Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted. There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something. After dozens of hours billed you will, in fact, get code where the new file wasn't added to the csproj or something like that, and when you point it out, they will bill another 20 hours, and send you a new copy of the project, where the test always fails. It's exactly like this.

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

I think that was the point of the comparison..

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

> That said, I really don't see how it could meaningfully replace an intern however

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

> It's like you have a senior phd level intelligence developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing.

Is that better?

Did you miss the "except" in his sentence? He was making the point this is worse than junior devs for all reasons listed.

Making quite a bit of money brings me a lot of joy compared to other industries

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

> This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic

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".

It happens in waves. For a period, there was an oversupply of cs engineers, and now, the supply will shrink. On top of this, the BS put out by AI code will require experienced engineers to fix.

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

No, there is absolutely no joy left.

I've been looking at getting a CDL and becoming a city bus driver, or maybe a USPS driver or deliveryman or clerk or something.

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When their performance reviews stop depending upon them not doing that.

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

    > rage close the PRs

One of my all time "rage quit" stories is Azer Koçulu of npm left-pad incident infamy. That guy is my Internet hero -- "fight the power".

Better yet, deploy their own LLM to close the PRs.

"Big data" -> "Cloud" -> "LLM-as-A(G)I"

It's all just recycled rent seeking corporate hype for enterprise compute.

The moment I had decided to learn Kubernetes years ago, got a book and saw microservices compared to 'object-oriented' programming I realized that. The 'big ball of mud' paper and the 'worse is better' rant frame it all pretty well in my view. Prioritize velocity, get slop in production, cope with the accidental complexity, rinse repeat. Eventually you get to a point where GPU farms seem like a reasonable way to auto-complete code.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Any bigger excavator you send down there will only get buried when the mud crashes down.

I dunno, when I review code, I don't review what's automatically checked anyways, but thinking about the change/diff in a broader context, and whatever isn't automatically checked. And the earlier you can steer people in the right direction, the better. But maybe this isn't the typical workflow.

The "left behind" mantra that I've been hearing for a while now is the strange one to me.

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.

If you're not using it where it's useful to you, then I still wouldn't say you're getting left behind, but you're making your job harder than it has to be. Anecdotally I've found it useful mostly for writing unit tests and sometimes debugging (can be as effective as a rubber duck).

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.

This is Stephen Toub, who is the lead of many important .NET projects. I don't think he is worried about losing job anytime soon.

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.

TBF they are dogfooding this (good) but it's just not going well

> 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.

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.

So why in public, and why in the most ham-fisted way, and why on important infrastructure, and why in such a terrible integration that it can't even verify that things compile before opening a PR!

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

I think people would be more likely to adopt this view if the overall narrative about AI is that it’s a work in progress and we expect it to get magnitudes better. But the narrative is that AI is already replacing human software engineers.

>> 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.

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.

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."

You are not addressing the point in the comment, why are failing CI changes assigned?

This is the exact reason AI sucks : there is no proper feedback loop.

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

> I feel like everyone is applying a worse-case narrative to what's going on here..

Unfortunately, just about every thread on this genre is like that now.

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.

Why not, when it goes through code review by experienced software engineers who are experts on the subject in a codebase that is covered by extensive unit tests?

It’s worth recognizing that the tension between labor and capital historical reality, not just a modern-day bad attitude. Workers and leadership don’t automatically share goals, especially when senior management incentives often prioritize reducing labor costs which they always do now (and no, this wasn't always universally so).

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.

I suppose that depends on your relationship with your employer. If your goals are highly aligned (e.g. lots of equity based compensation, some degree of stability and security, interest in your role, healthy management practices that value their workforce, etc.) then I agree, it’s in your own self interest to push back because it can effect you directly.

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.

On the other hand: why should you accept that your employer is trying to fire you but first wants you to train the machine that will replace you? For me this is the most "them vs us" it can be.

To be fair, "them" are actively working to replace "us" with AI.

Do you sleep well at night just doing what you're told by people who don't really care about your well being?

I don't get that

Considering that there's daily employee protests against Microsoft now, probably a lot of Microsoft employees want to behave like that.

I agree. It doesn’t help that once things start breaking down, the employer will ask the employees to fix the issue themselves, and thus they’ll have to deal with so much broken code that they’ll be miserable. It’ll become a spiral.

>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality

Your manager understands it. Their manager understands it. Department heads understand it. The execs understand it. The shareholders understand it.

Who does it benefit for the laborers to refuse to understand it?

It's not like I hate my job. It's just being realistic that if a company could make more money by firing me, they would, and if you have good managers and leadership, they will make sure you understand this in a way that respects you as a human and a professional.

Just in time for marshmallows!

That would be logical, but alas LLMs can't into logic.

Bloating the codebase with dead code is much more likely.

This is probably version 0.1 or 0.2.

Reviewing what the AI does now is not to be compared with human PRs. You are not doing the work as it is expected in the (hopefully near?) future but you are training the AI and the developers of the AI and more crucially: you are digging out failure modes to fix.

This is true for all code and has nothing to do with AI. Reading code has always been harder than writing code.

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.

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.

Funny enough, this happens literally every day with millions of developers. There will be thousands upon thousands of incidents in the next hour because a PR looked good, but contained a subtle issue.

He's rolling in money for sure.

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.

A comment on one of the threads, when a random person tried to have copilot change something, said that copilot will not respond to anyone without write access to the repo. I would assume that bot doesn't have write access, so copilot just ignores them.

AI can't, as I understand it, have copyright over anything they do.

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).

Not sure if a chatbot can legally sign a contract, we'd better ask ChatGPT for a second opinion.

It didn't. It completely ignored the request.

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

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.

Its hard for me to think of a small, clearly defined coding problem an LLM cant solve.

I mean I guess this isn't very ambitious, but it's a meaningful time saver if I basically just write code in natural language, and then Copilot generates the real code based on that. I don't have to look up syntax details, or what some function somewhere was named, etc. It will perform very accurately this way. It probably makes me 20% more efficient. It doubles my efficiency in a language I'm unfamiliar with.

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.

They are not intern level.

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.

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

You are really underselling interns. They learn from a single correction, sometimes even without a correction, all by themselves. Their ability to integrate previous experience in the context of new problems is far, far above what I've ever seen in LLMs

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

Without handholding (aka being used as a tool by a competent programmer instead of as an independent “agent”), they’re currently significantly worse than an intern.

This looks much worse than an intern. This feels like a good engineer who has brain damage.

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.

The plan went from the AI being a force multiplier, to a resource hungry beast that have to be fed in the hope it's good enough to justify its hunger.

I mean, I think this is a _lot_ worse than an intern. An intern isn't constantly going to make PRs with failing CI, for a start.

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.