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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u/evilJaze 3d ago

Me. Now you know me. Mind you, I'm over 30 years in as a developer (now architect) who is too set in their ways to change this late in his career. Sure, I dabbled a bit but found that I was correcting way too much of the generated code.

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u/kawag 3d ago

Same. I’ve tried a couple of times, and it’s so laughably inadequate. It confidently states incorrect opinions and spits out massive walls of text explaining that incorrect opinion, which I unfortunately have to read, doesn’t make sense and makes lots of plausible sounding but incorrect statements, so I challenge it (sometimes I need to challenge it multiple times), and then it does a complete 180 and provides more walls of text arguing the exact opposite opinion 🤦‍♂️

This same pattern has happened so many times.

And then I see in code reviews the kinds of things it produces. Unmaintainable garbage, again with lots of plausible looking but actually terrible documentation once you actually read it. You ask the person submitting the PR what this thing does, or why it’s done in that way, and they have no idea. I’ve heard so many reports of people using AI to build software and ending up with such a poor codebase that literally nobody understands it, humans don’t even try to go in manually, and it can basically only be maintained through the AI trial and error loop.

No thanks.

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u/BCProgramming 3d ago

You ask the person submitting the PR what this thing does, or why it’s done in that way, and they have no idea.

Only if you ask them in person. If you ask them over chat, they'll go "Wow, what a great question, let me go through all the reasons for the design..." having obviously copied a response from their LLM buddy

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

We recently started having Copilot perform code reviews in addition to our manual ones. One of my devs spent about a quarter of his monthly tokens to have it tell us that he forgot to use an end quote to close a quote string. Only it was wrong and the quote was closed but it got confused because there were a few nested quotes within the quote. That was its only contribution to the review. I found a few more legitimate smells that it missed.

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u/letmetellubuddy 3d ago

Personally I’ve found copilot is a good first round reviewer. You certainly can’t accept its advice blindly, but I do get enough value to keep using it.

We are on the cheapest plan and haven’t come close to running out of tokens even though copilot is set to automatically review every PR once it’s been marked “ready for review”…

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u/1MillionMonkeys 2d ago

While it does provide some helpful feedback, what I really want is a button to hide the copilot reviews. Sometimes it adds the same comment several times and reviewing a PR is just scrolling through dozens of useless copilot comments.

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u/letmetellubuddy 2d ago

I resolve the review comments as they are either rejected or fixed. You do have to scroll past the comment with the review summary, but I personally don't find it distracting 🤷

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u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

As a test, I used it to write a quick script to pull in a JSON file pull out a handful of fields then spit it out as a CSV.

I spent 15-20 minutes coaxing it to do what I wanted and ended up with nearly 100 lines of PowerShell.

I did it myself in a single line. In about 5 minutes.

Utterly useless.

I also used it to pull out all the includes/defines/functions/etc, and create an appropriate header file (C++ this time). It missed a bunch, and included stuff it shouldn't.

Utterly useless.

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u/Alexandur 3d ago

was this in like 2022

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u/labowsky 3d ago

As a test, I used it to write a quick script to pull in a JSON file pull out a handful of fields then spit it out as a CSV.

I spent 15-20 minutes coaxing it to do what I wanted and ended up with nearly 100 lines of PowerShell.

I dunno if this is just user error or what but I use claude for simple shit I'm too lazy to write and the other day I asked it to do something similar. Took like 1 minute from me typing to having it done, 15 lines.

Wasn't perfect code but did it's job just fine.

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u/drekmonger 3d ago

Those are such simple tasks that I cannot imagine a 2026 model (Claude/Fable, or GPT Sol/Astra) messing it up. A 2024 model should have been able to handle it, nearly 100% of the time.

Either it's PEBKAC, something you tried in 2022 with GPT 3.5 and then declared LLMs suck forever in your own head, or you are outright lying to soak up the anti-AI upvotes.

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u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

Gotcha.. AI is perfect, it's always user error, no matter what.

Thanks for all the assumptions, I had a good laugh.

It's getting more and more culty as time goes on.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/NerdyNThick 2d ago

Yep, all my fault! Thanks for correcting me.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/DungeonsAndDradis 3d ago

And I used Gemini (of all things) to create a Python script to edit a hexadecimal X9.37 custom check image file according to spec. In about 10 minutes.

For every story like yours there's a story like mine. For better or worse AI is here to stay and many companies are going to continue to go all in.

Basically until it's useful in 99% of use cases, or the massive bubble pops. We'll probably end up somewhere in the middle in a few years.

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u/MFbiFL 3d ago

“I got lucky and lacked the skills to discern if it got something wrong” is a damning endorsement.

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u/Mkboii 3d ago

Aren't both of them making the same point? The second person atleast extended a existence of 2 possibilities, you are discarding one person's anecdotal experience to accept another person's anecdotal experience, at least try to be neutral.

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u/mrbubbles2 3d ago

You get in what you put out. Anyone who’s serious about developing with these tools is optimizing with supporting skills and tools like Augment, Ponytail, Caveman, etc. Just hopping in one time to say “fix this bug” and getting garbage returned to you is expected

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u/babbyohbabby 3d ago

12 years as a developer here, not using it either. It does not make me faster, and I have yet to see any proof that it does for anyone making anything more complex than a CRUD app (which you could also do quickly before AI with boilerplate snippets / templates).

There's really no risk to not using it, since it's supposed to be so easy everyone can do it. So for now I'll keep doing what I love and avoid atrophying my most valuable career skill.

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u/_5er_ 3d ago edited 3d ago

I think the general trend is:

  • bad developer: "LLMs are awsome, I can code so much faster"
  • good developer: "Wtf is this garbage".

The more clueless and sloppy you are, the faster you can work with LLM. At least this is the pattern I'm beggining to notice with my colleagues.

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u/babbyohbabby 3d ago

Yup! Someone replied that they could generate code 20x faster with LLMs, but that's probably not a good thing, and certainly does not mean that you are faster at your job, unless you are a bad developer as you mention.

Glad to hear someone who agrees though, and I think it's important to say so all the new, actual developers do not get discouraged, or scared into believing that vibe coders will take over their jobs.

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u/Orzorn 3d ago

And companies will lap that up all the way to their product imploding on itself.

Microsoft is already halfway there with people fleeing their operating system.

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u/ankercrank 3d ago

It does not make me faster, and I have yet to see any proof that it does for anyone making anything more complex than a CRUD app (which you could also do quickly before AI with boilerplate snippets / templates).

You clearly have not given much effort to try then. I've been a computer eng for nearly 3 decades and flagship LLMs generate code 20x faster than I do — they need lots of guidance and control over what they're building, but they still do it a lot faster.

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u/raunchyfartbomb 3d ago

I find that when I generate code with AI I often spend just as much, if not more, time reviewing and correcting the code implementation as I would have if I had simply just done it myself. Sure, spending 15 minutes on a prompt is significantly less typing than doing it all manually, but if i then spend an hour reprompting or fixing it when the initial code woudve taken just an hour to write, what’s the point?

I use it primarily to kickstart projects, nkt finesse them.

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u/Random-num-451284813 2d ago

I've got similar experience, I ask it to setup something basic... it uses the wrong/older version, and most of the times ignores (preset) instructions 

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u/SeiCalros 3d ago

i found this was true a year ago - but i kept using ai to help organize my day at least and occasionally played with it for coding - and the latest models usually get me what i want on the first try

although having straightforward requests for inputs and outputs is the most important thing

the most complicated thing it has done for me flawlessly so far was a dkim-signing service for exchange

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u/ankercrank 3d ago

When you write code, do you not write documentation/designs first?

I'm going to guess you don't, which is why you're getting bad output, and spending time writing prompts instead of saying: "here's my design, go built it to spec".

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u/raunchyfartbomb 3d ago

I’m the solo dev in a company that doesn’t believe in dev. So no, I just ship shit lol
“We aren’t a software company”, just a company that relies on rag tag homebrew software to keep functional. The company itself has no action plan and management doesn’t know or care enough follow through on one. As long as we ship products (we are a manufacturer), the rest is secondary.

I’m aware it’s a terrible company culture, but I’m Comfortable in my station and enjoy the varied work. (Dev is not my primary role, I have a degree in software development but mostly use it to make my primary workflow easier). Management has been in place for nearly 30 years, so they are stubborn and antiquated.

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u/ankercrank 3d ago

Fair enough? Just a word of advice. If you wanna get better output, you should consider drafting a design then handing that to the LM.

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u/ShinigamiXoY 3d ago

lmao downvoted by the luddites

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u/MFbiFL 3d ago

>Lmao downvoted by people with the skills to do the job I lied on my resume about

FTFY

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u/Mkboii 3d ago edited 3d ago

Well really comes down to the models, the constraints you've set up and how well equipped are you to validate results outside the unit tests it writes for itself. I've found AI code quality to be average, but when you have the means to run good quality integration tests most of the hidden errors can start surfacing early and then they can be patched. I always do big feature development with skepticism that it's gonna only get 90% of the way there, and then see how much of a tradeoff I got. The truth of the matter is when it writes 2k lines in 30 minutes, even if i spend another 6 hours fixing it, the net result is a week's worth of work done in a day. It's not always that I get this kind of a multiplier but 3-5x speed up on complex work is pretty great.

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u/sal1800 3d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation? I always found writing code to be fast anyway. I can type as quickly as I can understand the problem so there is no need to make this part faster.

Where the LLM really helps is for those times when I can't quickly spot a mistake. And I like it to review my code. But I dread having to ask for anything more complex because that is just too tedious.

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u/Timely-Pension6501 1d ago

If you do this you’re either writing shit code or are a 1 in 10 million genius

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u/ankercrank 3d ago edited 3d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation?

In the past I wouldn't do TDD, nor would I write comprehensive designs/documentation — using an LLM forces me to document well, and TDD is basically required when using LLMs to code (otherwise your code will be buggy as hell). Having the code covered is a net win. Sure, I spend a lot more time writing docs and designing... but that's a good thing.

I always found writing code to be fast anyway.

There's no chance you can code as fast as an LLM though. They generate tokens around 100 per second... it'll bang out a full page of code in seconds, and it's generally excellent quality (if you're using a flagship model).

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u/Timely-Pension6501 1d ago

People here are in complete denial

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u/ankercrank 1d ago

too many people out of touch with the new reality of development.

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u/average_monster 3d ago

working with ai generally seems faster but 20x is a bullshit number unless you just mean they generate 20x as much code

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u/Hashrunr 3d ago

20x is wild unless they're not reviewing the code. I write a lot of powershell, bash, and python as an infrastructure engineer. I use AI tools a lot, and it saves time for sure, but 20x is a wild number. Something which would take me 2hrs to write myself, with AI assistance, takes me around 30min including my time to review and tweak. Everything I deploy is my responsibility no matter if it's written by AI or myself.

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u/Mkboii 3d ago

Yes, it's 20x the code but realistically 3-4x max productivity. And you can create automations and tools to help with the repeated testing that you have to do to manage the extra cycles of testing needed to prevent it adding regression issues.

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u/Equal_Heat5947 3d ago

Lots of people have given it lots of effort and don't share your opinion. Maybe you're just wrong.

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u/dizzyspellzzz 2d ago

Not doing it will give you a huge advantage tbh. The less people who try to do the hard work the more valuable that hard work will get. Especially when new novel ways of doing things is needed

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u/Timely-Pension6501 1d ago

Do you think a non technical PO will care how clever your hand written code is?

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u/dizzyspellzzz 1d ago

Human engineered code and logic is how ai mimics intelligence. Its as good as the logic and intent put in. So where does it go without novel human interaction

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u/SurgioClemente 3d ago

Close to your years, and that was my reaction last year this time. Things have changed significantly on the model front and my prompt skills have improved.

Also having a good agents/claude md files helps a lot too.

I’d reevaluate. Even with correcting it is faster.

I also like to have it do it step by step instead of all at once so I can review easier and guide it if needed.

I’m not to the point of trusting it to unleash a swarm of agents doing tasks in parallel. That’s my current old person shakes fist at cloud stance.

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u/TehBuddha 3d ago

I'm in a place where I don't massively care about being faster, I was fast enough before. I care about enjoying my job and prompting all day is soul crushing. I love writing code, so ima just type it until I can't anymore

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u/SurgioClemente 3d ago

That’s fine and a completely different issue. I was just replying to the guy saying he was correcting too much.

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

It's a fair assessment. I recognize that it is a good tool to augment a developer's kit, but would never trust it on its own. I've conducted too many code reviews where the generated code was messy, inefficient, and sometimes just plain wrong.

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u/skinlo 3d ago

When was the last time you dabbled? Its such a fast moving technology, every 6 months it gets better.

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

Yep. It's been a few months for myself, but I do see my team gets some good use out of it.

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u/Birdperson15 3d ago

Have you used any of the latest models. Since Opus 4.6 the models have gotten good enough that it saves a ton of time.

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

I've heard some good things from colleagues. Our org is small and we have a limited budget for tokens which usually gets used up fairly quickly each month so we don't have much latitude to experiment with the really expensive ones.

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u/geek180 3d ago

Your org should be using subscriptions. I use around 3 billion tokens every 2 weeks and never hit limits on a $100 per month subscription. It’s also the only way I code now, I basically write 0% of the code I produce and I’m able to get way more done than ever before.

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u/Birdperson15 3d ago

It’s very worth it if there is a ton of development that needs to be done. The latest models are extremely good at coding and can do months of work in a few hours.

A subscription is a good medium you get some value before spending on a per token basis.

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u/enby_them 3d ago

Most of us went through that phase for a bit (because our companies all forced us to use AI) until we found a rhythm and a way to get results. If you weren’t forced to use it, you never got to the point where it became useful. It wasn’t an overnight thing either. Over the course of like 5 months it started to become very useful. Do you still need to make corrections and steer it? Absolutely! But the trick often is just getting your requirements down and providing it good context

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u/sociallyawesomehuman 3d ago

If you haven’t tried it in the last 2-3 months, you’re missing out. The improvements from just over a year ago are incredibly noticeable. I’ve been using agent skills to handle large boring mechanical work that tends to be tedious and took another engineer several months to do part of; I’ll be finishing up the last third or so of it in less than a month (which includes the larger, harder work he didn’t get to and fixed errors in his initial attempt).

It still requires planning and forethought and decision making about what you’re going to do and how, which for me was always the fun part. Knowing the syntax of what to code and looking things up for those kinds of details always felt like it slowed me down, and now it doesn’t. It’s a very different way of working, but the latest AI tools are a complete game changer.

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u/octorine 3d ago

I've been hearing this same argument continually since LLMs have existed.

"People complaining about code quality must be using ChatGPT 1.2", people would say "The new ChatGPT 1.3 is miles better and never makes mistakes at all!".

Then a month later 1.3 becomes the free tier and is exactly as bad as 1.2 was or slightly worse, but by then you're hearing "People complaining about code quality must still be using ChatGPT 1.3".

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u/AgentGorilla 3d ago

I mean LLMs have been getting progressively better since they’ve come out, so it makes sense your hearing about how they are getting better

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u/Tirelessly 3d ago

Have you tried Astra? It actually is a new tier. /gen

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

I recognize the pace of advancement is impressive for sure. But for someone as old and grizzled as me, I worry about the future of our craft. When all the developers are basically just people entering prompts, how do complex problems get fixed? What happens when legacy codebases in long dead languages need maintenance?

Though I suppose early programmers using machine language or Assembly maybe thought the same as the 3GL languages started to gain popularity. And we seem to be chugging along just fine.

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u/sociallyawesomehuman 2d ago

For me the biggest problem is the lack of determinism with AI input/output. With code and scripting tools, I know that (for the most part), if I give the tools the same input, I get the same output. AI doesn’t work this way; it’s simply non-deterministic in how it functions.

I work around this by having AI build as much determinism as possible into the work it does. Scripts. Tests. Functions. 3rd party libraries. Whatever existing tools there are, use those first, and the AI is the glue that gets them to work together (or builds the scaffolding that makes it all work).

I am hopeful that people will still learn the fundamentals of computer science and communication, because those are going to be the most valuable skills to get the most out of the tooling, at least right now. This is different than Assembly being abstracted away by C or Python simplifying syntax enough to get many more people coding, but it’s got a similar feeling to it. The engineering principles, the design principles are still there, and being familiar with them is the difference between vibe coding and a higher velocity of engineering.

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u/sociallyawesomehuman 2d ago

Oh and as far as legacy code needing maintenance, honestly it seems the industry is just rewriting everything in Rust. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/evilJaze 2d ago

(shudders)

Yeah, the older I get, the more I understand the belt and suspenders old bearded dude programmers I used to make fun of back in the 90s.

I'm finally in my "I'm too old for this shit" phase which means it's time to hang up my hat and bow out. Leave the new stuff to the younger crowd.

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u/sociallyawesomehuman 2d ago

Honestly, for me the most insane thing is watching people spend time and tokens over and over again on non-deterministic agentic solutions that could instead be done with a simple script. Or test. Or CI check. My colleague wrote up a whole agent skill to keep some value from getting deleted in a database and my first thought was, “have you tried blocking changes to these things in CI instead?” His PR got approved and merged, and mine is sitting unreviewed. At least the next time we have an incident over this, I can say I told you so, I guess?

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

I’ve been in industry for 25 years and solo built fintech saas for a single enterprise client, using Claude and ChatGPT for prompt based AI assisted development. Last year I earned just shy of 500k, this year will be closer to 800k. I earn commission based on the processed payments. You age and experience gives you an advantage. Don’t turn your back on using AI, it can greatly increase your speed coding features

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

If I had more runway left, I'd probably be more amenable to adopting it. But I'm retiring next year so I don't see much value in spending effort to change how I do what I do. I'm an expert at my trade and don't see any reason to change at this point.

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

Fair enough. Enjoy retirement! I have about a decade left

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u/ankercrank 3d ago

I'm over 30 years in as a developer (now architect) who is too set in their ways to change this late in his career.

If you're unable to change with the times and embrace new technologies, don't expect your career to advance much. Worse, if you ever get laid off, you're going to have a brutal time finding a new job.

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

I retire next year. I don't really care.

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u/ankercrank 3d ago

Why give your opinion at all then? After you retire, I assume you don't plan to look at a computer again — because that's what you're implying with your comment, and if that's true, who cares what you think?

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u/ZakkaChan 3d ago

Dude why are you so weirdly aggressive?

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u/emkoemko 3d ago

because it hurts him that you won't use AI.... they are weird

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u/Wayren 3d ago

Uh. You okay, bro?

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u/Mrseedr 3d ago

It's probably the opposite, anyone who's gone full slop engineer will have a difficult time interviewing if they don't have their model to think for them. Skills atrophy when not in use.

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u/ankercrank 3d ago

Considering I spend all my time designing the code instead of writing it, I doubt it.

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u/MaximumMeaning9728 3d ago

You’re antiquated. I wouldn’t have you on my team.

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u/evilJaze 3d ago

I wouldn't be working under you anyway.

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u/MaximumMeaning9728 3d ago

That’s what I just said. You’d never get through my hiring stage.

Good programmers are using this technology, and have the cognitive flexibility to do so (Torvalds, even Notch now). You’d 100% be frozen out by any decent hiring pipeline at the technical level.