Re: Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company's code written by AI

On 30/04/2025 23:30, Chris M. Thomasson wrote:

On 4/30/2025 10:38 AM, Richard wrote:

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]
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Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> spake the secret code
<vurv36$340f4$1@dont-email.me> thusly:
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I call bull hockey pucks.

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Have you tried any generative AI assistants?  They're remarkably good
at generating boiler plate in the small and the large.  However, there
are caveats (as always).
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I think this article is a good summary of where we are today:
<https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-70-problem-hard-truths-about>
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The other thing to consider is that generative AI assistants are only
going to get better from here.
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If you haven't yet tried one, try GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, but
be aware that you'll quickly burn through your budget of 2,000 code
completions per month on the free acount.  This is because it's
counting all the suggestions that are being made against that budget
and not just the ones that you accept.  I burned through the 2K
suggestions in a weekend of coding.

 Last year I asked AI to write some lock-free code... It tried, but got the memory barriers all messed up. Now, I did not try to correct it because, well, why should I. Wow. Bug city.

AI (currently) is useless for that kind of thing.  It can write code that /looks/ correct, based on common examples - but for code where you need to think through the consequences of the sequencing, or where the time and effort is in planing the code or in analysing its correctness, AI hasn't a chance.
It can be okay for simple, repetitive boiler plate code or as a slightly more advanced version of code refactoring tools.  And if it makes some tedious parts of the job go faster, that's fair enough.  (I'd be much happier if AI could do some of the documentation, or writing time lists, or attending customer meetings...)
It doesn't help that AI learns from existing code samples, and a lot of that is crap code or simple demo code.
I first remember reading about how software development will be done by computers and most programmers will be out of a job some 35 years ago. I remain unconvinced.