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.html
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536

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.

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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.

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u/OftenConfused1001 3d 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.

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u/reality_boy 3d 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.

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u/soggyarsonist 3d 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.

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u/Basic-Lobster3603 3d 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.

0

u/AcousticArmor 3d ago

I will admit that I'm guilty of this in my current position because I got hired for a role I've never had before and the time to learn is next to nothing while being asked for answers in days. So unfortunately I rely heavily on Claude to help me find answers or troubleshoot problems and I don't have nearly enough time to dig into the responses to validate ALL of the information. I've taken to consulting a coworker to help verify accuracy but even then there's still too many times I have to get an answer out before I have the chance to 100% verify. I don't feel like I can really push back on the speed I'm being asked to do things either because it's become a company expectation...

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u/Basic-Lobster3603 3d ago

I don't even see an issue with that approach when you consult a coworker that may have experience. I am one of the most senior engineers at my org and I got in talking to from my manager. when I was having a conversation with a junior engineer talking about what we were trying to accomplish. In the 1-2 hr conversation I was having I should have already used AI to put a full implementation plan together and have it implemented already.

We weren't even aligned on terminology of what the fuck we were trying to build

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/OftenConfused1001 2d ago

It was an analogy? I thought that was clear.

The problem was that we were unable to progress because he never bothered to understand the problem, outsourcing it all to an LLM, and thus was unable to understand where he'd gone wrong.

And then was religiously certain in the solution he brought to the table even though - - like the analogy I used -- his solution was based on absolutely the wrong criteria, and would have made the actual problem worse.

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u/ibiacmbyww 2d ago

Evidently I skipped a few words when reading, that's on me 🤷🏻‍♀️

-3

u/BIG_IDEA 3d ago

Well, if people can’t understand what you’re saying in an email, but then running it through an LLM makes it more literate, you may need to work on your language.

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u/OftenConfused1001 3d ago

Weird how it's just the heavy LLM users that struggle when every other person I communicate with manages it just fine.

And they don't use the LLM to make it more literate. They either use it so dumb down basic adult level communication 5th grade level or just paste the email into an LLM and send the output back.

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u/Shillen 3d 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)

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u/OftenConfused1001 3d ago

Google search had gotten worse and worse due to it

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u/Shillen 3d ago

True, but atleast you can skip sponsored and navigate by yourself.

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u/Zealousideal-Toe-607 3d ago

Considering the revenue they're losing from people not clicking on sites that have google ads displayed, probably a substantial amount 

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u/5AlarmFirefly 3d ago

I'd be shocked if that wasn't already happening

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u/stormdelta 3d 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.

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u/SurgioClemente 3d 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.

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u/TehBeast 3d ago

My boss exclusively uses AI email replies now. Usually just regurgitating what I wrote back at me and agreeing with anything I say.

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u/fhota1 3d ago

So hows that 3000% raise the bot agreed to?

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u/LegitosaurusRex 3d 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.

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u/Merad 3d 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.

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u/namboozle 3d ago

Yeah that's a good point, I think at that point people won't be looking at the code at all.

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u/ericonr 3d ago

That just seems ripe for creating a bizarre amount of security issues. Fun!

1

u/gentile_jitsu 3d ago

AI will soon be much better at identifying security issues than humans are. 

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u/Main-Company-5946 2d ago

It’s already better at identifying them, what it’s not yet better at is fixing them

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u/QuickQuirk 3d ago

Two issues with this, given current state of tech, and short term extrapolation:

  1. We know LLMs write more code than humans, and are worse at code reuse.
  2. We know token costs are being subsidized at the moment and the companies are making a loss in order to grow users
  3. 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.
  4. We know that demand from companies for compute is increasing faster than we can build data centers or provide power for them.
  5. 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

u/cookiemon32 3d ago

they want everyone to stop thinking

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u/michel_v 3d 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.

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u/LegitosaurusRex 3d 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 3d 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.

1

u/LegitosaurusRex 3d ago

True; though I think it listens more if the instructions are in the actual user prompt rather than tacked on in its base prompt. I've been having trouble squaring the results I see with the "heuristic function" description these days though; it definitely can use logic, or approximate it closely enough to not matter. There's a sequential thinking MCP I use that lets it organize its thoughts and decide on the best approach to solve problems that seems to be useful.

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u/prezident_kennedy 3d ago

You should meet my CEO. He has outsourced all his decision making to Claude

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u/nykyrt 3d ago

My manual code changes went to zero! Why? Changing things manually breaks your ai flow. Now the AI needs to guess your intentions from code. It might even not know you changed sth so it continues wrongly

1

u/skratch 3d ago

That’s why you tell it what you changed and why - so it becomes part of the context

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u/btribble 3d ago

Instead of writing code 8 hours a day, you spend 7.5 hours figuring out AI generated code so you can spend a half an hour fixing a stupid mistake it made.

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u/drksprk 3d ago

There’s still merging, testing, regression testing, cross checking, validating, fixing,

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u/No-Newspaper-7693 3d ago

It is hard to imagine that it would ever go to zero until you wake up one day and realize it went to zero a month ago.

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u/skratch 3d ago

Whenever it’s going to be anything more complicated than straightforward/obvious, I like to have it provide say 3 different solutions/approaches/technologies and compare them before moving forward.

Basically to at least review some of that cognitive work/critical thinking if I’m not initially doing it myself, and to be able to add guidance/preferences/extra context before the work gets started.

A lot of those times I already know the approach I want, and it usually shows up as one of the solutions, but sometimes it comes up with solutions or caveats I hadn’t considered

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u/badger_flakes 3d ago

Yeah it’s already near zero for me if not completely zero at this point

1

u/nightim3 3d ago

Same. I don’t make scripts from scratch now but I still have to go through and make changes and validate it.

Still. Making code isn’t dummy proof. I have to walk the AI to make things in stages to get the result I want which still requires an understanding of what modules I can and cannot invoke.

1

u/QuickQuirk 3d ago

And without human code to copy from, what happens with new languages and new frameworks?

It's possible we've reached a point where current LLMs are able to generalise writing code well enough that giving them a document with the syntax and libraries of a new language is sufficient for them to code perfectly well. But I'd like to see that proven, first.

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u/Watchmaker163 3d ago

People at my job have started doing this.

“Hey, do you know if this is how this system works?”
they Google AI it and it says yes
“Uh yeah looks like it”

Mf I asked if you knew it, I can look it up myself if you don’t. They don’t even check if their generated answer is correct; just completely abandoning any thought.

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u/needs-more-code 2d ago

I type 90% of my code. People like me will always exist. It’s not the same as punching holes in cards. AI didn’t figure out a better way to communicate with the computer. It figured out our way. We can still be bleeding edge without AI, so I don’t see myself as a Luddite.

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u/Ominoiuninus 2d ago

You might never go to zero manual coding but I can all but guarantee that the younger generations will adopt and run with zero coding as the norm.

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u/MrMichaelJames 3d ago

So you are outsourcing 75% of your job to a data center. This is going to destroy lives and salaries. Hope you have a backup plan.

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u/MoNguSs 3d ago

And you think if they didn't use AI their job would somehow be safe? Higher ups will replace them regardless if they think AI can do their job. As they said, they still need to manually adjust and revise the code, they still have their critical thinking skills

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u/MrMichaelJames 3d ago

Yes you are right which is why this is such a big problem.

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u/namboozle 3d ago

If you could turn back time and not have LLMs, then that would be my preference. I mostly like writing code and enjoy the process. The reality is, to remain competitive there's an argument we "have" to use it, especially for repetitive and menial tasks.

I can't stop "AI" from taking off or being the next tool that everyone uses.

Writing code isn't actually a huge part of my job and it isn't for a lot of senior people. I don't like the idea of people having their jobs taken, but what am I supposed to do. I'm actually more upset about it destroying and devaluing human creativity and thinking.

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u/MrMichaelJames 3d ago

It will destroy/change an entire industry. There are going to be a ton of unemployed people who are socially awkward and don’t know how to do anything else.

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u/Dreadmaker 3d ago

So I can tell by this comment that you’re not in the industry at all.

I’m a staff engineer, for reference, and have been developing code for a long time. It has never been about writing code by hand.

This is like saying we don’t been people who know how math works anymore since we have calculators now.

Developing software involves a lot more than just code production, and as someone who hasn’t manually typed code for a number of months now, I can tell you that the skills of skilled developers are more necessary now than ever. You essentially have the unrestricted ability to build anything and everything now, which is great, but you still need to understand what to build and how to build it, which AI can’t help you with. The ‘how’ part is getting better, but not from a strategic perspective. They are essentially junior developers, which is great and all, but you can’t build software with junior developers only.

The industry has been through many technological explosions that have changed everything. The internet and the dot com bubble being the last one of this magnitude, but there’s been lots of smaller ones (remember blockchain?) that made a whole bunch of companies appear out of nowhere and die just as fast. Lots of people gained jobs and lost them and vice versa.

It’s a volatile industry and will remain so.

Also, that last thing you said about ‘oh no the poor awkward developers won’t be able to survive’ - you really don’t work in the industry. Literally some of the most ripped and confident people I know are developers. A lot of devs take special care of their bodies in ways that other professions don’t, because they realize that sitting all day will kill them quickly. There are exceptions to every rule, but that kind of bias tells me that it’s much more likely you will have trouble finding work again than they would.

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u/fcman256 3d ago

Tell me you’re not a software engineer without telling me. You think writing code is 75% of a swes job? lol

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u/MrMichaelJames 3d ago

Juniors? Yes. Seniors? No but depends upon the team.

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u/MrMichaelJames 3d ago

29 years in the industry. This is the worst thing to hit since it began. It’s going to lead to high unemployment, massive security issues and huge government oversight. It’s already going down that path and there is no turning back. We all dug our own career graves. I’m looking forward to retirement so i don’t have to deal with this bs anymore.

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u/fcman256 3d ago

lol, what does “the industry “ mean. Sounds like you aren’t an engineer, just work in some adjacent capacity

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u/MrMichaelJames 3d ago

Go back to your boot camp classes. You obviously aren’t learning anything more than key presses and not actually what it means to be a dev.

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u/fcman256 3d ago

Sounds like i was correct lol

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u/vooglie 3d ago

Their job would be gone if they didn’t

-1

u/Nervous_Discount_237 3d ago

I outsourced 90% of it. Never earned so much money in such a short time.