Comment by the-lazy-guy
19 days ago
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.
They don’t have any problem firing experienced devs for no reason. Including on the .NET team (most of the .NET Android dev team was laid off recently).
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/microsofts_axe_softwa...
Perhaps they were fired for failing to show enthusiasm for AI?
I can definitely believe that companies will start (or have already started) using "Enthusiasm about AI" as justification for a hire/promote/reprimand/fire decision. Adherence to the Church Of AI has become this weird purity test throughout the software industry!
I love the fact that they seem to be asking it to do simple things because ”AI can do the simple boring things for us so we can focus on the important problems” and then it floods them with so many meaningless mumbo jumbo that they could have probably done the simple thing in a fraction of the time they take to keep correcting it continuously.
It is called experimentation. That is how people evaluate new technology. By trying to do small things with it first. And if it doesn't work well - retrying later, once bigger issues are fixed.
In production?
Didn't M$ just fire like 7000 people, many of which were involved in big important M$ projects? The CPython guys, for example.
Now, consider the game theory of saying "no" when your boss tells you to go play with the LLM in public.
Hot take: CPython is not an important project for Microsoft, and it is not lead by them. The faster CPython project had questionable acheivement on top of that.
Half of Microsoft (especially server-side) still runs on dotnet. And there are no real contributors outside of microsoft. So it is a vital project.
They also laid off one of the veteran TypeScript developers. TypeScript is definitely an important project for Microsoft, and a lot of code there is written in it.
Anyone not showing open AI enthusiasm at that level will absolutely be fired. Anyone speaking for MS will have to be openly enthusiastic or silent on the topic by now.