Now I understand why at each windows 11 update, they introduce more bugs than ever
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.
It shows
Stole it as if I wrote it
“30% of my pants is pooped”
Yeah, I can tell every time I have to use that dinosaur of an OS.
Satya Nadella has given an evasive answer there and both Zuckerberg and the journalists have been taken in.
It is common in programming languages that have a lot of boilerplate to use code generation, where you take some information about data and generate code automatically, like code that translates data between formats (for example reading and writing xml for saving to disk or json to send over the network). Being very routine to write and easy to deduce logically from other information, this process has been automated for years and years, long before AI existed.
Microsoft’s flagship software such as operating systems, office software, is unbelievably vast and complex, far beyond the complexity of most business software, and has been developed over decades. They absolutely have not replaced 30% of their code since the very recent advent of useful AI. I can believe that 30% of it is automatically generated, but not by AI.
Windows is 95 percent pure bloat now imo, an os just needs to handle my hardware and launch my programs anything else is just eating my resources.
I don’t need any assistance from anything while my phasers and quantums aren’t doing anything. I don’t need AI doing anything when I finally get the proper setup for crashing a Tomcat into a big old mountain that only a fool would miss. I don’t need any bloat while I’m ripping off an old cartoon character for a D&D campaign.
We can tell
Wonder how much of Windows 10 was written by Stack Exchange?
How much of Linux is?
If you count all of my contributions, 0%.
None of my contributions have been included. I am a terrible programmer.
And its all Teams.
Copilot. Piloting you towards effortless bugs, and with all the telemetry, we don’t need to test our patches and updates. You, the user are doing that for us. Sincerely, Microsoft.
Are they including stuff written by intellisence and boiler plate for legacy code?
Is the part that handles images in word
Does that mean that Microsoft shares are gonna crash?
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.
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.
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.
“Please move all comments from in-line to the line above, and add a separator line”
They mean new code, as per the article. And they mean code gen and IntelliSence
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.
“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
“Auto complete generated 30% of characters”
Fixed it.
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.
Ah but it was nice for a minute imagining microsoft vibe coding windows…