Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

Nice to see that Microsoft has automated that, failure will be cheaper now.

It's not like a regular junior developer, it's much worse.

And even if it could, how do you get senior devs without junior devs? ^^

But the actual software part? I'm not sure anymore

So, for experienced engineers, I see a great future fixing the shit show that is AI-code.

I feel the same way today, but I got started around 2012 professionally. I wonder how much of this is just our fading optimism after seeing how shit really works behind the scenes, and how much the industry itself is responsible for it. I know we're not the only two people feeling this way either, but it seems all of us have different timescales from when it turned from "enjoyable" to "get me out of here".

Yes, when your 100k quarterly RSU drop lands

Microsoft's stock price is dependent on them proving that this is a success.

I estimate two more years for the bubble to pop.

The answer is probably that the Copilot team is using the rest of the engineering organization as testers. Great for the Copilot team, frustrating for everyone else.

I would say the copilot system isn't really there yet for these kinds of changes, you don't have to run experiments on a language framework to figure that out.

Like, I need to start smashing my face into a keyboard for 10000 hours or else I won't be able to use LLM tools effectively.

If LLM is this tool that is more intuitive than normal programming and adds all this productivity, then surely I can just wait for a bunch of others to wear themselves out smashing the faces on a keyboard for 10000 hours and then skim the cream off of the top, no worse for wear.

On the other hand, if using LLMs is a neverending nightmare of chaos and misery that's 10x harder than programming (but with the benefit that I don't actually have to learn something that might accidentally be useful), then yeah I guess I can see why I would need to get in my hours to use it. But maybe I could just not use it.

"Left behind" really only makes sense to me if my KPIs have been linked with LLM flavor aid style participation.

Ultimately, though, physics doesn't care about social conformity and last I checked the machine is running on physics.

It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE.

It's a powerful tool. You still need to know when to and when not to use it.

I think, we should not read too much into it. He is honestly exploring how much this tool can help him to resolve trivial issues. Maybe he was asked to do so by some of his bosses, but unlikely to fear the tool replacing him in the near future.

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.

In my org, we would have had to bypass precommit hooks to do this!

>> This is a test. You can't improve a system without testing it on real world conditions.

Software developers know to fix build problems before asking for a review. The AIs are submitting PRs in bad faith because they don't know any better. Compilers and other build tools produce errors when they fail, and the AI is ignoring this first line of feedback.

It is not a maintainers job to review code for syntax errors, or use of APIs that don't actually exist, or other silly mistakes. That's the compilers job and it does it well. The AI needs to take that feedback and fix the issues before escalating to humans.

It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem."

EVERY single prompt should have the opportunity to get copied off into a permanent log where the end user triggers it : log all input, all output, human writes a summary of what he wanted to happen but did not, what he thinks might have went wrong, what he thinks should have happened (domain specific experts giving feedback about how things are fucking up) And then its still only useful with long term tracking like how someone actually made a training change to fix this exact failure scenario.

None of that exists, so just like "full self driving" was a pie in the sky bullshit dream that proved machine learning has an 80/20 never gonna fully work problem, same thing here

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.

Most employees want to do good work, but pretending there’s no structural divergence in interests flattens decades of labor history and ignores the power dynamics baked into modern orgs. It’s not about being antagonistic, it’s about being clear-eyed where there are differences between the motivations of your org. leadership and your personal best interests. After a few levels remove from your position, you're just headcount with loaded cost.

Meanwhile a lot of folks have very unhealthy to non-existent relationships with their employers. There may be some mixture where they may be temporary hired/viewed as highly disposable or transient in nature having very little to gain from the success of the business, they may be compensated regardless of success/failure, they may have toxic management who treat them terribly (condescendingly, constantly critical, rarely positive, etc.). Bad and non-existent relationships lead to this sort of behavior. In general we’re moving towards “non-existent” relationships with employers broadly speaking for the labor force.

The counter argument is often floated here “well why work there” and the fact is money is necessary to survive, the number of positions available hiring at any given point is finite, and many almost by definition won’t ever be the top performers in their field to the point they truly choose their employers and career paths with full autonomy. So lots of people end up in lots of places that are toxic or highly misaligned with their interests as a survival mechanism. As such, watching the toxic places shoot themselves in the foot can be some level of justice people find where generally unpleasant people finally get to see consequences of their actions and take some responsibility.

People will prop others up from their own consequences so long as there’s something in it for them. As you peel that away, at some point there’s a level of poetic justice to watch the situation burn. This is why I’m not convinced having completely transactional relationships with employers is a good thing. Even having self interest and stability in mind, certain levels of toxicity in business management can fester. At some point no amount of money is worth dealing with that and some form of correction is needed there. The only mechanism is to typically assure poor decision making and action is actually held accountable.

Interesting because "them" very much have an antagonistic mentality vs "us". "Them" would fire you in a fucking heartbeat to save a relatively small amount (10%). "Them" also want to aggressively pay you the least amount for which they can get you to do work for them, not what they "value" you at. "Us" depends on "them" for our livelihoods and the lives of people that depend on us, but "them" doesn't doesn't have any dependency on you that can't be swapped out rather quickly.

I am a capitalist, don't get me wrong, but it is a very one-sided relationship not even-footed or rooted in two-way respect. You describe "them" as "leadership" while "Them" describe you as a "human resource" roughly equivalent to the way toilet paper and plastics for widgets are described.

If you have found a place to work where people respect you as a person, you should really cherish that job, because most are not that way.

Almost no one does but people get ground down and then do it to cope.

I don't get that

Bloating the codebase with dead code is much more likely.

The joke is that PERL was a write-once, read-none language.

> Speaking from experience.

My experience is all code can have subtle errors, and I wouldn't treat any PR differently.

Nor can it be an entity to sign anything.

I assume the "not-copyrightable" issue, doesn't in anyway interfere with the rights trying to be protected by the CLA, but IANAL ..

I assume they've explicitly told it not to sign things (perhaps, because they don't want a sniff of their bot agreeing to things on behalf of MSFT).

(Turns out the AI was programmed to ignore bots. Go figure.)

Besides, you could also say that 100% of code is generated "by software" no?

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.

I can't fire half my dev org tomorrow with that approach, I can't really fire anyone, so I guess it would be a big letdown for a lot of execs. Meanwhile though we just keep incrementally shipping more stuff faster at higher quality so I'm happy...

This works because it treats the LLM like what it actually is: an exceptionally good if slightly random text transformer.

Even if it could perform at a similar level to an intern at a programming task, it lacks a great deal of the other attributes that a human brings to the table, including how they integrate into a team of other agents (human or otherwise). I won't bother listing them, as we are all humans.

I think the hype is missing the forest for the trees, and I think exactly this multi-agent dynamic might be where the trees start to fall down in front of us. That and the as currently insurmountable issues of context and coherence over long time horizons.

When you look at it from afar, it looks potentially good, but as you start looking into it for real, you start realizing none of it makes any sense. Then you make simple suggestions, it does something that looks like what you asked, yet completely missing the point.

An intern, no matter how bad it is, could only waste so much time and energy.

This makes wasting time and introducing mind-bogglingly stupid bugs infinitely scalable.

In my experience, LLMs in general are really, really bad at C# / .NET , and it worries me as a .NET developer.

With increased LLM usage, I think development in general is going to undergo a "great convergence".

There's a positive(1) feedback loop where LLM's are better at Blub, so people use them to write more Blub. With more Blub out there, LLMs get better at Blub.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

(just mentioning it because you linked a post and quoted two comments, instead of directly linking the comments. not trying to 'uhm, actually'.)

It seems to me to be coming from the CEO echo chamber (the rumored group chats we keep hearing about). The only way to keep the stock price increasing in these low growth high interest rate times is to cut costs every quarter. The single largest cost is employee salaries. So we have to shed a larger and larger percentage of the workforce and the only way to do that is to replace them with AI. It doesn't matter whether the AI is capable enough to actually replace the workers, it has to replace them because the stock price demands it.

We all know this will eventually end in tears.

This feels like it will end badly.

Why?

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.

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.”

Doing so has low risk, the senior devs may perhaps get fed up and quit, and the company might be a laughing stock on public PRs. But the potential value for is huge.

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-..."

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.

may you please let me know where are you hosting the code ? would love to migrate as well.

thank you !

It's just that some internet extremophiles have managed to eke out a pleasant existence.

that's literally the bare minimum.

And the quantity of js code available/discoverable when scrapping the web is larger by an order of magnitude than every other language.

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.