Comment by timrogers

It's not survivorship bias. Survivorship bias would be if you made any conclusions from the 1000 merged PRs (eg. "90% of all merged PRs did not get reverted"). But simply stating the number of PRs is not that.

If they measured that too it would make it harder to justify a MSFT P/E ratio of 29.6.

I do agree that some scepticism is due here but how can we tell if we're treading into "moving the goal posts" territory?

I feel the same about automated dependency updates, but if your tests and verifications are good, these become trivial.

Wonderful thank you! It’s just so hard to filter signal vs noise rn.

> Pretty much every developer at GitHub is using Copilot in their day to work, so its influence touches virtually every code change we make ;)

Genuine question, but is CoPilot use not required at GitHub? I'm not trying to be glib or combative, just asking based on Microsoft's current product trajectory and other big companies (e.g. Shopify) forcing their devs to use AI and scoring their performance reviews based on AI use.

Unfortunately, you can't opt out of Co-Pilot in Github. Although I did just use it to ask how to remove the sidebar with "Latest Changes" and other non-needed widgets that feel like clutter.

Copilot said: There is currently no official GitHub setting or option to remove or hide the sidebar with "Latest Changes" and similar widgets from your GitHub home page.

I'm using this an example to show that it is no longer possible to set up a GitHub account to NOT use CoPilot, even if it just lurks in the corner of every page waiting to offer a suggestion. Like many A.I. features it's there, whether you want to use it or not, without an option to disable.

So I'm suss of the "pretty much every developer" claim, no offense.

I'm sorry but given the company you're working for I really have hard time believing such bold statements, even so more that the more I use copilot the more feels dumber and dumber

>Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and complex problems.

Where does the most come from? There's a certain sense of satisfaction in knowing I've tested a piece of code per my experience in the domain coupled with knowledge of where we'll likely be in six months. The same can be said for documentation - hell, on some of the projects I've worked on we've entire teams dedicated to it, and on a complicated project where you're integrating software from multiple vendors the costs of getting it wrong can be astronomical. I'm sorry you feel this way.

But isn't writing tests and updating documentation also the areas where automated quality control is the hardest? Existing high quality tests can work as guardrails for writing business logic, but what guardrails could AI use to to evaluate if its generated docs and tests are any good?

I would not be surprised if things end up the other way around – humans doing the boring and annoying tasks that are too hard for AI, and AI doing the fun easy stuff ;-)

> allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks.

I get paid for the mundane, boring, annoying tasks, and I really like getting paid.

What about developers who do enjoy writing for example high quality documentation? Do you expect that the status quo will be that most of the documentation will be AI slop and AI itself will just bruteforce itself through the issues? How close are we to the point where the AI could handle "tricky dependency updates", but not being able to handle "most interesting and complex problems"? Who writes the tests that are required for the "well tested" codebases for GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to work properly?

What is the job for the developer now? Writing tickets and reviewing low quality PRs? Isn't that the most boring and mundane job in the world?

Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates

So they won’t like working on their job ?

What will you be most excited about when the most interesting and complex problems are out of the Overton window and deemed mundane, boring or annoying as well, or turn out to be intractable for your abilities?

Do you think you're putting yourself or your coworkers out of work?

If/when will this take over your job?

Thanks for the response… do you see a future where engineers are just prompting all the time? Do you see a timeline in which todays programming languages are “low level” and rarely coded by hand?

Absolutely the wrong take. We MUST think about what might happen in several years. Anyone who says we shouldn’t is not thinking about this technology correctly. I work on AI tech. I think about these things. If the teams at Microsoft or GitHub are not, then we should be pushing them to do so.

Tim, are you or any of your coworkers worried this will take your jobs?

HAHA. Very smart. The more you review the Copilot Agent's PRs, the better is gets at submitting new PRs... (basics of supervised machine learning, right?)

Tell Claude the site is down!

It's nearly impossible though to escape the flood of Copilot buttons creeping into every corner of Github (and other Microsoft products like VSCode). This looks like Microsoft aims for deep integration, not separation.

Incorrect. It's not mandated that you actually use it to write or correct code but it's impossible to remove it so you need to either get used to blocking out it's incessant suggestions and notifications or stop using GitHub.

Similarly, the newest MS Word has CoPilot that you "don't have to use" but you still have to put up with the "what would you like to write today?" prompt request at the start of every document or worse "You look like you're trying to write a...formal letter...here are some suggestions."

Can copilot be disabled entirely in a GitHub repo or organization? I may very well have missed those settings, but if nothing else they are well hidden.

If everyone is using Copilot, it's pretty low metrics.

Using different models for different tasks is extremely useful and I couldn't imagine going back to using just one model for everything. Sometimes a model will struggle for one reason or another and swapping it out for another model mid-conversation in LibreChat will get me better results.

Its interesting that even people initially skeptical are now thinking they are on the "chopping block" so to speak. I'm seeing it all over the internet and the slow realization that what supposed to be the "top of the heap" is actually at the bottom - not because of difficulty of coding but because the AI labs themselves are domain experts in software and therefore have the knowledge and data to tackle it as a problem first. I also think to a degree they "smell blood" and fear, more so than greed, is the best marketing tool. Many invested a good chunk of time on this career, and it will result in a lot of negative outcomes. Its a warning to other intellectual careers that's for sure - and you will start seeing resistance to domain knowledge sharing from more "professionalized" careers for sure.

My view is in between yours: A bit of column A and B in the sense both outcomes to an extent will play out. There will be less engineers but not by the factor of productivity (Jevon's paradox will play out but eventually tap out), there will be even more software especially of the low end, and the ones that are there will be expected to be smarter and work harder for the same or less pay grateful they got a job at all. There will be more "precision and rigor", more keeping up required by workers, but less reward for the workers that perform it. In a capitalist economy it won't be seen as a profession to aspire to anymore by most people.

Given most people don't live to work, and use their career to also finance and pursue other life meanings it won't be viable for most people long term especially when other careers give "more bang for buck" w.r.t effort put into them. The uncertainty in the SWE career that most I know are feeling right now means to newcomers I recommend on the balance of risk/reward its better to go another career path especially for juniors who have a longer runway. To be transparent I want to be wrong, but the risk of this is getting higher now everyday.

i.e. AI is a dream for the capital class, and IMO potentially disastrous for social mobility long term.

> I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical at the time.

Well, that's back rationalization. I saw the advances like conducting meta sentiment analysis on medical papers in the 00's. Deep learning was clearly just the beginning. [0]

> Who would've thought (except you)

You're othering me, which is rude, and you're speaking as though you speak for an entire group of people. Seems kind of arrogant.

0. (2014) https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...