Comment by bramhaag
19 days ago
Seeing Microsoft employees argue with an LLM for hours instead of actually just fixing the problem must be a very encouraging sight for businesses that have built their products on top of .NET.
19 days ago
Seeing Microsoft employees argue with an LLM for hours instead of actually just fixing the problem must be a very encouraging sight for businesses that have built their products on top of .NET.
I remember before mass LLM adoption, reading an issue on GitHub where an increasingly frustrated user was failing to properly describe a blocking issue, and the increasingly frustrated maintainer was failing to get them to stick to the issue template.
Now you don’t even need the frustrated end user!
one day both sides will be AI so we can all relax and enjoy our mojitos
Well, people have been putting M-x doctor to talk with M-x eliza for decades.
when that day arrives we'll won't be relaxing, we will be put through a wood chipper
1 reply →
I sometimes feel like that is the right outcome for bad management and bad instructions. Only this time they can’t blame the junior engineer and are left to only blame themselves.
I think we all know they won’t.
I am genuinely curious though to see the strategies they employ to absolve themselves of guilt and foolishness.
Is there precedent for the entire exec and management class embracing a new trend to this kind of extent, then it blowing up in their faces?
They'll probably blame openai/the AI instead.
AI has reproducible outcomes. If someone else can make it work, then they should too.
3 replies →
Especially painful when one of said employee is Stephen Toub, who is famous for his .net performance blog posts.
I was thinking that too. He's a great programmer, and at this point I can't imagine he's having fun 'prompting' an LLM to write correct code.
I hope he writes a personal essay about the experience after he leaves Microsoft. Not that he will leave anytime soon, but the first hand accounts of how they are talking about these systems internally are going to be even more entertaining than the wtf PRs.
4 replies →
You don’t think he’s having fun getting laid a ton for playing with computers?
2 replies →
You don't want them to experiment with new tools? The main difference now is that the experiment is public.
It's pretty obviously a failed experiment. Why keep repeating it? Try again in another 3 months.
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.
> It's pretty obviously a failed experiment
For it to be "failed" it would have to also be finished/completed. They are likely continuously making tweaks, this thing was just released.
4 replies →
I wouldn't necessarily call that just an experiment if the same requests aren't being fixed without copilot and the ai changes could get merged.
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.
By all means. Just not on one of the most popular software development frameworks in the world. Maybe that can wait until after the concept is proven.
Yeah, seems to me that breaking .NET with this garbage will be, uh, extremely bad
Nah I'd prefer they focus on writing code themselves to improve .NET not babysitting a spam-machine
Microsoft closed their recently acquired advertisement buy-side platform Xander Invest because they are replacing it with an AI-only platform.
They only gave their customers 9 months to migrate away.
I'm expecting that Microsoft did this to artificially pump up their AI usage numbers for next year by forcibly removing non-AI alternatives.
This only one example in AdTech but I expect other industries to be hit as well.
The point of this exercise for Microsoft isn't to produce usable code right now, but to use and improve copilot.
They can do that in private repos just as easily, this a pr stunt that backfired very badly.
Yeah it's quite disheartening.
I recently spent a couple of months studying C# and .NET and working on my first project with it.
.NET, Blazor, etc are not known for a fast release schedule... but if things are going to become even slower with this AI crap I wonder if I made the right call.
I'm quite happy how things are today for making web APIs but I wish Blazor and other frameworks were in a much better shape.
.NET has major releases every year. How is that slow for a programming platform/framework?
Yes but the improvements are very gradual. It takes years for something to reach maturity. At least for the web stuff which is what I know of.
Eg:
Minimal APIs were released in 2021 but it won't be until .NET 10 that they will have validation. Amazing that validation was not a day one priority for an API. I'm not certain if even in .NET 10 Minimal APIs will have full parity of features with MVC.
Minification of static assets didn't come until .NET 9 released in 2024. This was already commonplace in the JS world a decade earlier. It could have been a quick win so long ago for .NET web apps.
Blazor was released in 2018. 7 years later they still haven't fixed plenty of circuit reconnection issues. They are working on it but progress is also quite slow. Supposedly with .NET 10 session state will be able to be persist etc but it remains to be seen.
OpenAPI is also hit and miss. Spec v3.1 released in 2021 is still not supported. Supposedly it will come with .NET 10.
Not from .NET but they have a project called Kiota for generating clients from OpenAPI specs. It's unusable because of this huge issue that makes all properties in a type nullable. It's been open since 2023. [1]
Etc.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/kiota/issues/3911
Go has a six month release cycle. Rust releases a new stable every six weeks.
1 reply →
Given that Microsoft always decided to Will Not Fix issues because they went "oh this thing is throwing errors? Just ignore them". THey're numbskulls that are high on their own farts just as much as their managers. They deserve everything that's happening to them.
That is essentially what I tried to say in my comment there but don't think they wanted to hear it.
That is why they just fired 7k people so they don’t argue with LLM but let it do the work /s