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[–] 172 points 11 months ago (4 children)

It says it will finish the code, it doesn't say the code will work.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I was going to say. The code won’t compile but it will be “finished “

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    A couple agent iterations will compile. Definitely won't do what you wanted though, and if it does it will be the dumbest way possible.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    Yeah you can definitely bully AI into giving you some thing that will run if you yell at it long enough. I don’t have that kind of patience

    Edit: typically I see it just silently dump errors to /dev/null if you complain about it not working lol

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  • [–] 65 points 11 months ago* (7 children)

    Ooh, unemployment! How exciting! I love Microsoft now.

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  • [–] 49 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    Seriously who the hell are they trying to sell this to?

    Are they just that desperate to keep the hype train going?

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  • [–] 53 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Business owners. People that don't want to spend money on annoying stuff like wages.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    There are entire media agencies that only do vibe coding. And that might be enough for a one-off event but many of them „develop“ long term solutions without knowing the code or it‘s vulnerabilities so it‘s safe to say their existence will be short lived.

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  • [–] 51 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    Copilot keeps finishing my code for me in near real time... it completely disrupts my train of thought and my productivity dropped tremendously. I finally disabled it.

    I LIKE writing code, stop trying to take the stuff away that I WANT to do and instead take away the stuff I HATE doing.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah, I just wrote a blog post comment about how I enjoy using Copilot. But that's when I explicitly ask it a question or give it a task. The auto complete is wrong more often than it's right.

    Probably doesn't help that if it was tedious, boilerplate code I would have already explicitly asked it.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I like auto complete because I'm a terrible speller I'd write "int countOfCommplixThang", but auto complete guesses "int countComplexThing" Sometimes it even comes up with a better name than I would

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    I wish I could get it to stop finishing comments for me. It’s like some jackass is trying to complete my sentence for me but gets it completely wrong every time and it breaks my train of thought.

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  • [–] 41 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    yes but all the code will be wrong and you will spend your entire day chasing stupid mistakes and hallucinations in the code. I'd rather just write the code myself thanks.

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  • [–] 37 points 11 months ago

    What they forget to mention is that you then spend the rest of the week to fix the bugs it introduced and to explain why your code deleted the production database...

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  • [–] 33 points 11 months ago (14 children)

    I had a bit of a breakthrough with some personal growth with my code today.

    I learned a bit more about entity framework that my company is using for a project, and was able to create a database table, query it, add/delete/update, normal CRUD stuff.

    I normally work mostly on front end code, so it was rewarding to learn a new skill and see the data all the way from the database to the UI and back - all my code. I felt great after doing a code review this afternoon to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, and we talked about some refactoring to make it better.

    AI will never give you that.

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  • [+] -10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (13 children)

    No, but it can help a capable developer to have more of those moments, as one can use LLMs and coding agents to (a) help explain the relationships in a complicated codebase succinctly and (b) help to quickly figure out why one's code doesn't work as expected (from simple bugs to calling out one's own fundamental misunderstandings), giving one more time to focus on what matters to oneself.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Wow, well it's absolutely terrible at A. B is worth a shot, but it's 50/50 to bullshit you in my experience.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago

    Yeah - there's definitely a GIGO factor. Throwing it at a undocumented codebase with poor and inconsistent function & variable names isn't likely to yield great revelations. But it can probably still tell you why changing input X didn't result in a change to output Y (with 50k lines of code in-between), saving you a bunch of debugging time.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    TBH, it's not really that great at that. Is average at best and grossly misleading and flat out wrong at worst. It may bring slight speedups for average development on boring legacy enterprise code, but anything really novel and interesting? Detrimental.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Most code on the planet is boring legacy code, though. Novel and interesting is typically a small fraction of a codebase, and it will often be more in the design than the code itself. Anything that can help us make boring code more digestible is welcome. Plenty of other pitfalls along the way though.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Fair enough, that's true. I guess my gripe is with the narrow use case and the debugging and/or prompt/context tuning to get what you want. I still feel that if you don't get what you want on the first try, it's faster to write it yourself than spending time "debugging" the input and maybe get a 60% chance on correct output, which in most cases, still needs debugging. And god forbid, a framework is rewritten.

    I just wished it was a bit better before we hit the plateau of diminishing returns.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Hah, yeah. Vibe coding and prompt engineering seem like a huge fad right now, although I don't think it's going to die out, just the hype.

    The most successful vibe projects in the next few years are likely to be the least innovative technically, following well trodden paths (and generating lots of throwaway code).

    I suppose we'll see more and more curated collections of AI-friendly design documents and best-practice code samples to enable vibe coding for varied use-cases, and this will be the perceived value add for various tools in the short term. The spec driven development trend seems to have value, adding semantic layers for humans and AI alike.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    help explain the relationships in a complicated codebase succinctly

    It will offer an explanation, one that sounds consistent, but it's a crap shoot as to whether or not it accurately described the code, and no easy of knowing of the description is good or bad without reviewing it for yourself.

    I do try to use the code review feature, though that can declare bug based on bad assumptions often as well. It's been wrong more times than it caught something for me.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    AI can help you be more agile in getting out a PoC but vibe coding always ends up eating itself and you either aren’t capable enough to fix it (because you are a vibe coder) or you spend more time on the back 9, trying to clean up the code so you don’t have so many hacks and redundancy because the AI was too literal or hallucinated fake libraries that return null or its context window expired and it wrote 5 different versions of the same function

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Eh, I've enjoyed writing a SQL query and having AI translate it to Linq. I've had at least one work directly, very clear on what it's doing, just with Linq's odd syntax. The other query was more complicated and wasn't something that translated well to Linq. I may have had to split that into two Linq queries.

    Then again, I wouldn't count translating psuedocode (or SQL) as really vibe coding. To me "vibe coding" means you're not really looking at the code it produces.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago

    It's a changing world, and there is going to be an ever increasing amount of AI slop out there, and even more potential programmers who won't make the leap due to the crutch.

    At the same time, there are always people who want to and will learn in spite of the available crutches the latest tech revolution brings.

    There will also be many good engineers who will exploit the tech for all its worth while applying appropriate rigour, increasing their real productivity and value manyfold.

    And there will be many non-programmers who can achieve much more in their respective fields, because AI tools can bridge gaps for them.

    Hopefully we won't irreversibly destroy ourselves and our planet while we're at it. 🙈

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  • [+] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Hm? Oh, I obviously misread the room. It seems I interrupted a circle jerk? My apologies.

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  • [–] 28 points 11 months ago

    I was finished with Windows before Microshit finished Copilot.

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago

    "Microsoft Says Copilot" is like a Two Sentence horror story for me now.

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago

    Love how they're pretending that an LLM is useful for any task that needs precision.

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago

    Actually it won't be finishing anything because code is disposable now and nobody cares what trivial app somebody can churn out

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago

    Because you won't have time to drink that coffee if you put this code into production

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago

    And it will leave you debugging strange code for two weeks afterward.

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  • [+] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 child)
  • [+] 15 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    So why don't they use it to unfuck Windows 11... before I finish my coffee?

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    best they can do is put more AI

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    It was the AI that messed it up to begin with lol. Vibe coding has often required coders having to go back and spend even more time fixing it then if they just did it themselves.

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I mean it gets there in the end but it's often three of four prompts before it provides working code for a relatively simple powershell script. Can't imagine that it scales to complex code that well at the moment, but then again I'm not a coder.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago* (13 children)

    But, will it work, huh? HUH?

    I can also type a bunch of random sentences of words. Doesn’t make it more understandable.

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  • [+] -6 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    Some models are getting so good they can patch user reported software defects following test driven development with minimal or no changes required in review. Specifically Claude Sonnet and Gemini

    So the claims are at least legit in some cases

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    Oh good. They can show us how it's done by patching open-source projects for example. Right? That way we will see that they are not full of shit.

    Where are the patches? They have trained on millions of open-source projects after all. It should be easy. Show us.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's an interesting point, and leads to a reasonable argument that if an AI is trained on a given open source codebase, developers should have free access to use that AI to improve said codebase. I wonder whether future license models might include such clauses.

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  • [+] -6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Are you going to spend your tokens on open source projects? Show us how generous you are.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I'm not the one trying to prove anything, and I think it's all bullshit. I'm waiting for your proof though. Even with a free open-source black box.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    What's a free open source black box?

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Some kind of bad joke that went way over your head. Where are your merge requests?

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago*

    At work, the software is not open source.

    I would use it for contributions to open source projects but I do not pay for any AI subscriptions, and I can't use my employee account for copilot enterprise for non-work projects.

    Every week for the last year or so I have been testing various copilot models against customer reported software defects and it's seriously at a point now where with a single prompt Gemini pro 2.5 is solving the entire defect with unit tests. Some need no changes in review and are good to go.

    As an open source maintainer of a large project I have noticed a huge uptick in PRs which has created a larger review workload, I'm almost certain these are due to LLMs. Quality of a typical PR has not decreased since LLMs have become available and I am thus far very glad

    If I were to speculate I'd guess the huge increase in context windows has made the tools viable, models like GPT5 are garbage on any sizable code bases

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Will it execute . . . probably.

    Will it execute what you want it to . . . probably not.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    These fuckers at MicroShit have lost all the ability needed to read a room.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago

    Big over-promise. We're heavily incentived to use an AI coding agent at work. I try to be optimistic and treat it like a tool to help me do things I already know how to do but a little bit faster. It takes multiple iterations of "no, this still isn't working" to get something that I can touch up and push for review. The idea that I can prompt it and then step away for ten minutes to make coffee and return to an app is ludicrous.

    Maybe one day that will be possible. Then I'll find a new job I guess

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago

    My problem is that the dev and stage environments are giving me 502 gateway errors when hitting only certain api endpoints from the app gateway. My real problem is devops aren't answering my support tickets and telling me which terraform var file I gotta muck with and tell me what to fix on it. I'm sure you'll be fixed soon though right copilot?

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago

    But... But I don't want it to. 😮‍💨

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Writing code is the reward for doing the thinking. If the LLM does it then software engineering is no fun.

    It's like painting - once you've finally finished the prep, which is 90% of the effort, actually getting to paint is the reward

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago*

    What a great way to frame it, I love this! I typically spend something like 60-80% of time available for a given task thinking through approaches and trade-offs, etc. Usually there comes a point when the way forward becomes clear, even obvious.

    After that? Bliss. I'm snapping together a LEGO set I designed, composed of pieces I picked (maybe made one or two new ones!), and luxuriating in how it all feels, when put together.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    I would rather paint a portrait by myself, spending the time to do it, rather than asking some computer prompt to spit me out a picture. Same logic applies with coding for me.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    By the headline statement, that it should be complete and works 100%. Big doubt.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago*

    It's great at bullshitting that it did what you wanted, even if it obviously didn't, which I guess is what counts for results at Microsoft.

    It would be much better if they treated it as the slightly better (yeah, I said it) auto complete that it is instead of the beginning of fucking sky net -- which was supposed to be a bad thing anyway, remember?

    But that wouldn't move the needle on all of the share prices, so instead we have to pretend it can do people's jobs when it fucking obviously cannot.

    So, instead they keep pushing this AI (auto-complete insanity), and keep burning more and more cash. Imagine if we just put a portion of these billions (approaching trillions) into anything that could actually help anyone. Or don't, because it's pretty fucking depressing to think about.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago*

    I can drink coffee pretty slow, but I don't think I can drink it that slow

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    If thats what they are aiming at, I feel like their AI is actually suppose to be the pilot and the user the copilot

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    To safely put it out just pee on it.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago*

    In my experience, which consists of using copilot for about ten minutes, literally every single suggestion is wrong, and if you're not careful it'll insert the shitty code and then you have to go back and find out why the code isn't working.

    I'd rather have Lizzo shum on my face than use copilot

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Technically true, but nobody said the code will be at all functional. I'm pretty sure I can finish about 800000 coffees before Copilot generates anything usable that is longer than 3 lines.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Make it de the shit I don't want to do, then we'll talk

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    The only time I use copilot is when I am bored at work and I make jokes with it.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I would like to someday use AI to remaster Stars!, Magic Carpet, and Judgment Rites. However, it won't be through co-pilot, because I fundamentally don't trust Microsoft.

    In any case, I think genuine "hands off" development from an AI would be at least a decade off. Partially just for it to have the ability, but also for local hardware to support it. (I only use local AI, but a 100b like GLM is slow as heck on my gaming rig.)

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago*

    I do NOT want to have ditch Windows after this long. Microsoft. Please don't just carve a big, Copilot-pilot-shape hole out of Windows and weld it in there, expecting that that is somehow what your users want.

    Of course, I do look forward to the brave new era of "Sam Altman will shut you down unless" being the new "run as administrator"

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    ...but what am I going to do while it's compiling?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    yeah but then you have to fix everything in the code that they didn't get right.

    like using it to automate a shell is fine; but trusting it blindly and treating it as the finishing product? you're delusional.

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