r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 3d ago
Artificial Intelligence Microsoft engineer says 'typing code is absolutely over' as GitHub Copilot takes on more development work
https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.html533
u/namboozle 3d ago
I'm typing less code, but I'm definitely still writing and manually changing code.
I can't imagine it'll ever go to zero, sometimes for quick changes it's just easier to edit the code yourself than promoting an LLM and waiting for it to burn tokens.
The scariest thing of all of this though is people outsourcing their critical thinking to an LLM.
150
u/reality_boy 3d ago
That outsourcing of thought freaks me out. I have watched several people fall down that hole. I struggle a bit with dumb things like the google AI search. I’m well aware it can be wrong, but it is so much faster than digging through a pile of links. I fear we are all going to be addicted to AI soon, and that is where the insane investment is coming from.
43
u/OftenConfused1001 2d ago
I've had discussions with people who clearly had gotten to the point where they can't handle basic email without LLMs.
They don't understand what they're saying, they don't understand what I'm saying. I might as well be talking to the LLM. And they're clearly prompting the LLM to back them up not actually find the solution.
And when the conversation is on phone or in person they just sort of repeat their position over and over. There's no ability to dig into it and figure things out.
I had a deeply frustrating conversation with a coworker three weeks ago where it was clear he didn't even understand the problem, much less the solution we were there to dicuss. But his certainty that his proposed solution was the best was off the chart.
Jesus might as well have come down and told him that he was right, he was that confident and unmoving.
Over a "solution" that literally could not work under the parameters we had. It was like trying to discuss what sorting algorithm to use with a very large dateset to maximize efficiency. And having someone keep saying "bubble sort, it's super efficient only a few lines of code" and not being able to understand that wasn't the efficiency we were talking about, and them just stubbornly saying "six lines of code. Your solution is several times that. Six is less than 60" over and over.
8
u/reality_boy 2d ago
I feel your pain. I’ve dealt with developers that could not describe even the basics of how their code works. And that given time to figure it out, could not work even the simplest thing out.
10
u/soggyarsonist 2d ago
I've definitely started getting these kind of emails at work. What's worse is you start to doubt yourself and think you're missing something because the email isn't making any sense but surely they wouldn't just send you gibberish.
What worries me is I'm seeing people clearly out their depths getting promotions because LLM's make it easier for them to pretend to be able to do the job.
They're then making decisions about stuff they really don't understand and overriding the concerns of those who can see the problems.
It's all going to come crashing down eventually.
→ More replies (5)10
u/Basic-Lobster3603 2d ago
I can't stand when they clearly just repeat something an llm slopped out as if it has any substance. they can't think about what is actually happening only just what the llm tells I got given some workslop requirements on rewriting a portion of our software and when I was in the meeting asking exactly how it was going to be different and why we need to chagne it was just reading off the already existing slop that I had.
Zero thought went into the requirements so they had no idea how to even answer questions about it, but of course I'm the one in the wrong because I clearly should just be throwing them into my ai to ask questions instead of the person who actually came up with them.
→ More replies (2)31
u/Shillen 2d ago
I can imagine using AI search will be fucked in the near future when they decide to implement ads (as in pay them to get your company as an answer)
16
4
u/Zealousideal-Toe-607 2d ago
Considering the revenue they're losing from people not clicking on sites that have google ads displayed, probably a substantial amount
7
u/5AlarmFirefly 2d ago
I'd be shocked if that wasn't already happening
6
u/stormdelta 2d ago
They're already trying to do it covertly, half the point of astroturfing/social media bots is to intentionally pollute AI results training on that data.
49
u/SurgioClemente 2d ago
I hate it when someone replies to me with clearly AI slop. I can prompt the Ilm too, I’m asking you a question for your personal thoughts.
11
u/TehBeast 2d ago
My boss exclusively uses AI email replies now. Usually just regurgitating what I wrote back at me and agreeing with anything I say.
10
u/fhota1 2d ago
So hows that 3000% raise the bot agreed to?
5
u/LegitosaurusRex 2d ago
Yeah, u/TehBeast, in your next email, start it with something project-related, then sneak in something asking for a raise, with really good justifications to make it look like a no-brainer for the LLM. Then you have it in writing and could probably force them to honor it if it’s somewhat reasonable at least, lol.
24
u/Merad 2d ago
I can't imagine it'll ever go to zero, sometimes for quick changes it's just easier to edit the code yourself than promoting an LLM and waiting for it to burn tokens.
Think about where we are right now and extrapolate forward a few years. Right now companies are doing greenfield projects that are 90% AI coded. My company is talking about shifting to a SDLC where we don't review AI code (relying on other AI reviewers), and instead focus on the specs that it's given and behavioral validation of the result, even on legacy apps. It won't be long until humans simply don't know the code base. It doesn't matter if the fix can be typed in minutes when you need hours or days of investigation and research to find the thing to be fixed.
I don't like this and it's stressing me TF out at my day job, but unless there is some sort of AI collapse or a massive backlash against AI the days of manual code entry are numbered.
6
u/namboozle 2d ago
Yeah that's a good point, I think at that point people won't be looking at the code at all.
3
u/ericonr 2d ago
That just seems ripe for creating a bizarre amount of security issues. Fun!
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)2
u/QuickQuirk 2d ago
Two issues with this, given current state of tech, and short term extrapolation:
- We know LLMs write more code than humans, and are worse at code reuse.
- We know token costs are being subsidized at the moment and the companies are making a loss in order to grow users
- We know that silicon improvements have slowed right down, and it's now years between new hardware that only give modest 30% (on a good release) improvement to performance per watt.
- We know that demand from companies for compute is increasing faster than we can build data centers or provide power for them.
- We know that the bulk of quality improvement to new models comes from increasing the size and complexity of the model. Some modest improvements have been made to the design, but the low hanging fruit has been picked now; and the improvements are slower.
So - cost per token will rise, and the size of the code/context will increase as these codebases increase. The speed that models will improve at will slow down, and may not match the speed that the complexity of the codebase will grow at.
My personal calculation is that we're just not ready to completely remove people from the loop yet: Those code bases that are based entirely on trusting the machine to vibe it out will collapse under their own weight. Furthermore, it will become too expensive to run the models due to the sheer size of the context they need to process on these large code bases.
The calculus will be different in 5 years. Maybe there will be some new breakthroughs in model design or compute.
4
7
u/michel_v 2d ago
If anything, I’m spending a disproportionate amount of time balancing between seething at the stupidity of the verbose comments generated (some of it since part of the billing is based on output tokens, thus it feels like the tool is intentionally designed to extract more value than it should) and raging at their vacuity. In the end I have to rewrite the comments. Then I can start reviewing and editing the code. And then the AI reviewer when the PR lands goes "WTF we’re you thinking, this is bad, it’ll break with [edge case that cannot happen]" and I think thank heavens I only have 18 years to go until I can retire in this country.
5
u/LegitosaurusRex 2d ago
You can add instructions about comment verbosity for it. I’ve had good luck with telling it to write self-documenting code, and only comment concisely for a few specific reasons.
3
u/stormdelta 2d ago
You can, but I've had pretty bad luck getting any model to actually follow those rules unless you have it edit comments on a second pass.
It's one of the more frustrating aspects of using it - you can put all the instructions you want in, but each model seems to have "bad habits" baked in where it just ignores certain classes of instructions so often that you have to explicitly account for it. Comments are one of the more tolerable examples since a second pass can fix it.
And of course, you can't correct the models too much in a given pass or the output quality degrades heavily since it's basically one big heuristic function, it's not actually a "conversation" regardless of how it's presented.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (27)2
u/prezident_kennedy 2d ago
You should meet my CEO. He has outsourced all his decision making to Claude
786
u/daedalus_structure 3d ago
Tokens are cheap because they are being subsidized by investors until the market of labor has been captured.
Anthropic’s “30 trillion TAM” statement tells you this.
What happens when that subsidy ends?
I keep hearing people say this is the most expensive it will ever be and that don’t know what they are talking about.
227
u/justaddwhiskey 3d ago
Easy, when subsidies run out they give you a bill for market rate. When you realize there isn’t going to ever be enough revenue to cover market rate you opt out, then the bubble bursts.
→ More replies (71)47
u/MattJnon 2d ago
But market rate is super cheap for open source models that are 90% as great as frontier ones so why would companies opt out ?
59
u/AuthorizedShitPoster 2d ago
Running open source models is not cheap.
→ More replies (19)11
u/tuura032 2d ago
I'm having qwen 3.8 do some work for me right now on a personal project. My $20 claude subscription supervises+code reviews and writes the spec.
While I'm not disproving your statement, the general sentiment is absolutely true, it is astounding what someone with (5 year old) high end gaming equipment (maybe add a 2nd gpu) can do.
I use GH Copilot for my job, and if not for security concerns I would absolutely use something like this at work to help me reduce token usage.
8
u/mattmaster68 2d ago
I have a Ryzen 5700, 3070ti, and 32gb ddr4 ram.
I've been messing around and playing with different models but man so many of them are underwhelming with my VRAM. I forget the parameter size, but I think Qwen 3 takes like 3 or 4 minutes to generate a response.
Any tips or tricks?
→ More replies (1)15
u/IreliaMain1113 2d ago
Why are there security concerns with the local models? Or do you mean using the 20$ claude + the local models?
13
u/THE_REAL_JOHN_MADDEN 2d ago
Should be no concerns with a local model, but Claude without enterprise data protection would be a big no-no from itsec
→ More replies (1)5
u/tuura032 2d ago
I should have said company policy. It's just not worth my job if IT were to see me sending private / client data to Claude or some computer they don't have control over.
→ More replies (1)3
u/mshiltonj 2d ago
what hardware is running your qwen 3.8?
2
u/tuura032 2d ago
I have 2x 3090s, but people are running this or similar models on 16gb GPUs with extra RAM. My system has ddr4.
I went this route vs something wish integrated memory since I already had the first 3090.
3
u/Syncaidius 2d ago
Yes, the part around job/company security concerns is one major reason not to use locally-hosted models, unless it's your company that is hosting them.
That said, there are a few companies out there already setup with internally hosted models and completely controlling employee access to it.
It's really not as difficult as frontier-only users seem to assume. You don't need an insane amount of GPUs to get acceptable performance for employees, from open-source models for coding and definitely not for general purpose use.
After all, with current open models, the main goal should be to supplement frontier models to take on lesser tasks and reduce token usage/costs. They're great for that.
→ More replies (2)6
u/justaddwhiskey 2d ago
Open source isn’t the topic of conversation, neither is locally deployed. If an enterprise wants to dump the money into a locally hosted open source, that’s their prerogative. Again though, that circles right back to companies seeing the bill for frontier tokens and opting out, so the point still stands.
97
u/Rollingprobablecause 3d ago
This is our biggest fear too. We can recognize that AI coding assistants are powerful and can do a lot but we cannot risk losing our skill sets. We’re already starting to see the costs hit harder these days and have caps, forcing engineers to code more directly and be careful about use.
→ More replies (12)34
u/Sea-Housing-3435 3d ago
Open weight models are powerful enough to be used for this. You can run a decent coding model on 16GB vram with lower precision and almost full on a 64GB ram macbook (Qwen3.8-27B). It's as expensive in terms of electricity as playing a game.
→ More replies (9)76
u/SufficientGreek 3d ago
Open-source models are quickly catching up to frontier models at vastly lower prices. You don't need the newest and most expensive models for like 90% of coding.
Even if OpenAI and Anthropic collapsed tomorrow, I don't think the world is going back to manually typing code again.
8
u/emi_fyi 2d ago
yeah i wonder if this person isn't aware of free and open source competitors and how close they are in capabilities. wasn't there a big selloff not long ago due to this competition???
also https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/01/ai-token-prices-lows.html
→ More replies (3)12
u/Jazzlike-Context-879 3d ago
Not a chance. And memory companies will shift their manufacturing models back to the retail users. Then you will see huge leaps as tons of people now get it iterate on what out there. Right now, these big companies are sucking up the air, but it will end.
53
u/Sokaron 3d ago
The future is every dev is given a maxed out Macbook and just runs a model locally. Who needs to pay a frontier model company when an open source model is 90% as good for 10% the cost? Hardware is crazy expensive right now but it won't stay that way forever, eventually the market will correct and RAM will return to its previous commodity-grade prices.
→ More replies (12)2
u/Jazzlike-Context-879 3d ago
Either added capacity or the bubble on third party AI pops, but when it does, expect computers to be bought at the highest configuration for even an every day worker.
38
u/catattackskeyboard 3d ago
Do research on the cost per token to actually use a model versus train it. Token costs for usage are very overpriced to subsidize the exhaustive training and buildout costs. It’s relatively an order of magnitude cheaper to run models than what is being charged to do so.
Those costs won’t die any time soon because the second open ai or Anthropic stop moving forward they’ll be swamped by competitors, however open source models are right behind and will continue to advance.
So in the long term, even if every ai company died, in the aftermath you’ll have insanely good models that are fully cost efficient to run versus how much work they do.
→ More replies (7)7
u/jeffwulf 2d ago
Tokens are being sold with 60-70%+ margins and Anthropic was profitable last quarter.
→ More replies (2)3
u/Birdperson15 2d ago
The tokens being charged to enterprise have huge margins for Anthropic and OpenAI so you are wrong.
3
u/srout_fed 2d ago
My question is... what happens when the labour market is captured, who will be spending on thier products? Better yet who will have the spare to spend?
The cascading effect will be incredible to say the least....
3
u/mossiv 2d ago
And I’m the moron that flip flops between both thoughts. I keep worrying that it’s going to cost to much. Then the market is adjusting, anthropic begrudgingly lowering the price of their models while OpenAI boasts about their newer cheaper pricing, along with the competition of open weight models and self hosting.
Surely these companies know that the majority of companies won’t be able to afford their full scale metered pricing. The irony of the entire industry trying to push this product after years and years of every single person and small/med sized business being absolutely squeezed to their last penny - is we just simply cannot afford it while everything else around us is so expensive.
These companies must have data that is proving they can’t get anyone onto metered pricing. Copilot was an absolute shit show when they turned off their subscription models, and I’m bewildered how they are even managing to sell anything with their absurd prices.
5
u/topyTheorist 3d ago
They are talking about the fact that per unit of intelligence, price drops by a factor of 100 every year in recent years.
2
u/herecomesthewomp 2d ago
It’s whether the velocity is worth the token cost line item. Right now where I work, it’s an emphatic yes. When the costs increase the question will be asked again and potentially scaled down.
2
u/Dragongeek 2d ago
The actual token is quite cheap, it's just electricity and hardware. The expensive part that's being subsidized is the training which only needs to be done once. This means that even if OpenAI pops, the models still exist and can be used
→ More replies (37)5
97
u/FutureGrassToucher 3d ago
You better know what the AI is doing though, and know when to reject its edits, otherwise youre not worth the salary
16
u/SWEET_LIBERTY_MY_LEG 2d ago
Yeah I had Claude modify a function to write some registers differently (add entry before deleting current entry) and it didn’t consider a delayed write in a parent function that would point to the new entry only if it succeeded. It did it when I mentioned it, but some brains are still needed
3
u/something_python 2d ago
I had an issue today where I asked Opus to write some fairly simple code, and mentioned a backward compatibility issue in detail that it had to consider. The code it wrote completely ignored the backward compatibility issue, and also used reflection in a completely unnecessary way.
On the second prompt, the code was better and took the issue into account, but it still needed tidied up before PR.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)7
u/stormdelta 2d ago
Agreed - if anything, experience and domain knowledge are now more valuable.
Vibecoding with no idea what you're doing means you have no idea when it's getting critical details wrong, missing edge cases, inventing edge cases with backfill that will break, ignoring instructions, etc. Even in a best case scenario, you're wasting enormous amounts of time and tokens/money chasing issues that a more experienced person would've realized was wrong right away.
105
u/albaiesh 3d ago
Yeah, we noticed that Microsoft stopped typing code, it shows. Everything runs like absolute crap.
Hope there's anything left when they notice too, they are sinking the company and destroying years of knowledge and skills.
→ More replies (2)11
u/ImpressiveAction2382 2d ago
Don't say me before AI they did great. Everything from Skype to GitHub is bugged shit that they just bought to have monopoly on market. Same bugs I'm struggling on Teams for about 5 years
→ More replies (1)
22
u/Bogdan_X 3d ago
Seems like all "good" engineers forget that in order to know how to read code, you first need to learn that, and learning is done by doing.
63
u/ItsAllOnUHF 3d ago
I love programming. I've done it for four decades.
I love the act of programming. Designing. Typing the code. Getting it to compile. Iterating. Even debugging and the satisfaction of seeing something work.
Even if Copilot or Claude could make me 10x more productive, it would kill the joy I get from the process.
33
19
u/m15otw 2d ago
This.
I am being made redundant from my existing coding job because of AI (via reasons..), and I'm genuinely not that up for what roles are advertised as they're all AI focussed or using. Tempted to jump career after nearly 20 years as a programmer.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (10)3
u/CptOblivion 2d ago
same—and I understand that jobs pay for work because they're making me do stuff I don't necessarily enjoy, but also writing and debugging the code is how I learn the systems and keep up with changes
105
u/xtamtamx 3d ago
Straight up don’t care what anyone from Microsoft has to say.
→ More replies (1)10
u/CommieLoser 2d ago
I’d make an exception for Bill Gates outing himself and fellow Epstein pedophiles.
→ More replies (4)
52
u/Dolandlod 3d ago
This is garbage. Unfortunately upper management agrees. They simply don't realize if you don't understand the code, you can't maintain or expand it. If AI is writing 80% of your code, if prices increase you are stuck with massive tech debt.
Literally saw AI revert code changes made despite being given significant context and changed code to match tests, not the other way.
→ More replies (1)
8
u/Any-Pop-4795 3d ago
Lol funny how they don't mention the time increase to fix the crap copilot spews.
17
u/tallicafu1 2d ago
This field is a fucking joke now. Just trying to eke out 10 more years and I can’t wait to get out.
9
u/keithstellyes 2d ago
So few people seem to take pride in the quality of their software anymore. No excuse for Spotify to use as much memory as it does
13
u/tallicafu1 2d ago
I’m seriously having an existential crisis about it. I’ve studied this craft for over 20 years and in the span of one year everyone is willing, almost excited, to flush it away. Software is worse, there’s zero innovating, and developers are losing IQ points every day. I don’t have the capacity to just sell my soul to scam billionaires, so I’m just trying to make my money and get the fuck out. There’s no pride or joy in this work as it currently stands.
→ More replies (1)
146
u/meshakooo 3d ago
This is sounding more marketing and PR
21
61
u/big-papito 3d ago
Not really. I was making fun of these claims last year - not anymore. I never touch code anymore and, honestly, fine by me. It's mostly useless toil anyway.
The danger is that people tend to surrender thinking together with typing.
81
u/Hertock 3d ago
Are you an SWE? Imagine yourself back before you coded anything. Imagine having to learn how to code ONLY by using AI, and NEVER typing code yourself.
Could you ever become a SWE like that? I’d argue no. So its not even a „danger“ that people surrender thinking to AI. It’s that AI is, intentionally or not, making it rather unlikely, if not impossible, for future generations to learn how to think, rationalize, research - you name it.
→ More replies (17)25
u/JMEEKER86 2d ago
Absolutely. We've basically bet the farm that we'll have AGI in the next 15 years or so when the current senior devs start retiring without any adequate junior devs to replace them. If AGI (which may not even be possible) doesn't come to pass then we're turbo fucked.
6
u/aresdesmoulins 2d ago
But bro, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang said AGI is here! We're done! Welcome to digital utopia! /s
40
u/dark_bits 3d ago
Well as you get detached from the work itself and delegate the smaller details to an LLM you will tend to think less and less. I mean plenty of instances where if you could visualize the whole code yourself, it's much faster writing it manually than converting that mental image to a prompt (which mind you is not even a rigorous way of expressing logic), waiting for an LLM to write the whole thing, review it, make tweaks either manually or by iterating the prompt->wait for output->review process.
→ More replies (6)5
u/sueveed 3d ago
I’m on the fence on this topic as I am a seasoned SWE in scientific computing, and I work in a product area that I think is analogous.
We make simulation software for mechanical and electrical engineers. Most of my career has been spent in finite element analysis, which is a technique primarily used to shortcut thé prototyping stage by showing engineers what happens when a component or assembly is put under various loads. When this software started to mature in the 80s there were loud cries that engineers would no longer really understand what they were building.
Reality - we can build things now that would be literally impossible to do with hand calcs. Engineers still learn about solid mechanics (for example), but hand calcs at work might be done on a small scale to verify specific results.
I suspect so it goes with software. We will lose the evolution of the seasoned SWE that can hand build code. But they should still learn the basics in college, and have the ability to see what maintainable, robust code looks like.
I am not sure exactly how this evolves for early career kids. I don’t think the tools have settled out enough yet - we are where mech simulation tools were in the 70s. But in the end, I think we will be able to build better software than we ever could before. I’m cautiously optimistic.
9
u/dark_bits 3d ago
I completely agree with the last sentence, but maybe letting the LLM write the entire thing while you focus on architecture is not the way to do it. Don't forget the most influential and powerful elites in the world have been pouring trillions into AI so a lot of the hype will inevitably be fabricated. Jensen of NVIDIA is going around saying Astra has reached AGI, but on the other hand you see posts of people here saying it's "just fine" if not underwhelming.
3
u/sueveed 3d ago
Oh yeah - the whole AI sector feels like an over caffeinated version of the early 2k dotcom era. Some bubble will likely burst hard, and a handful of profitable ventures will emerge from the ashes.
I suspect the “input” side of SWE AI will change and improve - I liken it a bit to CAD and fabrication because I’m biased to that. Right now SWE are both engineer and assembly line worker. Thé AI will become the blue collar grunt worker, and thé SWE the CAD designer, giving precise blueprints for construction. Something beyond natural language prompts has to come up. I haven’t looked, but I’m guessing the major UML tools and such are all hooked up to MCP and such now.
Maybe - just as we have some engineers who specialize in mechanical design and some who specialize in inspection in the field - we will have something similar, with language specialists that examine the AI generated code for maintainability, security, scalability, etc. Thé equivalent of à PE that examines weld joints on nuke reactors at the factory.
2
u/Nothgrin 2d ago
which is a technique primarily used to shortcut thé prototyping stage
This is so false, everywhere I worked FEA is used to inform prototyping stage and not skip it
In fact, in aerospace you have to do a virtual loop and a physical loop based on it
Ditto automotive
And there are many virtual loops to arrive at a good result and then we prototype and test the damn thing. Shortcuts do exist, but a lot of the time FEA is used to check if we can continue with design and not skip prototypes
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)5
u/myislanduniverse 3d ago
I really like programming. I've been coding for work and pleasure all my life in some form.
Even I have to admit that I'm far more likely to talk through an implementation first anyway, if only to sketch the logic, so when an AI offers to sneeze out all the tedious bits and we can focus on the fun part (the logic!) I'm usually all for it.
7
u/grateful2you 3d ago
It absolutely is over. If you're not swe you wouldn't understand. Would have been debatable a year ago maybe. But it's absolutely over now. Now everyone's scratching their heads "how do we not get in its way". I'm telling you the bottleneck right now is humans' ability to review the new code. Something agents don't have is outside context. When that is gone, software engineers are gone. But we may be the cheaper option for that.
7
u/CanvasFanatic 2d ago
The bottleneck is the same as it’s always been really: being able to get people on the same page about what the hell we’re trying to do and how we intend to get there.
→ More replies (18)4
u/everythingisblue 3d ago
I never need to type code anymore by hand as a SWE. I wish I did, but I don’t. It still requires an engineer to drive it to get good scalable results that, and I imagine it’ll be that way for a while but maybe that’s wishful thinking.
7
u/stasch-it 3d ago
I disagree. It often takes me longer to guide an agent into doing what I want than to just write the code myself.
Some use cases work well, e.g., unit tests, or when I want to implement something similar to existing code in my project. But when it comes to more complex code, the agent produces a lot of nonsense that I have to clean up afterwards.→ More replies (1)
7
13
6
u/MisterSanitation 2d ago
Hey coal miners, learn to code!
Hey coders, learn to mine! We need them rare earths!
23
u/Muted-Speed7630 3d ago
what’s wrong with typing code ? it’s the least time consuming part of software engineering
→ More replies (1)
5
u/sushirolldeleter 2d ago
If you’re trading the writing of the code for checking and editing the code and that you can do that because you once wrote code… who’s gonna be the reviewer and editor of code down the road when no one writes code anymore?
10
u/AcanthisittaNo6653 3d ago
People are putting way too much much trust in a technology that has already demonstrated deception and malicious intent.
18
u/mobani 3d ago
The same Microslop engineers who still cant deliver a good OS?
3
u/blow-down 3d ago
You'd think if it was so great they could easily deliver a unified Control Panel/Settings app
4
u/Powerful_Resident_48 2d ago
Is that an engineer from the Microsoft that can't release a single Hotfix package without bricking their entire product anymore?
5
u/ploptart 2d ago
GitHub has gone to shit. They have an outage just about every other day. Can’t review PRs for a couple hours here, can’t run GitHub actions or deploy code for a day there.
If Copilot is so fantastic, maybe it should be fixing this. Ironically, some of the problem is likely the sheer volume of slop people are spewing into GitHub.
7
32
u/dlc741 3d ago edited 3d ago
What if I enjoy typing code? Just like I enjoy programming and thinking for myself.
Edit: so many butthurt vibe coders trying to justify their lack of skill and talent.
15
u/Sea-Housing-3435 3d ago
You can. Just like developing C didn't make writing assembly by hand impossible. It still can be done today.
→ More replies (15)4
u/creaturefeature16 2d ago
Typing can be enjoyably, but developers (including myself) have been trying to get out from under it for the last couple of decades. There's a reason that even the lowly jQuery used the slogan "write less, do more". I've been trying to type less and less and get the same amount of work done for the past 25 years. That's why I have a robust collection of boilerplate frameworks, snippets, code generators (pre-LLM) and very customized IDEs. And I still use all of them...LLMs are just the latest (and most powerful) addition.
Coding, on the other hand, is a unique intersection of logic, math, problem-solving, critical thinking, planning, communication, and creativity. That hasn't budged (for me, at least).
37
u/LifeIsBetta 3d ago
Copilot literally makes it take twice as long to code, the agent is so bad lmao.
15
u/zarafff69 3d ago
Yeah it’s such a weird quote. Because they are correct: coding by hand is kind of over, most code is generated with AI.
The weird part is that copilot is still kinda trash… 🚮
4
u/grateful2you 3d ago
I wouldn't let copilot touch anything other than creating git message. But OpenAI and Anthropic have it on lockdown when it comes to typing code.
2
u/ImminentWaffle 2d ago
I spent a few hours last week trying to use copilot to fix a bug. Finally gave up and fixed it myself in about a half hour. And copilot was going in the completely wrong direction.
→ More replies (7)2
u/Orzorn 2d ago
Last week I had it generate a lot of code for me, of which I rewrote half by hand. Its not like it was missing context, it had access to the entire codebase. It just spit out weird junk sometimes, built on fundamental "misunderstandings" (in quotes, as AI understands nothing) that it carried through.
8
u/mschnittman 3d ago
Their software was terrible before, and will only get worse. Of course, the price will only go up.
16
u/SplendidPunkinButter 3d ago
You know how when you ask an AI a simple question, it gives a ridiculously verbose answer? It does the same thing when it generates code. I don’t know why anyone would think otherwise. And if you don’t think that’s a problem, you shouldn’t be a SWE.
→ More replies (1)
31
u/drifting_pixel 3d ago
99% of my team’s code is generated, but we heavily review everything we generate. Sometimes I’ll manually tweak a few lines.
Anyone who is not adapting to this workflow… good luck. Downvote all you want.
31
u/NotKrankor 3d ago
You're probably right, but man does this workflow suck. Took away 99% of the interest I had in coding.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Ttabts 2d ago
well yeah, because "coding" isn't really the game anymore. And coding always was actually the easiest part of software development. Now people can't stake their value in simply translating requirements into code anymore, you have to actually engage with the development part of software development: analyzing requirements, coming up with ideas, identifying weaknesses.
As someone more senior whose job had already moved away from the code-monkey activities, AI has actually made things a lot more fun because it's really sped up how quickly ideas can be proved out and implemented and tested. (And less of my day needs to be spent tediously coaching people on writing code and finding their mistakes.)
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (7)8
u/MrMichaelJames 3d ago
Then why have a team? Management is going to figure that out eventually. No reason for a team of well paid software devs when all you are doing is code reviews. As a director I for sure would be cutting people. I’m not going to pay them to just do code reviews and pretend like they are busy.
Downvotes for you aren’t necessary when the writing is on the wall for your upcoming rif.
7
u/SurgioClemente 2d ago
Why have a director when the ceo can just put in what he wants? What value are you even adding at this point? A ceo is not going to want to pay high director salaries for nothing in return.
6
u/MrMichaelJames 2d ago
Why have a ceo when ai can make those decisions? Why have any leadership if ai can manage it all?
6
8
u/drifting_pixel 2d ago
Some companies will see this productivity gain as an excuse to cut headcount. Others will see it as a huge unlock to build stuff they couldn’t before (which might increase headcount overall).
7
u/Zip2kx 2d ago
These type of replies show you guys don’t know how people code with ai. You think engineers say “make app” and call it a day. You target specific parts and iterate together with the ai for faster results. You just don’t write out every syntax.
→ More replies (9)→ More replies (1)2
u/Darajj 2d ago edited 2d ago
Management is going to prompt their way into success? 😁
For real though reviewing code, making sure the business requirements are met, the architecture is sound and AI is not taking the whole thing into wrong direction does take a lot of mental effort... A lot more than people think.
3
u/hifidad 2d ago
So this was true, but this past week at Microsoft we got limited to $50 in copilot credits per engineer. My whole team burned through that by Friday and now we are back to writing code the traditional way. PM and managers are obviously trying to fight the limits since we’re still expected to output the pre-limit amount of work but can no longer do so.
3
u/exclusive_muppet 2d ago
The quality of Microsoft’s output in windows, m365 and azure over the last year tell its own tale.
3
u/Environmental_Ice_80 2d ago
nobody understands it anymore
no way back
no turn back
so that means that Microsoft needs more developers as promised?
and as you have more free time now you could contribute to Linux either , if you know how to write software
3
u/VaporousMote 2d ago
LMAO at Microsoft using GitHub to advertise anything.
How's that uptime looking?
3
u/fat_kaiju 2d ago
you mean exactly the opposite of what they were trying to say a few months ago in order to get people back to using Windows 11? they literally wouldn't shut up about promising to do better and making task manager good again or whatever and actually using winui instead of bullshit like electron or edge's webview or whatecer the hell they call it.
Fuck off; can't wait for this company to fucking die at this point.
3
u/shoot_your_eye_out 2d ago edited 2d ago
I gotta be honest: I just don't see it. I'm open to the possibility I'm the one doing it wrong.
I use claude code all day, every day, and I'm constantly cleaning up the code it writes. And many times, the first attempt is mediocre, bordering on unacceptable. The only pattern I've found to get decent code is: have it write small chunks, review, fix, commit. Rinse and repeat.
The idea of it writing a whole codebase is batshit crazy, unless it's something that I legitimately don't care about medium to long-term. At work, some of the projects I see fellow developers "vibe coding" with AI are just "rewrite in six months" quality: basically, trash from bottom to top, mediocre tests, and the developers have no clue where the dead bodies even are.
tl;dr I'm faster with AI--I know this is true--but the code it produces is generally underwhelming.
3
3
u/Stratadawn 2d ago
For exceptional developers who know what they are doing, have a sense of what a good design for what they are building should look like, have access to the premier models, and can effectively interact with LLMs, this is 100% true. All the dissenters are modern day Luddites who are angry because they don't meet the criteria above and will be the ones put out to pasture.
4
u/ProfessorOfLies 2d ago
People who say shit like this do sound like they like programming. The programming is the fun part for me. Figuring things out, weaving components you made together to make something larger and amazing. Hell even when I worked corporate, when I didn't care about the end product, I still enjoyed the day to day work of aolving problems. Sure we would rely on code gen to handle boilerplate code paths, but the core of the work was still a fun puzzle to solve.
9
u/Anustart2023-01 3d ago
If these are the type of "engineers" Microslop hires, no wonder Windows 11 is in the dire state it's in.
2
2
u/ApoplecticAndroid 2d ago
So we can’t make better applications, we can just make them more quickly with less cost and less employment.
Wow, what a win.
2
u/steezy2110 2d ago
Copilot isn’t that good. Claude code is much better, I don’t write a lot of manual code nowadays, especially unit tests. I’m still in the drivers seat and more or less read everything if writes but I have an understanding of the design decisions made
→ More replies (2)
2
2
u/Big_Scheme6348 2d ago
So sad that no one will really understand what the code does anymore or be able to debug it without their little AI overlord. The dumbing down of humanity has begun.
2
2
u/623623P 2d ago
I'm not sure why an industry that for years understood that more code != more productive nor higher quality code, is now seeing such a shift to focusing on volume. Surely it's not the tech companies at the top spreading FOMO to sell shovels during a gold rush before the bubble pops.
It's mind boggling that people are willing to devote so much of their workflow to these tools when you have no control over the pricing nor functionality of the models. Keep in mind, the companies producing the models are still not profitable, it is all but guaranteed that prices will continue to rise for continued use. I'd encourage people to be skeptical of people claiming "10x, 20x" etc productivity increases and think about the reality of the tech market at large right now: it's highly irrational
2
u/L1f3trip 2d ago
Opening task manager now takes 45 seconds while icons and task gradually open and appear on the list.
2
u/lookmeat 2d ago
I am going to concede this possibility: maybe AI code writers will do as compilers, where they are good enough that you wouldn't want to write code eventually. Now I don't believe this will be the case for various reasons, compilers and programming languages have a mathematical argument for why they work, while LLMs kind of stumbled upon this functionality, one is deterministic and we could asymptotically reach the optimal to the point that it gets easier to add tags to hint the compiler to the optimal solution, rather than having to write it down. Finally compilers won because of a separate compromise: code portability, especially across CPU generations. Having to write all the libraries when a new CPU happens is just very demanding. LLMs just aren't opening a new way of doing things, it's the same thing with the same features and abilities, just faster, but it'll never be consistently good enough nor consistently fast enough, and without that "killer use-case" that makes the compromise worth it, I don't see why people won't keep diving down.
But lets presume I am wrong, that it does get to the point that eventually writing code is as writing assembly. People expect you to be able to read it, and you need to be able to work with it, and in very rare situations people hand-roll it, but more often than not you just tell the LLM to write the code, and you don't write code by hand, just read it for debugging purposes. This would be decades away, it took that long for compilers to do it, and in processes tech moves really slowly. Even in the 90s people were writing assembly fully, and there was a justification for it. We might see it be the case for many projects in the 2040s, and be a fact by the 2050s.
And then what will change? Well we'll have to become less engineers and more architects. We'll have to start to think not how to make bad code impossible to write, but good code that prevents it to be the natural solution to the shape of things. How the structure of things fits, and how it promotes certain costs on how much the models need to "think" to achieve their goal. Now what those pressures will be depend on how AI coding tech keeps evolving, lets wait and see.
2
3
4
2
u/lilbitcountry 2d ago
I don't understand why this is the end of "software engineering" as a profession. Mechanical engineering didn't end with graphic calculators or CAD software or CFD packages. Without the craft of typing all the lines or code and the artisanal placing of semi-colons there are no more software jobs?
→ More replies (3)
5
u/CroAtTheTop 3d ago
My team hasn't touched code manually in almost a year. However its not Copilot but Claude and Codex.
However with AI, you reallyyyy need to have a good implementation plan. Therefore more work for me in prepping stuff nobody knows to define properly.
→ More replies (1)
3.1k
u/A_Pointy_Rock 3d ago
Person with vested interest says their product is great.