And it will leave you debugging strange code for two weeks afterward.
It’s great at bullshitting that it did what you wanted, even if it obviously didn’t, which I guess is what counts for results at Microsoft.
It would be much better if they treated it as the slightly better (yeah, I said it) auto complete that it is instead of the beginning of fucking sky net – which was supposed to be a bad thing anyway, remember?
But that wouldn’t move the needle on all of the share prices, so instead we have to pretend it can do people’s jobs when it fucking obviously cannot.
So, instead they keep pushing this AI (auto-complete insanity), and keep burning more and more cash. Imagine if we just put a portion of these billions (approaching trillions) into anything that could actually help anyone. Or don’t, because it’s pretty fucking depressing to think about.
Big over-promise. We’re heavily incentived to use an AI coding agent at work. I try to be optimistic and treat it like a tool to help me do things I already know how to do but a little bit faster. It takes multiple iterations of “no, this still isn’t working” to get something that I can touch up and push for review. The idea that I can prompt it and then step away for ten minutes to make coffee and return to an app is ludicrous.
Maybe one day that will be possible. Then I’ll find a new job I guess
Actually it won’t be finishing anything because code is disposable now and nobody cares what trivial app somebody can churn out
Does its ai learn from people using vscode?
Yes
These fuckers at MicroShit have lost all the ability needed to read a room.
When do you reckon they could last do that?
Maybe after windows 8? Last time I can remember.
Writing code is the reward for doing the thinking. If the LLM does it then software engineering is no fun.
It’s like painting - once you’ve finally finished the prep, which is 90% of the effort, actually getting to paint is the reward
What a great way to frame it, I love this! I typically spend something like 60-80% of time available for a given task thinking through approaches and trade-offs, etc. Usually there comes a point when the way forward becomes clear, even obvious.
After that? Bliss. I’m snapping together a LEGO set I designed, composed of pieces I picked (maybe made one or two new ones!), and luxuriating in how it all feels, when put together.
I mean it gets there in the end but it’s often three of four prompts before it provides working code for a relatively simple powershell script. Can’t imagine that it scales to complex code that well at the moment, but then again I’m not a coder.
You’re pretty much spot on
Because you won’t have time to drink that coffee if you put this code into production
Ah get outta here! Next time they’ll say that co pilot also chooses my furry porn and controls my buttplug while it codes for me.
Oh wow I didn’t know about that butt plug thing. I’m playing in a chess tournament soon so that could come in handy
where are my penguin boys at. 🐧
seriously people. the majority of you don’t have to put up with this, you know that right?
Just enjoying this popcorn.
What they forget to mention is that you then spend the rest of the week to fix the bugs it introduced and to explain why your code deleted the production database…
Love how they’re pretending that an LLM is useful for any task that needs precision.
A more appropriate line would be that Copilot can shit out code faster than you can pinch off your own loaf.
It says it will finish the code, it doesn’t say the code will work.
Also just because the code works, doesn’t mean it’s good code.
I’ve had to review code the other day which was clearly created by an LLM. Two classes needed to talk to each other in a bit of a complex way. So I would expect one class to create some kind of request data object, submit it to the other class, which then returns some kind of response data object.
What the LLM actually did was pretty shocking, it used reflection to get access from one class to the private properties with the data required inside the other class. It then just straight up stole the data and did the work itself (wrongly as well I might add). I just about fell of my chair when I saw this.
So I asked the dev, he said he didn’t fully understand what the LLM did, he wasn’t familiar with reflection. But since it seemed to work in the few tests he did and the unit tests the LLM generated passed, he thought it would be fine.
Also the unit tests were wrong, I explained to the dev that usually with humans it’s a bad idea to have the person who wrote the code also (exclusively) write the unit tests. Whenever possible have somebody else write the unit tests, so they don’t have the same assumptions and blind spots. With LLMs this is doubly true, it will just straight up lie in the unit tests. If they aren’t complete nonsense to begin with.
I swear to the gods, LLMs don’t save time or money, they just give the illusion they do. Some task of a few hours will take 20 min and everyone claps. But then another task takes twice as long and we just don’t look at that. And the quality suffers a lot, without anyone really noticing.
Great description of a problem I noticed with most LLM generated code of any decent complexity. It will look fantastic at first but you will be truly up shit creek by the time you realise it didn’t generate a paddle.
So I asked the dev, he said he didn’t fully understand what the LLM did, he wasn’t familiar with reflection.
Big baffling facepalm moment.
If they would at least prefix the changeset description with that it’d be easier to interpret and assess.
They’ve been great for me at optimizing bite sized annoying tasks. They’re really bad at doing anything beyond that. Like astronomically bad.
Why would unit tests not be written by the same person? That doesn’t make a lot of sense…
They did say why they’re doing it
Whenever possible have somebody else write the unit tests, so they don’t have the same assumptions and blind spots.
Did that not make sense to you?
I usually wouldn’t do that, because it’s a bigger investment. But it certainly makes logical sense to me and is something teams can weigh and decide on.
I was going to say. The code won’t compile but it will be “finished “
A couple agent iterations will compile. Definitely won’t do what you wanted though, and if it does it will be the dumbest way possible.
Yeah you can definitely bully AI into giving you some thing that will run if you yell at it long enough. I don’t have that kind of patience
Edit: typically I see it just silently dump errors to /dev/null if you complain about it not working lol
And people say that AI isn’t humanlike. That’s peak human behavior right there, having to bother someone out of procrastination mode.
The edit makes it even better, swiping things under the rug? Hell yeah!
