113 ms·

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I am doing to something I don't want or didn't intend. It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails.

xnorswap 10mo ago
I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.
- yoyohello13 10mo ago
  I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.
  - foobarian 10mo ago
    Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?
    - blibble 10mo ago
      > Why is this, I wonder? because that's Microsoft's business model their products are just just good enough to allow them to put a checkbox in a feature table to allow it to be sold to someone who will then never have to use it but not even a penny more will be spent than the absolute bare minimum to allow that this explains Teams, Azure, and everything else they make you can think of
      - ethbr1 10mo ago
        * That's modern Microsoft's desktop product business model I hear tales of the before-times, when they had a QA department and took quality seriously.
        bdangubic 10mo ago
        How do you QA adding weird prediction tool to say Outlook. I have to use Outlook at one of my clients and have switched to writing all emails in VS Code and then pasting it to Outlook as “autocomplete” is unbearable… Not sure QA is possible with tools like these…
        ethbr1 10mo ago
        Part of QA used to be evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing. ... why, it's almost like in eliminating the QA function, we removed the final checks and balances on developers (read: PMs) from implementing whatever ass-backwards feature occurs to them. Just in time for 'AI all the things!' directives to come down from on high.
        bdangubic 10mo ago
        exactly!! though evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing is hard when no one knows what it is supposed to be doing :)
- smileson2 10mo ago
  that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out
- vjvjvjvjghv 10mo ago
  "They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way." And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"
  - greazy 10mo ago
    I asked copilot in outlook webmail to search my emails for something I needed. I can't do that. that's the one use case where LLM is helpful!
- ihsw 10mo ago
  [dead]
- Arwill 10mo ago
  I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.
  - xnorswap 10mo ago
    This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / statistics based approach that worked well without suggesting outright rubbish. In .NET we've had intellisense for 25 years that would only suggest properties that could exist, and then suddenly I found a while ago that vscode auto-completed properties that don't exist. It's maddening! The least they could have done is put in a roslyn pass to filter out the impossible.
    - cyberax 10mo ago
      The regular JetBrains IDEs have a setting to disable the AI-based inline completion, you can then just assign it to a hotkey and call it when needed. I found that it makes the AI experience so much better.
      - mrguyorama 10mo ago
        There is no setting to revert back to the very reliable and high quality "AI" autocomplete that reliably did not recommend class methods that do not exist and reliably figured out the pattern I was writing 20 lines of without randomly suggesting 100 lines of new code that only disrupts my view of the code I am trying to work on. I even clicked the "Don't do multiline suggestions" checkbox because the above was so absurdly anti-productive, but it was ignored
- mk89 10mo ago
  My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks. The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget. 100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe). This means for a year or more, a lot of AI everywhere, impossible to avoid, will make usability sink. Now, if this was only done by Microsoft, I would not mind. The issue is that this behavior is getting widespread. Things are becoming increasingly unusable.
  - wlesieutre 10mo ago
    Reminds me of when Google’s core mission was to put Google Plus integrations in everything
  - ilteris 10mo ago
    Yep, ship it out now, we'll figure out the rest later. I remember there was that motto, "respect the user." I am so tired.
    - conartist6 10mo ago
      You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care. Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least
      - conartist6 10mo ago
        (unless of course the user is an impostor, a scammer, or a grifter! Then the level is service becomes almost unimaginably high)
- raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  I have had great luck with ChatGPT trying to figure out a complex AWS issue with “I am going to give you the problem I have. I want you to help me work backwards step by step and give me the AWS cli commands to help you troubleshoot. I will give you the output of the command”. It’s a combination of advice that ChatGPT gives me and my own rubberducking.
- lostphilosopher 10mo ago
  This seems like what should be a killer feature: Copilot having access to configuration and logs and being able to identify where a failure is coming from. This stuff is tedious manually since I basically run through a checklist of where the failure could occur and there’s no great way to automate that plus sometimes there’s subtle typo type issues. Copilot can generate the checklist reasonably well but can’t execute on it, even from Copilot within Azure. Why not??
butlike 10mo ago
That's because in its current form, that's all it's good for reliably. Can't sell that it might hallucinate the numbers in the Q4 report
PyWoody 10mo ago
> ...Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you" I feel like that describes nearly all of the "productivity" tools I see in AI ads. Sadly enough, it also aligns with how most people use it, in my personal experience. Just a total off-boarding of needing to think.
- netsharc 10mo ago
  The term is "cognitive offloading". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cognitive+offloading https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cognitive+offloading Sheesh, I notice I also just ask an assistant quite a bit rather than putting effort to think about things. Imagine people who drive everywhere with GPS (even for routine drives) and are lost without it, and imagine that for everything needing a little thought...
latchkey 10mo ago
Dissonance runs straight through from top of the org chart. https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1996597609587470504 https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1996597609587470504 Just 22 hours ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138952
Edmond 10mo ago
>As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This the nightmare scenario with AI, ie people settling for Microsoft/OpenAI et al to do the "thinking" for you. It is alluring but of course it is not going to work. It is similar to what happened to the internet via social media, ie "kickback and relax, we'll give you what you really want, you don't have to take any initiative". My pitch against this is to vehemently resist the chatbot-style solutions/interfaces and demand intelligent workspaces: https://codesolvent.com/botworx/intelligent-workspace/ https://codesolvent.com/botworx/intelligent-workspace/
- netsharc 10mo ago
  A world full of humans being guided by computers would be... dystopian. Although I imagine a version where AI drives humans who mindlessly trust them to be more vegetarian or take public transport, helping save the environment (an ironic wish since AI is burning the planet). Of course "AI" is being guided by their owners, so there'd be a camp who uses Grok who'll still drive SUVs, eat meat, and be racist idiots...
pupppet 10mo ago
Too many companies have bolted AI on to their existing products with the value-prop Let us do the work (poorly) for you.
jfarmer 10mo ago
I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis and the air. Friction isn't fungible. John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes: ”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.” In "Mind and World", McDowell criticizes this sort of thinking, too, saying: > We need to conceive this expansive spontaneity as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain off representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a void. And that's really what this is about, I think. Friction-free is the goal but friction-free "thought" isn't thought at all. It's frictionless spinning in a void. I teach and see this all the time in EdTech. Imagine if students could just ask the robot XYZ and how much time it'd free up! That time could be spent on things like relationship-building with the teacher, new ways of motivating students, etc. Except...those activities supply the "wants and struggles whose consummations" build the relationships! Maybe the robot could help the student, say, ask better questions to the teacher, or direct the student to peers who were similarly confused but figure it out. But I think that strikes many tech-minded folks as "inefficient" and "friction-ful". If the robot knows the answer to my question, why slow me down by redirecting me to another person? This is the same logic that says making dinner is a waste of time and we should all live off nutrient mush. The purposes of preparing dinner is to make something you can eat and the purpose of eating is nutrient acquisition, right? Just beam those nutrients into my bloodstream and skip the rest. Not sure how to put this all together into something pithy, but I see it all as symptoms of the same cultural impulse. One that's been around for decades and decades, I think.
- greenavocado 10mo ago
  People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful. Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.
stogot 10mo ago
The disappointing thing is I’d rather them spend the time improving security but it sounds like all cycles are shoved into making AI shovels. Last year, the CEO promised security would come first but it’s not the case https://www.techspot.com/news/102873-microsoft-now-security-first-everything-else-second-ndash.html https://www.techspot.com/news/102873-microsoft-now-security-...
- bombcar 10mo ago
  Security does come first. Job security.
dustingetz 10mo ago
Dear MS please use AI to autocomplete my billing address correctly when I fill out web forms, thanks
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
pants2 10mo ago
Perhaps this is a feature and not a bug for MS. Every time you hit escape or accept, you're giving them more training samples. The more training data they can get you to give them, the better. So they WANT to be throwing out possibly irrelevant suggestions at every opportunity.
gyomu 10mo ago
As an old school interface/interaction designer, I see this as a direct consequence of how the discipline of software design has evolved in the last decade or two. We’ve went from conceiving of software as tools - constructs that enhance and amplify their user’s skills and capabilities - to magic boxes that should aim to do everything with just one button (and maybe even that is one action too many). This shift in thinking is visible in how junior designers and product managers are trained and incentivized to think about their work. “Anticipating the user’s intent”, “providing a magical experience”, “making the simplest, most beautiful and intuitive product” - all things that are so routine parlance now that they sound trite, but that would make any software designer from the 80s/90s catatonic because of how orthogonal they are to good tool design. To caricature a bit, the industry went from being run by people designing heavy machinery to people designing Disneyland rides. Disneyland rides are great and have their place, but you probably don’t want your tractor to be designed like one.
- bombcar 10mo ago
  Watching this tractor boot is infuriating https://youtu.be/pWWC2a7Bj-U https://youtu.be/pWWC2a7Bj-U
throwaway2037 10mo ago
As much as I love JetBrains (IntelliJ and friends), I have the same feeling this year. The ratio that I undo an accidental tab/whatever far exceeds the accepted ones. I'm not anti-LLM -- they are great for many things, but I am tired of undoing shitting suggestions. Literally, many of them produce a syntax error. Please don't read this post as dumping on JetBrains. I still love their products. > It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails. No trolling: This is genius-level sarcasm. You do realise that most "business" emails are essentially this, right? Oh, right, you knew that already!
- mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  I agree. I am happiest just using plain Emacs for coding and every once in a while separately using an LLM or once or twice a day use gemini-cli or codex for a single task. My comment is for coding, but same opinion for writing emails - once in a blue moon, then I will use a LLM manually.
  - throwaway2037 10mo ago
    You raise a good point. For specific programming tasks, I don't really want token-by-token suggestions in an IDE. And, like you, when I have a specific problem, e.g., "I need to do Kerberos auth like this in that language." -- I go to ask an LLM, and it is generally very useful. Then I look at the produced code and say: "Oh, that's how you do it." I almost never copy/paste the results from the LLM into my code base.

xnorswap 10mo ago

I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.

yoyohello13 10mo ago
I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.
- foobarian 10mo ago
  Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?
  - blibble 10mo ago
    > Why is this, I wonder? because that's Microsoft's business model their products are just just good enough to allow them to put a checkbox in a feature table to allow it to be sold to someone who will then never have to use it but not even a penny more will be spent than the absolute bare minimum to allow that this explains Teams, Azure, and everything else they make you can think of
    - ethbr1 10mo ago
      * That's modern Microsoft's desktop product business model I hear tales of the before-times, when they had a QA department and took quality seriously.
      - bdangubic 10mo ago
        How do you QA adding weird prediction tool to say Outlook. I have to use Outlook at one of my clients and have switched to writing all emails in VS Code and then pasting it to Outlook as “autocomplete” is unbearable… Not sure QA is possible with tools like these…
        ethbr1 10mo ago
        Part of QA used to be evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing. ... why, it's almost like in eliminating the QA function, we removed the final checks and balances on developers (read: PMs) from implementing whatever ass-backwards feature occurs to them. Just in time for 'AI all the things!' directives to come down from on high.
        bdangubic 10mo ago
        exactly!! though evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing is hard when no one knows what it is supposed to be doing :)
smileson2 10mo ago
that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out
vjvjvjvjghv 10mo ago
"They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way." And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"
- greazy 10mo ago
  I asked copilot in outlook webmail to search my emails for something I needed. I can't do that. that's the one use case where LLM is helpful!
ihsw 10mo ago
[dead]
Arwill 10mo ago
I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.
- xnorswap 10mo ago
  This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / statistics based approach that worked well without suggesting outright rubbish. In .NET we've had intellisense for 25 years that would only suggest properties that could exist, and then suddenly I found a while ago that vscode auto-completed properties that don't exist. It's maddening! The least they could have done is put in a roslyn pass to filter out the impossible.
  - cyberax 10mo ago
    The regular JetBrains IDEs have a setting to disable the AI-based inline completion, you can then just assign it to a hotkey and call it when needed. I found that it makes the AI experience so much better.
    - mrguyorama 10mo ago
      There is no setting to revert back to the very reliable and high quality "AI" autocomplete that reliably did not recommend class methods that do not exist and reliably figured out the pattern I was writing 20 lines of without randomly suggesting 100 lines of new code that only disrupts my view of the code I am trying to work on. I even clicked the "Don't do multiline suggestions" checkbox because the above was so absurdly anti-productive, but it was ignored
mk89 10mo ago
My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks. The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget. 100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe). This means for a year or more, a lot of AI everywhere, impossible to avoid, will make usability sink. Now, if this was only done by Microsoft, I would not mind. The issue is that this behavior is getting widespread. Things are becoming increasingly unusable.
- wlesieutre 10mo ago
  Reminds me of when Google’s core mission was to put Google Plus integrations in everything
- ilteris 10mo ago
  Yep, ship it out now, we'll figure out the rest later. I remember there was that motto, "respect the user." I am so tired.
  - conartist6 10mo ago
    You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care. Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least
    - conartist6 10mo ago
      (unless of course the user is an impostor, a scammer, or a grifter! Then the level is service becomes almost unimaginably high)
raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
I have had great luck with ChatGPT trying to figure out a complex AWS issue with “I am going to give you the problem I have. I want you to help me work backwards step by step and give me the AWS cli commands to help you troubleshoot. I will give you the output of the command”. It’s a combination of advice that ChatGPT gives me and my own rubberducking.
lostphilosopher 10mo ago
This seems like what should be a killer feature: Copilot having access to configuration and logs and being able to identify where a failure is coming from. This stuff is tedious manually since I basically run through a checklist of where the failure could occur and there’s no great way to automate that plus sometimes there’s subtle typo type issues. Copilot can generate the checklist reasonably well but can’t execute on it, even from Copilot within Azure. Why not??

butlike 10mo ago

That's because in its current form, that's all it's good for reliably. Can't sell that it might hallucinate the numbers in the Q4 report

PyWoody 10mo ago

> ...Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you" I feel like that describes nearly all of the "productivity" tools I see in AI ads. Sadly enough, it also aligns with how most people use it, in my personal experience. Just a total off-boarding of needing to think.

netsharc 10mo ago
The term is "cognitive offloading". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cognitive+offloading https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cognitive+offloading Sheesh, I notice I also just ask an assistant quite a bit rather than putting effort to think about things. Imagine people who drive everywhere with GPS (even for routine drives) and are lost without it, and imagine that for everything needing a little thought...

latchkey 10mo ago

Dissonance runs straight through from top of the org chart. https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1996597609587470504 https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1996597609587470504 Just 22 hours ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138952

Edmond 10mo ago

>As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This the nightmare scenario with AI, ie people settling for Microsoft/OpenAI et al to do the "thinking" for you. It is alluring but of course it is not going to work. It is similar to what happened to the internet via social media, ie "kickback and relax, we'll give you what you really want, you don't have to take any initiative". My pitch against this is to vehemently resist the chatbot-style solutions/interfaces and demand intelligent workspaces: https://codesolvent.com/botworx/intelligent-workspace/ https://codesolvent.com/botworx/intelligent-workspace/

netsharc 10mo ago
A world full of humans being guided by computers would be... dystopian. Although I imagine a version where AI drives humans who mindlessly trust them to be more vegetarian or take public transport, helping save the environment (an ironic wish since AI is burning the planet). Of course "AI" is being guided by their owners, so there'd be a camp who uses Grok who'll still drive SUVs, eat meat, and be racist idiots...

pupppet 10mo ago

Too many companies have bolted AI on to their existing products with the value-prop Let us do the work (poorly) for you.

jfarmer 10mo ago

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis and the air. Friction isn't fungible. John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes: ”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.” In "Mind and World", McDowell criticizes this sort of thinking, too, saying: > We need to conceive this expansive spontaneity as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain off representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a void. And that's really what this is about, I think. Friction-free is the goal but friction-free "thought" isn't thought at all. It's frictionless spinning in a void. I teach and see this all the time in EdTech. Imagine if students could just ask the robot XYZ and how much time it'd free up! That time could be spent on things like relationship-building with the teacher, new ways of motivating students, etc. Except...those activities supply the "wants and struggles whose consummations" build the relationships! Maybe the robot could help the student, say, ask better questions to the teacher, or direct the student to peers who were similarly confused but figure it out. But I think that strikes many tech-minded folks as "inefficient" and "friction-ful". If the robot knows the answer to my question, why slow me down by redirecting me to another person? This is the same logic that says making dinner is a waste of time and we should all live off nutrient mush. The purposes of preparing dinner is to make something you can eat and the purpose of eating is nutrient acquisition, right? Just beam those nutrients into my bloodstream and skip the rest. Not sure how to put this all together into something pithy, but I see it all as symptoms of the same cultural impulse. One that's been around for decades and decades, I think.

greenavocado 10mo ago
People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful. Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.

stogot 10mo ago

The disappointing thing is I’d rather them spend the time improving security but it sounds like all cycles are shoved into making AI shovels. Last year, the CEO promised security would come first but it’s not the case https://www.techspot.com/news/102873-microsoft-now-security-first-everything-else-second-ndash.html https://www.techspot.com/news/102873-microsoft-now-security-...

bombcar 10mo ago
Security does come first. Job security.

dustingetz 10mo ago

Dear MS please use AI to autocomplete my billing address correctly when I fill out web forms, thanks

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

pants2 10mo ago

Perhaps this is a feature and not a bug for MS. Every time you hit escape or accept, you're giving them more training samples. The more training data they can get you to give them, the better. So they WANT to be throwing out possibly irrelevant suggestions at every opportunity.

gyomu 10mo ago

As an old school interface/interaction designer, I see this as a direct consequence of how the discipline of software design has evolved in the last decade or two. We’ve went from conceiving of software as tools - constructs that enhance and amplify their user’s skills and capabilities - to magic boxes that should aim to do everything with just one button (and maybe even that is one action too many). This shift in thinking is visible in how junior designers and product managers are trained and incentivized to think about their work. “Anticipating the user’s intent”, “providing a magical experience”, “making the simplest, most beautiful and intuitive product” - all things that are so routine parlance now that they sound trite, but that would make any software designer from the 80s/90s catatonic because of how orthogonal they are to good tool design. To caricature a bit, the industry went from being run by people designing heavy machinery to people designing Disneyland rides. Disneyland rides are great and have their place, but you probably don’t want your tractor to be designed like one.

bombcar 10mo ago
Watching this tractor boot is infuriating https://youtu.be/pWWC2a7Bj-U https://youtu.be/pWWC2a7Bj-U

throwaway2037 10mo ago

As much as I love JetBrains (IntelliJ and friends), I have the same feeling this year. The ratio that I undo an accidental tab/whatever far exceeds the accepted ones. I'm not anti-LLM -- they are great for many things, but I am tired of undoing shitting suggestions. Literally, many of them produce a syntax error. Please don't read this post as dumping on JetBrains. I still love their products. > It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails. No trolling: This is genius-level sarcasm. You do realise that most "business" emails are essentially this, right? Oh, right, you knew that already!

mark_l_watson 10mo ago
I agree. I am happiest just using plain Emacs for coding and every once in a while separately using an LLM or once or twice a day use gemini-cli or codex for a single task. My comment is for coding, but same opinion for writing emails - once in a blue moon, then I will use a LLM manually.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  You raise a good point. For specific programming tasks, I don't really want token-by-token suggestions in an IDE. And, like you, when I have a specific problem, e.g., "I need to do Kerberos auth like this in that language." -- I go to ask an LLM, and it is generally very useful. Then I look at the produced code and say: "Oh, that's how you do it." I almost never copy/paste the results from the LLM into my code base.