Now I understand why at each windows 11 update, they introduce more bugs than ever
Horseshit.
The current state of code generated by AI is sketchy at best. I often get plain wrong answers because the model tries to derive. It comes up with calls to functions and properties that just do not exist.
“You are right, I made a mistake. Here is a better answer.” Continues to give wrong answers.
Apart from that, apps that are glued together from AI generated code are not maintainable at all. What if there is a bug somewhere and you so not comprehend what is actually happening? Ask AI to fix it? Yeah good luck with that.
I do use AI for simple questions, and it works fairly well for that, but this claim by MS is just marketing bullshit.
This ^
“20%-30% of code inside the company’s repositories”
Now, if they had said “20%-30% of code written in the past 6 months…” I might buy that.
The repositories are going to have all the current codebase, likely going back years now. AI generated code is barely viable at this point and really only pretty recently.
No way 1/3rd of all current codebase is AI.
Even 20% of new code would be a stretch unless they count every first iteration of code written by AI that needs to be replaced by a human later because it was plain wrong.
Maybe they’re counting the six iterations of code it gives me as I tell it what’s wrong with each one.
20% of code = 20 lines of production code.
They mean new code, as per the article. And they mean code gen and IntelliSence
“Please move all comments from in-line to the line above, and add a separator line”
They say that because they are selling it.
And yeah, my experience is the same. The most frustrating is when writing in a typed python, and it gives answers that are clearly incorrect, making up attributes that don’t even exist etc.
My brother said his superior asked him to use more AI auto complete so that they can brag to investors that X percent of the company’s code is written by AI. This told me everything about the current state of this bullshit.
I didn’t RTA, but if they mean ALL code at MS, that just can’t be true. They have legacy stuff going back decades, beyond just their windows platform. There’s no way 30% of all their code is replaced or newly created by AI.
It would explain the constant barrage of system breaking bugs and RCE vulns
Turns out they have been using AI for decades.
“You are right, I made a mistake. Here is a better answer.” Continues to give wrong answers.
To be fair, the AI’s not wrong. It’s probably better, but just a teeny tiny bit so.
Honestly, AI is like a genie - whatever you come up with he’ll just butcher and misinterpret so you start questioning both your own sanity and the semantics of language. Good thing these genies have no wish limit, but bad thing that they murder rainforests while generating their non-sequitur replies.
“You are right, I made a mistake. Here is a better answer.” Continues to give wrong answers
The exact same wrong answer. Co-Pilot is especially bad for that. I’m practically giving up using it outside of vs code because the actual copilot AI is dog shit stupid m
Ah but it was nice for a minute imagining microsoft vibe coding windows…
“Auto complete generated 30% of characters”
Fixed it.
I do use AI for simple questions, and it works fairly well for that, but this claim by MS is just marketing bullshit.
This is my experience. It can be useful for simple things that used to be found with a web search before AI slop broke things. For example, I was having trouble getting a simple CGO program for a POC to communicate with the main Go process. This should have been solvable easily with documentation but the CGO docs are pretty bad and sample code was near impossible to find due to AI slop in the search results. GPT was able to provide the needed sample code to unblock me.
He used the word written by software. This is ambiguous and doesn’t mean AI, for example, using annotations for variables and generating the getters and setters would count. Right click and create function body for interface function definitions also.
They’re exaggerating to pretend their AI is more useful than it is.
Intellisense in visual studio has also been really good for over a decade. Which is technically also written by software and not me.
People have been using annotations to generate code since I rode my dinosaur to work.
Don’t forget code generation for stuff like bindings or database schemes
So the CEO is trying to tell investors that they are saving money by not paying employees. But to me it sounds more like: we are letting our sub-par products continue to enshitify, and any other company using AI to program will be equal competition.
I think he’s trying to say that their AI writes code good enough for Microsoft. Which is a message to other business leaders that your company too can benefit from copilot, just hand over your credit card!
Microsoft has absolutely gotten worse in the consumer space, but that isn’t really their business these days.
They’re worse in the business space too. Teams is crashing on me daily.
Teams crashed on me today too! It’s great because it was a meeting with external people, so I had to sit in the waiting room in shame until one of them let me back in.
Good point
They are even worse in the business space for sure.
Power move by the zucc by first asking how much genai is used at Microsoft then refusing to answer his own question at Facebook 😂
This is my own experience but the past few years Windows has been extremely dependable for me and then in the last few months the updates they’ve have been terrible. I’ve seen more blue screens recently than I have in a lot of years.
All this to say that if it is 30% AI code being used then it’s very telling!
Windows was always garbage to be honest, windows 7 was the best release in my opinion. You are correct though it is way worse these past months. By the way does your mouse lag when the update notification comes up?
i had such a bad experience with 7, it was horribly unstable on a computer that had handled vista just fine. i switched to 8 as soon as i could and was better off for it.
Windows 7 was peak windows. Its been downhill from there
Win98SE was my favorite. Maximum just working, minimum trying to “help.”
It’s great if you don’t need it to be on the network. I’d say they didn’t have networking figured out until almost the end of XPs lifespan.
I don’t remember in my 2 decades of working my work machine causing me to lose work due to a Windows update. In the last year, it happened to me 3 times. One was due to Crowdstrike. The latest update also recently broke my remote setup. Not completely their fault but still a crappy time. The one other time was due to an update (must’ve been the forced win11 one) killing the wifi and then Windows hiding any options to fix it, a bug from Windows 10.
Government spyware finally has a challenger for the title of “primary reason that most Microsoft software runs like hot garbage”.
If they mean “30% of the code we wrote last month” then I might believe it. Though I bet it is not across the board but deep in one or two areas. Still, it’s a crazy number.
But he said something like “30% of the code in our repositories” which would mean everything, including their entire legacy of code. And that I simply do not believe.
Its a shit article with Tech crunch changing the words to get people in a flap about AI (for or against), the actual quote is
“I’d say maybe 20 percent, 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software”
“Written by software” reasonably included machine refactored code, automatically generated boilerplate and things generated by AI assistants. Through that lens 20% doesnt seem crazy.
I’ve been “automatically writing code” for a system of about a dozen modules - we specify a glue file in .json between all the modules and the code generating software makes units to go in each module to do the communication interfacing based on the glue spec. That system has been running for more than 10 years now, it writes a couple hundred thousand lines of “new code” every time we modify the glue file.
The A stands for Automation, right?
My first thought on reading that is: yeah, like about 98% of the human genome is “junk DNA” that we have little or no idea what it might be doing. Sometimes when we cut it out, nobody ever notices, sometimes when we cut it out the system won’t boot up.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they entered the entire codebase for Windows 11 into an LLM and asked it to optimize it or some shit lol
And surprise surprise, it’s worse than ever
Funny considering windows 7 consists of exactly 0% AI generated code.
lmao I just said the same thing before reading your comment
Yeah that’s a good point.
Of course it’s just bad writing, but I kind of wouldn’t put it past management to try shoving their multitude of codebases through an LLM at this point.
I bet they’re counting code written while someone had an AI plugin installed as “written by AI” and I bet that accounts for almost all of that 30%. On top of that, I’m betting that they made it mandatory to have such a plug in, and the other 70% is just code written before they mandated this.
I would be very surprised if 30% of their code lines had even been touched at all by anyone since AI coding assistants became a thing.
I could see stuff getting small changes and them claiming that the entirety of the new version is “written by AI”.
I wish this shot from The Terminator had the camera showing Sarah Conner’s face instead of Reese’s, because it’d be such an appropriate meme image on multiple levels for when someone makes a misleading claim about some current AI system.
Also, having 1/3 lines with obvious code that can be auto suggested correctly would make sense, but that is hardly code “written by ai” in the way they suggest.
I’d guess a lot of the people writing the code don’t even have it turned on, it’s just installed because management said it had to be, because management wants to be able to tell investors they’re “innovating work flows”.
Those are the easy time savings though, the safe easy stuff the developer doesn’t have to worry about anymore. (Giving them time do the gnarly stuff)
It is exactly the opposite, with simple, predictable auto-complete you didn’t have to worry about that anymore, with LLMs you always have to look at it in detail because every little thing could be just plain completely different and wrong.
I can read way faster than I can type though. You still check it, but it’s pretty good as that kind of stuff once you have an example for it to follow.
Reading code is usually orders of magnitude slower than writing code. Sure, typing might be slower than reading but to check if it is what you intended you have to understand it too.
Well, I’m generally very anti-LLM but as a library author in Java it has been very helpful to create lots of similar overloads/methods for different types and filling in the corresponding documentation comments. I’ve already done all the thinking and I just need to check that the overload makes the right call or does the same thing that the other ones do – in that particular case, it’s faster. But if I myself don’t know yet how I’m going to do something, I would never trust an AI to tell me.
Well, okay, I can see how it would be useful in languages like Java that are extremely verbose and have a low expressiveness. Writing Java pretty much was already IDEs with code generation 20 years or so ago because nobody wants to write so much boilerplate by hand.
Well, that would explain a lot.
I’m also guessing that at “up to 30%” of the company’s leadership decisions are being made by AI too.
It shows
Stole it as if I wrote it
“30% of my pants is pooped”
“Up to” can also be 0%. Why is there even a need to say “up to” here.
So you are saying up to 100% of their code is written by AI?
Up to 100% of all Windows code was written by a Macaque monkey on meth.
So you are saying up to 100% of all Windows code is Mac code?
Work for a big software company. With all the offshoring of devs, I expect most of our code is now AI. And it shows.
How does it show? (Asking for red flags, not to create an argument).
Quality degredation and Disjointed experience comes to minds. Microsofts tech is such a mess right now i dont know how they come back from it honestly. Too many competing frameworks, bad schemas, broken tooling, bad documentation.
Im not even factoring in windows 11.
I used to be a windows dev guy, but with this landscape I dunno why i would do it to myself. Developing for linux systens is such a better experience. At least there are standards and ubernerds who adhere to them.
Coming back from this is easy.
Extend support for windows 10 for another 4 years. Take a break from their OS release cycle and get the next OS right. Remove the Microsoft account mandate from sign in. Remove AI by default. Remove Ads, weather, news and other bloat from the OS. The focus should be creating the cleanest, simplest, abstraction between the user and the hardware.
Its not nearly that easy. They are dealing with personalities behind all of this, investors they made promises to, etc. What you are describing is the right thing to do, its just very complicated with a ship as big as microsoft to turn on a dime like that. The bigger the org, the slower it is to react and the harder it is to course correct
Is this why they haven’t said why they one folder needs to be there. They actually don’t know.
I’m out of the loop here
Basically, there was a security flaw with Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (web server software) that could be exploited by an attacker to gain access to files and folders they shouldn’t be able to (permission escalation?). Well, instead of providing an actual fix to the problem as a whole, they applied a bandaid fix by creating a new folder named “inetpub” on peoples system drive, and apparently the presence of the folder is able to prevent the exploit from working. People noticed the folder and deleted it because they thought it was being created by an attacker, so Microsoft had to tell people not to delete it.
Wow, so my decision to switch my machines over to Linux by win10 EOL really isn’t overkill.
Yeah, I can tell every time I have to use that dinosaur of an OS.
