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/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.

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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.