nfg

« it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears" »

Go back and re-read the quote from your comment - which I responded to: “ You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired.”

I’m not overreacting to some nuanced take here. I’m not sure how to characterise quitting as a response to over-enthusiasm / slop as anything other than the career equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears. I’ve been there, I’ve had the arguments, I have little sympathy for staff/principal engineers or above who react like this - their job is to fix the organisation, put a yoke around the beast of AI and find a way to tap the benefits and use the problems (like those 2000 line PRs) as a golden signal for where you need to educate and improve process and planning.

Again - I’m not selling anything here, I just have found it an interesting challenge over the last year and one where I’ve been happy to make progress organisationally despite the frustrating moments. If someone’s response to a problem like this is to throw their hands up in despair or to engage in whatever the logical opposite of AI-hype is (which the article resorts to repeatedly) then yes I’d worry about being laid off. If you’re in an organisation where you don’t have the agency to fix problems then absolutely - start looking for a new job.

I don’t buy it - if you’re an engineering leader and this is happening it’s your responsibility to get out there and fix the problem through education, process improvements, improved automated quality checks, better planning. Sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “no!” is not a sustainable strategy. Figure out what would allow your throughput to double, triple etc and go organise it. Focus on bottlenecks and the most difficult pieces. I’m speaking from active experience here.

Ever work on a AAA game?

From left to right: Saturn, Mars and Mercury.

I’d agree, though maybe there’s a more charitable reading of the OP - “uninformed” is one of those accusations that it’s rarely very polite or fair to level against an individual but sometimes is reasonable against a group based on observation. My experience would be that it’s true that “devs says lots of uninformed things” - and I’d include myself in that. It’s been my experience that it’s particularly tough in this space at this time because:

1. Tooling is changing very fast but people tend to form sticky opinions (reasonably enough - there’s only so much time in the world).

2. It’s just hard to form robust objective opinions - you have to make a real effort to build test cases and evaluation processes and generally the barrier to entry there is pretty high.

So - I agree, calling people uninformed is not a great way to win them over, but maybe that’s the price of living in a world of anecdotes which become fixed in people’s minds.

And this has been comparing like for like with CC - say Opus 4.6 on the same reasoning effort? Hasn’t been my experience particularly but fair enough. I do tend to use them in different situations (CC outside of work).

Have you used the gh copilot cli? What would stand out most to you as gaps right now?

Fame doesn’t enter it - the point is Karpathy has about as strong a claim as anyone to having “actually used LLMs for non trivial tasks”.

Do you realise who you’re replying to?

If you could share I’d be really interested in hearing a concrete example of the two behaving differently. I work in Microsoft (not on copilot - though I’m an heavy user, and use Claude code in a personal capacity) and would be quite happy to repro and report back to the copilot cli team who are responsive.

As a matter of interest are you using the copilot cli?

Nearly 6 months in South America - then we ran out of money and headed home!

Memories!

Back in 2012 after 8 months across Asia (through Turkey, Iran, India, Nepal, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Hong King) we took a flight to Buenos Aires (well, via SF for a weekend) then went entirely overland: - Buenos Aires - Puerto Madryn - Ushuaia - El Calafate - El Chalten - Bariloche - El Bolson - Mendoza - Salta - El Cafayate - Into Bolivia… - La Quiaca - Tupiza - Salar de Uniyi - Sucre - La Paz - Copabanca - Isla Del Sol - Into Peru! - Puno - Cusco - Aguas Calientes - Arequipa - Tacna - Into Chile! - San Pedro de Atacama - Into Argentina - Salta - Puerto Iguazú - Into Brazil - Foz do Iguaçu - Rio de Janeiro - Ihla Grande - Paraty - San Paulo - Home (via Amsterdam)!

I’m glad we did it when we were younger - golden years.

In other words, that usage you like is costing them tons of money

Evidence? I’m sure someone will argue, but I think it’s generally accepted that inference can be done profitably at this point. The cost for equivalent capability is also plummeting.

If this is like the flow it uses for a codex / ChatGPT subscription it doesn’t even register a handler - the redirect opens as a 404 in your browser and there are instructions in copying the token from the query string!

How much are you taking?

I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models.

I’m also at MS, not (yet?) using Claude Code at work and pondering precisely the same question.

Interesting - these head to head comparisons you’re doing with the same model - what harnesses are you comparing, say Claude code / codex versus copilot cli?

I'm not sure if its understood how bad it really is within the org.

I can’t speak to that, but there’s a lively culture of people using internal tooling who also extensively use 3p products on projects outside work and are in a reasonable position to assess how well GH copilot works.

Sure I love Claude Code too - I use it plenty outside of work. But funnily enough I’ve been asking myself about whether to get my org on board with internal Claude Code trials and was struggling to truly articulate what we were losing versus the Copilot cli. There are some feature gaps - but the pace of work is super and experience is pretty good for me.

No one should hit Microsoft over the head for giving people access to Claude code - choice and competition is good!

Really? I’d be interested to hear more.

Disclaimer: I work in Microsoft (albeit in a quite disconnected part of it, nothing to do with GitHub or Copilot).

I’d suggest doing some research on software quality. Two years back I was all for buying one (I was considering an EX40), but I got myself into some Facebook groups for owners and was shocked at the dreadful reports of quality of the software and it completely put me off. I got an ID4 instead. Reports about the EX90 have been dreadful. I was very interested, and I still admire their look and build when they drive by - but it killed my enthusiasm to buy one for a few years until they get it right.

Agreed that it can work well, but it can also irritating - I find myself using private conversations to attempt to isolate them, a straightforward per-chat toggle for memory use would be nice.

It’s likely very out of date (Iran has a young, culturally dynamic population) but I really enjoyed https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mantle-Prophet-Religion-Politics-Ir... - I read it before visiting Iran as a tourist 15 years ago.

I’m not really suggesting it’s the right approach for CAD but prompting UI changes using sketches or mockup images works great.

None that I know of, Source Depot is derived from Perforce.

I recommend people read this to see why this comment is wrong: When the Cloke Broke by John Ganz https://a.co/d/hL4vo7d

I believe that Microsoft does not care about Gaming those days.

I’d be interested in hearing you expand on that!

Disclaimer: I work there :-)

I’d be interested to hear more here - what CGM did you buy? What was your process for monitoring?

there is no other animal out there who […] developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.

The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”?

I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.

For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek.

And interestingly to extend this chain of connections I just read your comment and through my basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet gained through maths, and a rough proficiency in pronouncing Cyrillic I could spot that the word is very close to the Turkish “portakal” (I know a few words from spending some time there over the years).