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A comment on the first pull request provides some context: > The stream of PRs is coming from requests from the maintainers of the repo. We're experimenting to

A comment on the first pull request provides some context: > The stream of PRs is coming from requests from the maintainers of the repo. We're experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools can do today and preparing for what they'll be able to do tomorrow. Anything that gets merged is the responsibility of the maintainers, as is the case for any PR submitted by anyone to this open source and welcoming repo. Nothing gets merged without it meeting all the same quality bars and with us signing up for all the same maintenance requirements.

abxyz 1y ago
The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence inspiring the statement they intended it to be, it's the opposite, it underscores that this isn't the .net team "experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools" but rather the .net team trying to keep their jobs.
- hnthrow90348765 1y ago
  TBF they are dogfooding this (good) but it's just not going well
  - davidgerard 1y ago
    "eating our own dogshit"
- username135 1y ago
  i dont think hey are mutually exclusive. jumping on board seems like the smart move if you're worried about losing your career. you also get to confirm your suspicions.
- dmix 1y ago
  > Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind" If they weren't experimenting with AI and coding and took a more conservative approach, while other companies like Anthropic was running similar experiments, I'm sure HN would also be critiquing them for not keeping up as a stodgy big corporation. As long as they are willing to take risks by trying and failing on their own repos, it's fine in my books. Even though I'd never let that stuff touch a professional github repo personally.
  - jayGlow 1y ago
    exactly ignoring new technologies can be a death sentence for a company even one as large as Microsoft. even if this technology doesn't pay off its still a good idea to at least look into potential uses.
    - BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago
      Only in very specific circumstances where there are clear moats to be built (mobile was one of these that Microsoft missed, but that's a PLATFORM in a way no AI product at the moment comes close to). As far as I can tell, there is no evidence of such a thing with the current applications of AI and I am unconvinced that there ever will be. It's just going to ride on top of previous platforms. So you may need some sort of service for customers that are interested, but having the absolute best AI story just isn't something customers are going to care about at the end of the day if it means they would have to say migrate clouds. At the moment, I'd arguing doing much more than what say Apple is doing would be what is potentially catastrophic. Not doing anything would be minimally risky, and doing just a little bit would be the no risk play. I think Microsoft is making this mistake in a big way and will continue to lose market share over it and burn cash, albeit slowly since they are already giants. The point is, it's a giant that has momentum going in the opposite direction than what they want, and they are incapable of fixing the things causing it to go in that direction because their leadership has become delusional.
- Vicinity9635 1y ago
  If you're not using it where it's useful to you, then I still wouldn't say you're getting left behind, but you're making your job harder than it has to be. Anecdotally I've found it useful mostly for writing unit tests and sometimes debugging (can be as effective as a rubber duck). It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE. It's a powerful tool. You still need to know when to and when not to use it.
  - static_void 1y ago
    Tests are one of the areas where it performs least well. I can ask an LLM to summarize the functionality of code and be happy with the answer, but the tests it writes are the most facile unit tests, just the null hypothesis tests and the like. "Here's a test that the constructor works." Cool.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      They are the exact same unit tests I never needed help to write, and the exact same unit tests that I can just blindly keep hitting tab to write with Intellij's NON-AI autocomplete.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    > It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE. That's right on the mark. It will save you a little bit of work on tasks that aren't the bottleneck on your productivity, and disrupt some random tasks that may or may not be important. It's makes so little difference that plenty of people in 2025 don't use an IDE, and looking at their performance from the outside one just can't tell. Except that LLMs have less potential to improve your tasks and more potential to be disruptive.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      Yea, "using an IDE" is a very good analogy. IDEs are not silver bullets, although they no doubt help some engineers. There are plenty of developers, on the other hand, who are amazingly productive without using IDEs.
- the-lazy-guy 1y ago
  This is Stephen Toub, who is the lead of many important .NET projects. I don't think he is worried about losing job anytime soon. I think, we should not read too much into it. He is honestly exploring how much this tool can help him to resolve trivial issues. Maybe he was asked to do so by some of his bosses, but unlikely to fear the tool replacing him in the near future.
  - n8cpdx 1y ago
    They don’t have any problem firing experienced devs for no reason. Including on the .NET team (most of the .NET Android dev team was laid off recently). https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/microsofts_axe_software_developers/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/microsofts_axe_softwa... Perhaps they were fired for failing to show enthusiasm for AI?
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      I can definitely believe that companies will start (or have already started) using "Enthusiasm about AI" as justification for a hire/promote/reprimand/fire decision. Adherence to the Church Of AI has become this weird purity test throughout the software industry!
  - low_tech_love 1y ago
    I love the fact that they seem to be asking it to do simple things because ”AI can do the simple boring things for us so we can focus on the important problems” and then it floods them with so many meaningless mumbo jumbo that they could have probably done the simple thing in a fraction of the time they take to keep correcting it continuously.
    - the-lazy-guy 1y ago
      It is called experimentation. That is how people evaluate new technology. By trying to do small things with it first. And if it doesn't work well - retrying later, once bigger issues are fixed.
- Verdex 1y ago
  The "left behind" mantra that I've been hearing for a while now is the strange one to me. Like, I need to start smashing my face into a keyboard for 10000 hours or else I won't be able to use LLM tools effectively. If LLM is this tool that is more intuitive than normal programming and adds all this productivity, then surely I can just wait for a bunch of others to wear themselves out smashing the faces on a keyboard for 10000 hours and then skim the cream off of the top, no worse for wear. On the other hand, if using LLMs is a neverending nightmare of chaos and misery that's 10x harder than programming (but with the benefit that I don't actually have to learn something that might accidentally be useful), then yeah I guess I can see why I would need to get in my hours to use it. But maybe I could just not use it. "Left behind" really only makes sense to me if my KPIs have been linked with LLM flavor aid style participation. Ultimately, though, physics doesn't care about social conformity and last I checked the machine is running on physics.
  - spiffytech 1y ago
    There's a third way things might go: on the way to "superpower for everyone", we go through an extended phase where AI is only a superpower in skilled hands. The job market bifurcates around this. People who make strong use of it get first pick of the good jobs. People not making effective use of AI get whatever's left. Kinda like how word processing used to be an important career skill people put on their resumes. Assuming AI becomes as that commonplace and accessible, will it happen fast enough that devs who want good jobs can afford to just wait that out?
    - Verdex 1y ago
      I'm willing to accept this as a possibility but the case analysis still doesn't make much sense to me. If LLM usage is easy then I can't be left behind because it's easy. I'll pick it up in a weekend. If LLM usage is hard AND I can otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing then I can't be left behind if I just do the hard things. Still the only way I can be left behind is if LLM usage is nonsense or the same as just doing it yourself AND the important thing is telling managers that you've been using it for a long time. Is the superpower bamboozling management with story time?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
This is important context given that it would be absurd for the managers to have already drawn a definitive conclusion about the models’ capabilities. An explicit understanding that the purpose of the exercise is to get a better idea of the current strengths and weaknesses of the models in a “real world” context makes this actually very reasonable.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  So why in public, and why in the most ham-fisted way, and why on important infrastructure, and why in such a terrible integration that it can't even verify that things compile before opening a PR! In my org, we would have had to bypass precommit hooks to do this!

abxyz 1y ago

The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence inspiring the statement they intended it to be, it's the opposite, it underscores that this isn't the .net team "experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools" but rather the .net team trying to keep their jobs.

hnthrow90348765 1y ago
TBF they are dogfooding this (good) but it's just not going well
- davidgerard 1y ago
  "eating our own dogshit"
username135 1y ago
i dont think hey are mutually exclusive. jumping on board seems like the smart move if you're worried about losing your career. you also get to confirm your suspicions.
dmix 1y ago
> Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind" If they weren't experimenting with AI and coding and took a more conservative approach, while other companies like Anthropic was running similar experiments, I'm sure HN would also be critiquing them for not keeping up as a stodgy big corporation. As long as they are willing to take risks by trying and failing on their own repos, it's fine in my books. Even though I'd never let that stuff touch a professional github repo personally.
- jayGlow 1y ago
  exactly ignoring new technologies can be a death sentence for a company even one as large as Microsoft. even if this technology doesn't pay off its still a good idea to at least look into potential uses.
  - BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago
    Only in very specific circumstances where there are clear moats to be built (mobile was one of these that Microsoft missed, but that's a PLATFORM in a way no AI product at the moment comes close to). As far as I can tell, there is no evidence of such a thing with the current applications of AI and I am unconvinced that there ever will be. It's just going to ride on top of previous platforms. So you may need some sort of service for customers that are interested, but having the absolute best AI story just isn't something customers are going to care about at the end of the day if it means they would have to say migrate clouds. At the moment, I'd arguing doing much more than what say Apple is doing would be what is potentially catastrophic. Not doing anything would be minimally risky, and doing just a little bit would be the no risk play. I think Microsoft is making this mistake in a big way and will continue to lose market share over it and burn cash, albeit slowly since they are already giants. The point is, it's a giant that has momentum going in the opposite direction than what they want, and they are incapable of fixing the things causing it to go in that direction because their leadership has become delusional.
Vicinity9635 1y ago
If you're not using it where it's useful to you, then I still wouldn't say you're getting left behind, but you're making your job harder than it has to be. Anecdotally I've found it useful mostly for writing unit tests and sometimes debugging (can be as effective as a rubber duck). It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE. It's a powerful tool. You still need to know when to and when not to use it.
- static_void 1y ago
  Tests are one of the areas where it performs least well. I can ask an LLM to summarize the functionality of code and be happy with the answer, but the tests it writes are the most facile unit tests, just the null hypothesis tests and the like. "Here's a test that the constructor works." Cool.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    They are the exact same unit tests I never needed help to write, and the exact same unit tests that I can just blindly keep hitting tab to write with Intellij's NON-AI autocomplete.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  > It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE. That's right on the mark. It will save you a little bit of work on tasks that aren't the bottleneck on your productivity, and disrupt some random tasks that may or may not be important. It's makes so little difference that plenty of people in 2025 don't use an IDE, and looking at their performance from the outside one just can't tell. Except that LLMs have less potential to improve your tasks and more potential to be disruptive.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Yea, "using an IDE" is a very good analogy. IDEs are not silver bullets, although they no doubt help some engineers. There are plenty of developers, on the other hand, who are amazingly productive without using IDEs.
the-lazy-guy 1y ago
This is Stephen Toub, who is the lead of many important .NET projects. I don't think he is worried about losing job anytime soon. I think, we should not read too much into it. He is honestly exploring how much this tool can help him to resolve trivial issues. Maybe he was asked to do so by some of his bosses, but unlikely to fear the tool replacing him in the near future.
- n8cpdx 1y ago
  They don’t have any problem firing experienced devs for no reason. Including on the .NET team (most of the .NET Android dev team was laid off recently). https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/microsofts_axe_software_developers/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/microsofts_axe_softwa... Perhaps they were fired for failing to show enthusiasm for AI?
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I can definitely believe that companies will start (or have already started) using "Enthusiasm about AI" as justification for a hire/promote/reprimand/fire decision. Adherence to the Church Of AI has become this weird purity test throughout the software industry!
- low_tech_love 1y ago
  I love the fact that they seem to be asking it to do simple things because ”AI can do the simple boring things for us so we can focus on the important problems” and then it floods them with so many meaningless mumbo jumbo that they could have probably done the simple thing in a fraction of the time they take to keep correcting it continuously.
  - the-lazy-guy 1y ago
    It is called experimentation. That is how people evaluate new technology. By trying to do small things with it first. And if it doesn't work well - retrying later, once bigger issues are fixed.
Verdex 1y ago
The "left behind" mantra that I've been hearing for a while now is the strange one to me. Like, I need to start smashing my face into a keyboard for 10000 hours or else I won't be able to use LLM tools effectively. If LLM is this tool that is more intuitive than normal programming and adds all this productivity, then surely I can just wait for a bunch of others to wear themselves out smashing the faces on a keyboard for 10000 hours and then skim the cream off of the top, no worse for wear. On the other hand, if using LLMs is a neverending nightmare of chaos and misery that's 10x harder than programming (but with the benefit that I don't actually have to learn something that might accidentally be useful), then yeah I guess I can see why I would need to get in my hours to use it. But maybe I could just not use it. "Left behind" really only makes sense to me if my KPIs have been linked with LLM flavor aid style participation. Ultimately, though, physics doesn't care about social conformity and last I checked the machine is running on physics.
- spiffytech 1y ago
  There's a third way things might go: on the way to "superpower for everyone", we go through an extended phase where AI is only a superpower in skilled hands. The job market bifurcates around this. People who make strong use of it get first pick of the good jobs. People not making effective use of AI get whatever's left. Kinda like how word processing used to be an important career skill people put on their resumes. Assuming AI becomes as that commonplace and accessible, will it happen fast enough that devs who want good jobs can afford to just wait that out?
  - Verdex 1y ago
    I'm willing to accept this as a possibility but the case analysis still doesn't make much sense to me. If LLM usage is easy then I can't be left behind because it's easy. I'll pick it up in a weekend. If LLM usage is hard AND I can otherwise do the hard things that LLMs are doing then I can't be left behind if I just do the hard things. Still the only way I can be left behind is if LLM usage is nonsense or the same as just doing it yourself AND the important thing is telling managers that you've been using it for a long time. Is the superpower bamboozling management with story time?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago

This is important context given that it would be absurd for the managers to have already drawn a definitive conclusion about the models’ capabilities. An explicit understanding that the purpose of the exercise is to get a better idea of the current strengths and weaknesses of the models in a “real world” context makes this actually very reasonable.

mrguyorama 1y ago
So why in public, and why in the most ham-fisted way, and why on important infrastructure, and why in such a terrible integration that it can't even verify that things compile before opening a PR! In my org, we would have had to bypass precommit hooks to do this!