We will see corporate douche.
Contradictory to the title, this message is not to the developers, developers don’t care what github ceo thinks, and they should know it. This might be for the management of other companies to allow using ai or force ai usage.
Daily reminder that Codeberg is always the good alternative to corporate bastards like this idiot
Threatening remarks like that are why I learned PHPUnit, and yeah it made me become a better developer, but often times these are just empty statements.
AI is just another tool in my toolbox, but it’s not everything.
such an easy choice …
(edit: I followed up and got out. This too is now self-hosted and codeberg when needed)
I’m a professional developer and have tested AI tools extensively over the last few years as they develop. The economic implications of the advancements made over the last few months are simply impossible to ignore. The tools aren’t perfect, and you certainly need to structure their use around their strengths and weaknesses, but assigned to the right tasks they can be 10% or less of the cost with better results. I’ve yet to have a project where I’ve used them and they didn’t need an experienced engineer to jump in and research an obscure or complex bug, have a dumb architectural choice rejected, or verify if stuff actually works (they like reporting success when they shouldn’t), but again the economics; the dev can be doing other stuff 90% of the time.
Don’t get me wrong, on the current trajectory this tech would probably lead to deeply terrible socioeconomic outcomes, probably techno neofeudalism, but for an individual developer putting food on the table I don’t see it as much of a choice. It’s like the industrial revolution again, but for cognitive work.
I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven’t found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you’re left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you’re not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong or what.
I guess what I’m saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.
I’ve used it most extensively doing Ruby on Rails greenfield apps, and also some JS front ends, some Python mid sized apps, and some Rust and Nix utilities. You’re absolutely right about it struggling with code base scale, I had to rework the design process around this. Essentially, design documentation telling the story, workflow documentation describing in detail every possible functionality, and an iteration schedule. So the why, what, and how formalized and in detail, in that order. It can generate the bulk of those documents given high level explanations, but require humans to edit them before making them the ‘golden’ references. Test driven development is beyond critical, telling it everywhere to use it extensively with writing failing tests first seems to work best.
So to actually have it do a thing I load those documents into context, give it a set unit of work from the iteration schedule, and work on something else.
It does go down some seriously wrong paths sometimes, like writing hacky work arounds if it incorrectly diagnosing some obscure problem. I’ve had a few near misses where it tried to sneak in stuff that would bury future work in technical debt. Most problematic is it’s just subtle enough that a junior dev might miss it; they’d probably get sent down a rabbit hole with several layers of spaghetti obscuring the problem.
That’s perfect for higher ups. They don’t care if what you release has bugs as long as you work on them when they pop up, they consider that part of your job. They want a result quickly and will accept 85% if it moves the needle forward.
These people don’t care about technical debt, they don’t care about exploits until it happens to them, then it’s how bad and how long to fix. No one cares about doxxes anymore, it’s just the cost of doing business. Like recalls.
This is perfect for CEOs and billionaires because they don’t care how something is done at a 35,000 foot view, they just want it now. AI is a nightmare of exploits that haven’t even begun to be discovered yet. Things that will be easily exploitable, especially by other algorithms.
Coders are just as effected by supply and demand, and the demand is for AI products.
I’m finding AI effectively automates entry level jobs and interns. The long term implications is very few will be able to enter the field. What do we do when all the experienced engineers retire? How will we shift our economy to work for everyone under this model?
Forward-thinking has never been capitalism’s strong suit.
I don’t get it. AI is a tool. My CEO didn’t care about what tools I use, as long as I get the job done. Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done? They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.
Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.
I don’t think these CEOs have quite figured out that LLM developers are creating something that can more easily replace a CEO than a developer.
Return? No, there is no return on investment from AI. If there really was a return to be had from Devs, you wouldn’t have to force them to use it.
This is a saving face and covering their asses exercise. Option 1 is “We spent the money, nobody’s using it, the bubbles gonna burst”, the other choice is “if we can ramp up the usage numbers before the earnings call, we can get some of that sweet investor money to buy us out of being mauled by our shareholders”.
It’s shitty management, making shitty decisions to cover up their previous shitty decisions
That’s the point though. These CEOs don’t know that there is not going to be an “AI revolution”. They all think they are getting in on the ground floor of the next Google or Facebook. They genuinely believe that these “AI’s” are going to revolutionize the Internet.
That’s exactly why Elmo went from “AI is too dangerous and development on it must be stopped” to “I’m gonna built the best AI ever and I’ll call it Grok cause I want everyone to think I’m a relatable sci-fi nerd.”
I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.
Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?
Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going
It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.
If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.
tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care
Alternatively, following their logic, keep the number of people and achieve massively higher productivity. But they don’t want that, they want to reduce the number of people having opinions and diluting the share pool, because its not about productivity, its about exerting control.
Because they make money selling you the AI. It’s that simple.
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
AI make money line go up. It’s not clueless, he’s trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not “snake oil”, I don’t think AI is entirely bad).
Snake oil is also not entirely bad. The placebo effect actually works.
No, snake oil is extremely bad. It’s a highly exploitative practice that preys on the desperation of sick people.
That’s what “snake oil” refers to. Exploiting someone by playing their emotions.
The placebo effect actually works.
The placebo effect sometimes works. But only in very specific circumstances. A placebo will not cure cancer or heart disease.
It can help with things related to pain, as mental and emotional state can directly affect the severity of pain. And a placebo can sometimes marginally improve symptoms by reducing stress levels. But that’s why placebos are used during drug trials. If a drug produces the same results as a placebo, then it doesn’t work. And that says a lot about what the placebo effect actually is. It’s just a mental state change that gets expressed as reduced physiological stress.
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees
They all need to be sued for unethical “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” practices again
best I can do is rusty dull guillotine
Honestly I’ve been recommending setting up a personal git store and cloning any project you like, I imagine the next phase of this is Microsoft making a claim that if Copilot ‘assisted’ all these projects, Microsoft is a part owner of all these projects - in a gambit to swallow and own open source.
loads of self hosted alternatives if you so require it
I am surprised they aren’t embracing it… I would. You immediately get some vague non person to blame all your failures on.
Employers aren’t loyal enough for the average person to care about their companies well being.
I agree, let them generate massive tech debt cause right now the majority of my current clients have hired me to clean up their AI slop.
is it bad for their users? oh hell yes it is. Is it great for me an other consultants/freelancers? hell yes it is. Best thing that’s ever happened to my wallet recently are vibe coders. I love those dumb prompt monkeys.
I asked an AI to generate me some code yesterday. A simple interface to a REST API with about 6 endpoints.
And the code it made almost worked. A few fixes here and there to methods it pulled out of it’s arse, but were close enough to real ones to be an easy fix.
But the REST API it made code for wasn’t the one I gave it. Bore no resemblance to it in fact.
People need to realise that MS isn’t forcing it’s devs to write all code with AI because they want better code. It’s because they desperately need training data so they can sell their slop generators to gullible CEOs.
I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.
To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.
It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.
The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.
Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.
We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.
For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.
Wow that rant blew up.
Your point about music is a great analogy. Basically:
- People play music and people enjoy listening to music.
- Businessman inserts himself between the musician and the audience to “deliver the music”.
- Businessman charges listeners huge money to deliver music, gives no money to musicians.
- Businessman the decides to replace the musician with a robot (e.g. “AI”)
- Businessman explodes market. Listeners leave. Businessman gets bailout from government.
See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.
Tell me you’ve never written a song without telling me you’ve never written a song…
Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?
Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”
Yep, autotune rappers have been pushed for years, and I always suspected it’s to make the transition to AI music easier.
AI can only deliver answers based on training code developers manually wrote, so hod do they expect to train AI in the future if there is no more developers writing code by themselves? You train AI on AI-generated code? Sounds like expected enshittification down the line. Inbreeding basically.
Also, small fact is that they invested so much money into AI, that they can’t allow it to fail. Such comments never came from people who don’t depend on AI adoption.
It’s like all those companies who fast tracked their way into profits by ignoring the catastrophic effects they were having on the environment… Down the road.
Later is someone else’s problem. Now is when AI-pushers want to make money.
I hate where things have been heading.
same as how it goes on the stock market? they don’t care about the long term, but only the short term. what happens on the long term is somebody else’s problem, you just have to squeeze out everything, and know when to exit.
they are gambling with our lives. but not with theirs. that’s (one of) the problem: they are not fearing their lives.
Two words: good fucking luck!
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Does github copilot include attributions and licenses from projects it copy paste code from or it’s just stealing and pretending like nothing happened like all other AI ?
Message to Github CEO: your job is one thing AI is best at.
Expectation: High quality code done quickly by AI.
Reality: Low quality AI generated bug reports being spammed in the hopes the spammers can get bug bounty for fixing them, with AI of course.
does “embracing AI” means replacing all these execs with it? or is it “too far”?
No, they’re all super special and have an “instinct” that a robot could never have. Of course the same does not go for artists or anyone who does the actual work for these “titans of industry”.
*by “instinct” we, of course, mean survivorship bias based on what is essentially gambling, exploitation, and being too big to fail.
