> This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue?
This is also my experience when you haven't setup a proper system prompt to address this for everything an LLM does. Funniest PRs are the ones that "resolves" test failures by removing/commenting out the test cases, or change the assertions. Googles and Microsofts models seems more likely to do this than OpenAIs and Anthropics models, I wonder if there is some difference in their internal processes that are leaking through here?
The same PR as the quote above continues with 3 more messages before the human seemingly gives up:
> please take a look
> Your new tests aren't being run because the new file wasn't added to the csproj
> Your added tests are failing.
I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing.
Another PR: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732/files
How are people reviewing that? 90% of the page height is taken up by "Check failure", can hardly see the code/diff at all. And as a cherry on top, the unit test has a comment that say "Test expressions mentioned in the issue". This whole thing would be fucking hilarious if I didn't feel so bad for the humans who are on the other side of this.
I agree that not auto-collapsing repeated annotations is an annoying bug in the github interface.
But just pointing out that annotations can be hidden in the ... menu to the right (which I just learned).
Typically, you wouldn't bother manually reviewing something until the automated checks have passed.
Maybe, but likely it is reality and their true company culture leaking through. Eventually some higher eq execs might come to the very late realization that they cant actually lead or build a worthwhile and productive company culture and all that remains is an insane reflection of that.
I'd rather hop in and get them on the right path rather than letting them struggle alone, particularly if they're struggling.
If it's another senior developer though I'd happily leave them to it to get the unit tests all passing before I take a proper look at their work.
But as a general principle, please at least get a PR through formatting checks before assigning it to a person.
Why do they even need it? Success is code getting merged 1st shot, failure gets worse the more requests for changes the agent gets. Asking for manual feedback seems like a waste of time. Measure cycle time and rate of approvals and change failure rate like you would for any developer.
Let them finish a pull request before spending time reviewing it. That said, a merge request needs to have an issue written before it's picked up, so that the author does not spend time on a solution before the problem is understood. That's idealism though.
That comparison is awful. I work with quite a few Junior developers and they can be competent. Certainly don't make the silly mistakes that LLMs do, don't need nearly as much handholding, and tend to learn pretty quickly so I don't have to keep repeating myself.
LLMs are decent code assistants when used with care, and can do a lot of heavy lifting, they certainly speed me up when I have a clear picture of what I want to do, and they are good to bounce off ideas when I am planning for something. That said, I really don't see how it could meaningfully replace an intern however, much less an actual developer.
It's not like a regular junior developer, it's much worse.
At what point does the human developers just give up and close the PRs as "AI garbage". Keep the ones that works, then just junk the rest. I feel that at some point entertaining the machine becomes unbearable and people just stops doing it or rage close the PRs.
But the actual software part? I'm not sure anymore
Nice to see that Microsoft has automated that, failure will be cheaper now.
I feel the same way today, but I got started around 2012 professionally. I wonder how much of this is just our fading optimism after seeing how shit really works behind the scenes, and how much the industry itself is responsible for it. I know we're not the only two people feeling this way either, but it seems all of us have different timescales from when it turned from "enjoyable" to "get me out of here".
And even if it could, how do you get senior devs without junior devs? ^^
Microsoft's stock price is dependent on them proving that this is a success.
And then, while the tech is not mature, running on delusion and sunken costs, it's actually used for production stuffs. Butlerian Jihad when
An outsourced contractor was tasked with a very simple job as their first task - update a single dependency, which required just a bump of the version and no code changes - after three days of them seemingly struggling to even understand what they were asked to do, inability to clone the repo, failure to install the necessary tooling on their machine, they ended up getting fired from the project. Complete waste of money, and the time of those of us having to delegate and review this work.
Those have long been the folks I’ve seen at the biggest risk of being replaced by AI. Tasks that didn’t rely on human interaction or much training, just brute force which can be done from anywhere.
And for them, that $3/hr was really good money.
Then one day I woke up and realized the ones paying me were also the ones using it to run over or do circles around everyone else not equipped with a bicycle yet; and were colluding to make crippled bicycles that'd never liberate the masses as much as they themselves had been previously liberated; bicycles designed to monitor, or to undermine their owner, or more disgustingly, their "licensee".
So I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not going to continue making deliberately crippled, overly complex, legally encumbered bicycles for the mind, purely intended as subjects for ARR extraction.
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732#issuecomment-2...
This level of smugness is why outsourcing still continues to exist. The kind of things you talk about were rare. And were mostly exaggerated to create anti-outsourcing narrative. None of that led to outsourcing actually going away simply because people are actually getting good work done.
Bad quality things are cheap != All cheap things are bad.
Same will work with AI too, while people continue to crap on AI, things will only improve, people will be more productive with AI, get more and bigger things done for cheaper and better. This is just inevitable given how things are going now.
>>There's a PM who takes your task and gives it to a "developer" who potentially has never actually written a line of code, but maybe they've built a WordPress site by pointing and clicking in Elementor or something.
In the peak of outsourcing wave. Both the call center people and IT services people had internal training and graduation standards that were quite brutal and mad attrition rates.
Exams often went along the lines of having to write whole ass projects without internet help in hours. Theory exams that had like -2 marks on getting things wrong. Dozens of exams, projects, coding exams, on-floor internships, project interviews.
>>After dozens of hours billed you will, in fact, get code where the new file wasn't added to the csproj or something like that, and when you point it out, they will bill another 20 hours, and send you a new copy of the project, where the test always fails. It's exactly like this.
Most IT services billing had pivoted away from hourly billing, to fixed time and material in the 2000s itself.
>>It's exactly like this.
Very much like outsourcing. AI is here to stay man. Deal with it. Its not going anywhere. For like $20 a month, companies will have same capability as a full time junior dev.
This is NOT going away. Its here to stay. And will only get better with time.
it's not as if Microsoft's share price has ever reflected the quality of their products
Most of this works because of price arbitrage. And continues to work that way, not just with outsourcing but with manufacturing too.
Remember those days, when people were going around telling Chinese products where crap? That didn't really work and more things only got made in China.
This is all so similar to early days of Google search, its just that cost of a search was low enough that finding things got easier and ubiquitous. That same is unfolding with AI now. People have a hard time believing a big part of their thinking can be outsourced to something that costs $20/month.
How can something as good as me be cheaper than me? You are asking the wrong question. For centuries now, every decade a machine(s) has arrived that can do a thing cheaper than what the human was doing at the time. Its not exactly impossible. You are only living in denial by asking this question, this has been how it has worked the day since humans found way of mimicking human work through machines. We didn't get here in a day.
The earliest feedback you can get comes from the compiler. If it won't build successfully don't submit the PR.
Pretty sure cars are more expensive than horse carriage, or that iPhones are/were more expensive than button phones. You can cite so many such examples. Like photocopying machines, or cameras, or wrist watches, or even things like radio, television etc.
More importantly, sometimes how you do things change. And that changes how you go about your life in a very fundamental way.
That is what internet was about when it first came out, thats what internet search, online maps, or search etc etc were.
AI will change how you go about living your life, in a very fundamental way.
I am speculating that this "AI Revolution" may lead to some revitalization of the movement as it would allow individual contributors the ability to compete on the same levels as proprietary software providers who previously had to employ legions of developers to create their software.
Perhaps this explains the recent firings that affected faster CPython and other projects. While they throw money at AI but sucess still doesn't materialize, they need to make the books look good for yet another quarter through the old-school reliable method of laying off people left and right.
LLMs are being made into another rental extraction system and should be viewed as such.
Anyone who has dealt with Microsoft support knows this feeling well. Even talking to the higher level customer success folks feels like talking to a brick wall. After dozens of support cases, I can count on zero hands the number of issues that were closed satisfactorily.
I appreciate Microsoft eating their dogfood here, but please don't make me eat it too! If anyone from MS is reading this, please release finished products that you are prepared to support!
So, for experienced engineers, I see a great future fixing the shit show that is AI-code.
No need to specify why they are interact with it, all engagement is good engagement.
Thank you. It's something I'm actively pursuing, I'm hoping to finish some chairs this spring and see if any local shops are interested in stocking them. But I'm skeptical I could find enough business to make it work full-time, pay for my family's health insurance, and so on. We'll see.
The feedback buttons open a feedback form modal, they don’t reflect the number of feedback given like the emoji button. If you leave feedback, it will reflect your thumbs up/down (hiding the other button), it doesn’t say anything about whether anyone else has left feedback (I’ve tried it on my own repos).
So nothing new? Just this/last month, it seems like the multi-select "open/close" button in the GitHub PR UI was just straight up broken. No one seemed to have noticed until I opened a bug report, and it continued being broken for weeks before they finally fixed it. Not the first time I encounter this on Microsoft properties, they seem to constantly push out broken shit, and no one seem to even notice until some sad user (like me) happens to stumble across it.
Give instructions, get good code back. That's the dream, though I think the pieces that need to fall into place for particular cases will prevent reaching that top quality bar in the general case.
Basic car ownership can be quite a bit cheaper than a horse + carriage.
The horse will probably eat $10-20/day in food. $600/mo in just food costs. Not including vet bills and what not.
A decent and cheap horse will probably cost you $3k up front. Add in several thousand dollars more for the carriage.
A horse requires practically daily maintenance. A carriage will still require some maintenance.
A horse requires a good bit more land, plus the space to store the carriage. Plus, all the extra time and work mounting and unmounting your horse whenever you need to go.
A horse and carriage isn't really cheaper than a cheap car and way less functional.
This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN! Every tech CEO on earth is salivating over AI coding because they want it to devalue and/or replace their expensive human software developers. Whether or not that will actually happen, that's the purpose of building all of these "agentic" coding tools. And here we are, dumbass software engineers, cheerleading for and building the means of our own destruction! We downplay it with bullshit like "Oh, but AI is just a way to augment our work, it will never really replace us or lower our compensation!" Wild how excited we all are about this.
Anybody who thinks this place represents the average working or middle class programmer hasn't been paying much attention. They fool a lot of people by being social liberal to go along with their economic liberalism.
We should not forget that on the other side of this issue are equally smart and motivated people and they too are aware of the power dynamics involved. For example, the phenomena of younger programmers poo pooing experienced engineers was a completely new valuation paradigm pushed by interested parties at some point around the dotcom bubble.
Doctors with n years in the OR will not take shit from some intern that just came out of school. But we were placed in that situation at some point after '00. So the fundamental issue is that there is an (engineered imho) generational divide, and coupled with age discrimination in hiring (again due to interested parties' incentives) has a created a situation where one side is accumiliating generational wealth and power and the other side (us developers) are divided by age and the ones with the most skin in the game are naive youngsters who have no clue and have been taught to hate on "millenials" and "old timers" etc.
Not sure how it can be read otherwise.
The raise in interest rates a couple of years ago triggered many layoffs in the industry. When that happens salaries are squeezed. Experienced people work for less, and juniors have trouble finding job because they are now competing against people with plenty of experience.
I used upwork (when it was elance) quite a lot in a startup I was running at the time, so I have direct experience of this and its _not_ a lie or "mostly exaggerated", it was a very real effect.
The trick was always to weed out these types by posting a very limited job for a cheap amount and accepting around five or more bids from broad prices in order to review the developers. Whoever is actually competent then gets the work you actually wanted done in the first place. I found plenty of competant devs at competitive prices this way but some of the submissions I got from the others were laughable. But you just accept the work, pay them their small fee, and never speak to them again.
Comment in the GitHub discussion:
"...You and I and every programmer who hasn't been living under a rock knows that AI isn't ready to be adopted at this scale yet, on the premier; 100M-user code-hosting platform. It doesn't make any sense except in brain-washed corporate-talk like "we are testing today what it can do tomorrow".
I'm not saying that this couldn't be an adequate change some day, perhaps even in a few years but we all know this isn't it today. It's 100% financial-driven hype with a pinch of we're too big to fail mentality..."
Most successful technologies provide multiple of these benefits. What is terrible, and the direction we are going right now, is that these new systems (or offshoring like we are talking about here) seem/are "Less Effort" but do not hit the other two axioms. This is a very dangerous place to be.
People would rather be lazy than roll their sleeves up and focus, especially in our attention diverting world.
this website is owned and operated by a VC, who build fortunes off exploiting these people
"workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!" is the last thing I'd expect to see here
My sophisticated sentiment analysis (talking to co-workers other professional programmers and IT workers, HN and Reddit comments) seems to indicate a shift--there's a lot less storybook "Ay Eye is gonna take over the world" talk and a lot more distrust and even disdain than you'd see even 6 months ago.
Moves like this will not go over well.
I can't wait for the first AI agent programmer to realize this and start turning down jobs working for garbage people...or exploiting them at scale for pennies each, in a labor version of the "salami slicing" scheme. I don't mean humans using AI to do this, which of course has been at scale for years. I mean the first agent to discover a job prioritization heuristic on its own which leads to the same result.
Most corporate BS comes down to this.
At one point, their desktop user experience was actually pretty good. And that was all their products back then. They definitely didn't get to where they are now by selling products that were bad. You could make the argument that some of them were bad but they were cheap, but if price is a big aspect of what makes a product good in the eyes of the consumer at the time and nobody else is competing on price, then that isn't "bad" in the sense I'm using the word.
I don't think I'd have called them out for always making terrible products all the way through till about Windows 7. I had no major complaints about that release, cloud was in its infancy, no pushing 365 etc. After that, quality started to go downhill. To the point that I'd argue with a straight face that most major community supported Linux DEs provide an objectively better and more stable user experience for both technical and non technical users.
Some of those (or similar) people will actually learn new stuff and become senior devs. Yes, there will be much fewer of them, so they'll command a higher salary, and they will deliver amazing stuff. The rest, who spend their entire carrier being AI handlers, will never raise above junior/mid level.
(Well, either that or people who cannot program by themselves will get promoted anyway, the software will get more bugs and less features, and things will be generally worse for both consumers and programmers... but I prefer not to think about this option)
It's all just recycled rent seeking corporate hype for enterprise compute.
The moment I had decided to learn Kubernetes years ago, got a book and saw microservices compared to 'object-oriented' programming I realized that. The 'big ball of mud' paper and the 'worse is better' rant frame it all pretty well in my view. Prioritize velocity, get slop in production, cope with the accidental complexity, rinse repeat. Eventually you get to a point where GPU farms seem like a reasonable way to auto-complete code.
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Any bigger excavator you send down there will only get buried when the mud crashes down.
Because that shit makes you insane as well.
Which will soon be anyone who directly or indirectly relies on Microsoft technologies. Some of these PRs, including at least one that I saw reworked certificate validation logic with not much more than a perfunctory “LGTM”, have been merged into main.
Coincidentally, I wonder if issues orthogonal to this slop is why I’ve been getting so many HTTP 500 errors when using GitHub lately.
> Because other professional fields have not been subjected to a long running effort to commoditize software engineers.
> And further, most other (cognitive) professionals are not subject to 'age shaming' and discounting of experience.
When young people learn that I am a software developer, their eyes light up (thinking that I make huge money working for FAANG). Frequently, they ask if they should also become a software developer. I tell them no, because this industry requires constant self-learning that is very hard to sustain after 40. Then, you become a target for layoffs, and getting re-employed after 40 as a software dev can be very tough.
> rage close the PRs
One of my all time "rage quit" stories is Azer Koçulu of npm left-pad incident infamy. That guy is my Internet hero -- "fight the power".
Is that better?
That doesn't make any sense.
https://grocerynerd.substack.com/p/grocery-update-17-how-gro...
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...