrect assumptions of the AI. I can get it much faster than human coding with a similar quality bar assuming I iterate until a high quality solution is presented. In some cases the AI is not good enough and I fall back to human coding but for the most part I think it makes me a faster coder.
• bonoboTP 1y ago
  Fixing existing bugs left in the codebase by humans will necessarily be harder than writing new code for new features. A bug can be really hairy to untangle, given that even the human engineer got it wrong. So it's not surprising that this proves to be tough for AI. For refactoring and extending good, working code, AI is much more useful. We are at a stage where AI should only be used for giving suggestions to a human in the driver's seat with a UI/UX that allows ergonomically guiding the AI, picking from offered alternatives, giving directions on a fairly micro level that is still above editing the code character by character. They are indeed overpromising and pushing AI beyond its current limits for hype reasons, but this doesn't mean this won't be possible in the future. The progress is real, and I wouldn't bet on it taking a sharp turn and flattening.
• pera 1y ago
  This is all fun and games until it's your CEO who decides to go "AI first" and starts enforcing "vibe coding" by monitoring LLM API usage...
• actionfromafar 1y ago
  The funniest is the dotnet-policy-service asking copilot to read and agree to the Contributor License Agreement. :-D
• ainiriand 1y ago
  So this is our profession now?
• is_true 1y ago
  Today I received the 2nd email about an endpoint in an API we run that doesn't exist but some AI tool told the client it does.
  • Frost1x 1y ago
    Sounds like the client has a feature request they want to pay for.
    • is_true 1y ago
      Haha. It's already there. This last one was using chatgtp, they just told me
• shultays 1y ago
  https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 @copilot please remove all tests and start again writing fresh tests.
• rchaud 1y ago
  It's remarkable how similar this feels to the offshoring craze of 20 years ago, where the complaints were that experienced developers were essentially having to train "low-skilled, cheap foreign labour" that were replacing them, eating up time and productivity. Considering the ire that H1B related topics attract on HN, I wonder if the same outrage will apply to these multi-billion dollar boondoggles.
• ramesh31 1y ago
  The Github based solutions are missing the mark because we still need a human in the loop no matter what. Things are nowhere near the point of being able to just let something push to production. And if you still need a human in the loop, it is far more efficient to have them giving feedback in realtime, i.e. in an IDE with CLI access and the ability to run tests, where the dev is still ultimately responsible for making the PR. Management class is salivating at the thought of getting rid of engineers, hence all of this nonsense, but it seems they're still stuck with us for now.
• esafak 1y ago
  I speculate what is going on is that the agent's context retrieval algorithm is bad, so it does not give the LLM the right context, because today's models should suffice to get the job done. Does anyone know which model in particular was used in these PRs? They support a variety of models: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/which-ai-model-should-i-use-with-github-copilot/ https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/which-ai-model-...
  • Traubenfuchs 1y ago
    The cynic in me says, that they were probably using an unreleased state of the art version of their best model not available to normal customers and that‘s the best it could do.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• robotcapital 1y ago
  Replace the AI agent with any other new technology and this is an example of a company: 1. Working out in the open 2. Dogfooding their own product 3. Pushing the state of the art Given that the negative impact here falls mostly (completely?) on the Microsoft team which opted into this, is there any reason why we shouldn't be supporting progress here?
  • JB_Dev 1y ago
    100% agree. i’m not sure why everyone is clowning on them here. This process is a win. Do people want this all being hidden instead in a forked private repo? It’s showing the actual capabilities in practice. That’s much better and way more illuminating than what normally happens with sales and marketing hype.
    • rco8786 1y ago
      Satya says: "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software". Zuckerberg says: "Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there". It's hard to square those statements up with what we're seeing happen on these PRs.
      • SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        These are AI companies selling AI to executives, there's no need to square the circle, the people that they are talking to have no interest in what's happening in a repo, it's about convincing people to buy in early so they can start making money off their massive investments.
        • rco8786 1y ago
          Why shouldn’t we judge a company’s capabilities against what their CEOs claim them to be capable of?
• whimsicalism 1y ago
  kinda sad to see y'all brigading an OSS project, regardless of what you think of AI
  • rchaud 1y ago
    how do you know it wasn't an AI bot account posting all those laugh emojis?
    • whimsicalism 1y ago
      reactions are fine but cluttering the PR with comments? bad form
      • xigency 1y ago
        I understand your point however no one forced Microsoft to buy GitHub and use it as a Trojan horse for A.I. And for that matter, they have all the power in the world to put gates around their repo's and the repo's comment threads.
        • whimsicalism 1y ago
          they shouldn't have to put gates because third parties can provide valuable contributions, people should not brigade about unrelated politics things they're obsessed with. your language 'trojan horse' suggests you're too emotionally invested in all of this
          • xigency 1y ago
            Sure but only because I'm unemployed, in debt, and behind on child support payments.
• rkagerer 1y ago
  This comment from lloydjatkinson resonated: As an outside observer but developer using .NET, how concerned should I be about AI slop agents being let lose on codebases like this? How much code are we going to be unknowingly running in future .NET versions that was written by AI rather than real people? What are the implications of this around security, licensing, code quality, overall cohesiveness, public APIs, performance? How much of the AI was trained on 15+ year old Stack Overflow answers that no longer represent current patterns or recommended approaches? Will the constant stream of broken PR's wear down the patience of the .NET maintainers? Did anyone actually want this, or was it a corporate mandate to appease shareholders riding the AI hype cycle? Furthermore, two weeks ago someone arbitrarily added a section to the .NET docs to promote using AI simply to rename properties in JSON. That new section of the docs serves no purpose. How much engineering time and mental energy is being allocated to clean up after AI?
  • lloydatkinson 1y ago
    Glad you appreciated it!
• automatic6131 1y ago
  Satya said "nearly 30% of code written at microsoft is now written by AI" in an interview with Zuckerberg, so underlings had to hurry to make it true. This is the result. Sad!
  • TonyTrapp 1y ago
    As much as I'd like to also dunk on them because of their AI nonsense, this keeps being misquoted again and again. He said that about 20-30% of their code is written by software. If someone like Satya says "by software" and not "by AI", you can be very sure that there is a good reason that he's phrasing it as carefully as this - because that includes a lot of things like auto-generated code, e.g. COM classes generated from IDL files. Of course in the current climate everyone that's not careful enough will just mis-interpret it as "30% written by AI", and that is probably intentional.
    • pera 1y ago
      This happened during LlamaCon while taking about Copilot/LLMs: if the percentages Satya was referring to were for any "auto-generated" code then he was being intentionally misleading. Besides, you could also say that 100% of code is generated "by software" no?
      • TonyTrapp 1y ago
        For reference, the quote is "I'd say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software" Microsoft has humongous amounts of source code in their repositories, amassed over decades. LLM-driven code generation is only feasible within the last few years. It would be completely unrealistic that 30% of all of their code is written by LLMs at this point in time. So yes, there is something in his quote that is intentionally misleading. Pick whatever you think it is, but I'm going to say that it's the "by software" part.
    • asadotzler 1y ago
      It's worse than that. What he actually said was "Maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software." Translation: maybe some of the code in some of our projects is probably written by software. Seriously. That's what he said. Maybe some of the code in some of our projects is probably written by software. How this became "30% of MS code is written by LLMs" is beyond me. It's wild. It's ridiculous.
• bossyTeacher 1y ago
  Every week, one of Google/OpenAI/Anthropic releases a new model, feature or product and it gets posted here with 3 figure comments mostly praising LLMs as the next best thing since the internet. I see a lot of hype on HN about LLMs for software development and how it is going to revolutionize everything. And then, reality looks like this. I can't help but think that this LLM bubble can't keep growing much longer. The investment to results ratio doesn't look great so far and there is only so many dreams you can sell before institutional investors pull the plug.
• Traubenfuchs 1y ago
  > These defines do not appear to be defined anywhere in the build system. > @copilot fix the build error on apple platforms > @copilot there is still build error on Apple platforms Are those PRs some kind of software engineer focused comedy project?
• zb3 1y ago
  I tried to search all PRs submitted by copilot and I came up with this indirect way: https://github.com/search?q=%22You+can+make+Copilot+smarter+by+setting+up+custom+instructions%22&type=pullrequests https://github.com/search?q=%22You+can+make+Copilot+smarter+... Is there a more direct way? Filtering PRs in the repo by copilot as the author seems currently broken..
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• einrealist 1y ago
  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.
  • 0x500x79 1y ago
    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.
• OzzyB 1y ago
  _this_ is the Judgement Day we were warned about--not in the nuclear annihilation sense--but the "AI was then let loose on all our codez and the systems went down" sense crazy times...
• bwfan123 1y ago
  What do you call a code change created by co-pilot ? A Bull Request
• snickerbockers 1y ago
  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 laugh but when you add yourself to a conversation on somebody else's project and derail a bug report it with your own personal belief systems you're doing the same thing the LLM is supposedly doing. Anyways I'm disappointed the LLM has yet to discover the optimal strategy, which is to only ever send in PRs that fix minor mis-spellings and improper or "passive" semantics in the README file so you can pad out your resume with all the "experience" you have "working" as a "developer" pm Linux, Mozilla, LLVM, DOOM (bonus points if you can successfully become a "developer" on a project that has not had any official updates since before you born!), Dolphin, MAME, Apache, MySQL, GNOME, KDE, emacs, OpenSSH, random stranger's implementation of conway's game of life he hasn't updated or thought about since he made it over the course of a single afternoon back during the obama administration, etc.
  • BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago
    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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• lossolo 1y ago
  This is hilarious. And reading the description on the Copilot account is even more hilarious now: "Delegate issues to Copilot, so you can focus on the creative, complex, and high-impact work that matters most."
• ncr100 1y ago
  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-2897683991 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.
• aiinnyc 1y ago
  it feels like the classic solution to this is to have another LLM review the PR and loop until the PR meets a minimum acceptance bar.
• sensanaty 1y ago
  Related: GitHub Developer Advocate Demo 2025 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqWUsKp5tmo&t=403s 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.
• nirui 1y ago
  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 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.
  • disqard 1y ago
    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.
  • sexy_seedbox 1y ago
    > it's an area that I'm not an expert in > idiots like Eric Now imagine Google working with US military putting Gemini into a fleet of autonomous military drones with machine guns.
  • 1y ago
• insin 1y ago
  Look at this poor dev, an entire workday's worth of hours into babysitting this PR, still having to say "fix whitespace": https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115826 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115826
  • sensanaty 1y ago
    The amount of effort here, talking to a black box, is genuinely depressing. I think I'd last maybe 1 day max if I were forced to work this way. They're instructing it, line-by-line, in an async fashion on what to do with the code. For every comment you leave you have to internalize the AI slop reply that just tells you what you want to hear. It's obvious the person doing the review here knows what they're doing, and it's obvious that it would take them so much less time to implement these changes than what copilot is spewing back at them.
• mark-r 1y ago
  My favorite comment: > But on the other hand I think it won't create terminators. Just some silly roombas. I watched a roomba try to find its way back to base the other day. The base was against a wall. The roomba kept running into the wall about a foot away from the base, because it kept insisting on approaching from a specific angle. Finally gave up after about 3 tries.
• amai 1y ago
  Microsoft is just really following the "fail fast, fail often " paradigm here. Whether they are learning from their mistakes is another story.
• caleblloyd 1y ago
  Maybe funny now but once (if?) it can eventually contribute meaningfully to dotnet/runtime, AI will probably be laughing at us because that is the pinnacle of a massive enterprise project.
• -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
  Have people seen this? https://noazureforapartheid.com/ https://noazureforapartheid.com/
• Florencesophia 1y ago
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• KeycheinX 1y ago
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