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Microsoft executive vice president bemoans employees sending him "AI slop," saying "This is a doom loop."
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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First draft of what? The AI* doesn't know what you're trying to make, so to use it, you first need to write a prompt to convey to it what you're trying to convey. If what you're trying to make takes the form of prose, there's your first draft already; there's nothing the AI can add other than padding and replacing your voice with a psychopath's. But to begin with, if you have the skill to turn a first draft into a final product, it's almost always going to be faster to just use that skill to create the first draft yourself instead of trying to convey to an AI what it's supposed to be like. If it isn't, it's something that's so easy to describe that there's either no value in making it or those few words are already the perfect way to convey it.
Also, this just completely undermines the whole thing:
The sole virtue AI arguably has, is its accessibility; anyone who can read and write a supported natural language, can make use of it. But the moment it starts requiring expertise, that accessibility becomes worthless. To anyone who is even somewhat serious about what they're trying to do, that natural language interface just offers far too little control for their purposes.
*) For the purposes of this comment, "AI" refers to the kinds of natural language-driven generative AI heavily marketed by companies like Microsoft, not the general concept of artificial intelligence or even the underlying technology of those products.
This is an incredibly stupid take, can’t believe people upvoted this shit, lol
Have you not used AI agents anytime in the past 6 months?
They can pull in information that you don’t write down, it can create Powerpoint slides, it can create mermaid diagrams from your description.
Those are not things you just do manually because you can? At that point why not code in Notepad instead of relying on the stupid machine assisted IDEs?
Any information that whatever you're working on hinges upon, you need to already know and have confirmed before you start working on it. So not only did you need to look it up anyway, only you know what aspects of that information are most important for the goals of your work. Of course, there can also be less vital pieces of information that you may consult as you work, like maybe you want to compare the size of something with football fields, to make it harder to understand. Undoubtedly an AI can do that for you, but in the end you still need to look it up to verify it, so you haven't really saved any time or effort.
It's a similar kind of story for things like generating PowerPoint slides. Slides based on what? An article? The script? Slides that just summarise the prose make for a terrible presentation and aren't any better as a starting point for one. Also, anything that can be described using less time and (cognitive) energy than to just write it in Mermaid code, isn't worth making a diagram out of.
This is comparison makes no sense, because an IDE is the very opposite of AI. There is little value in a person manually performing the same algorithms over and over again, other than maybe for a learning process. So if they can be automated, it just means that people can focus their efforts on doing the work that requires, you know, personhood. AI is the opposite in that it's useless for procedural automation, and the only thing it can do automatically is the kind of work that can only have value if a person is doing it.
Ok
And it is usually half right, its really a mess, unless you give it a really good rough draft outline.
I find writing the code is the easy part. The difficult part is figuring out what the requirements are, fitting together all of the data relationships, figuring out the security so the correct people and systems have access to the data. To do these things I need very specific knowledge of the systems I'm working on, knowledge the AI doesn't have.
I could see it could give you a simple interface that's similar to something it's been trained on. But it's capabilities are very limited in terms of doing anything novel. It can't actually understand a problem, it can only give some code similar to problems that exist in it's training data. Sometimes that's useful, since at times I do have to solve problems that's been solved by others. But most of the time the AI can't understand what I'm trying to do and it's easier to write the code than it is to try to explain to an LLM how to write the code I want it to write.
Maybe you are doing some exotic stuff, but for me it’s more than capable of writing code, coding is mostly about applying existing patterns to solve known problems, very few programmers deal with novel problems.
Design Patterns book has been out for what? 2 decades, and it’s not outdated.
For good team interoperability you want to have code that’s standardized, that’s also where LLMs excel at.
It’s a nice productivity tool, just like an IDE is a nice productivity tool
In software engineering, sure there's patterns, but that's just guidelines. Eventually you run up against a problem where an something you don't have control over isn't 100% reliable so you have to think through how to handle that scenario. Maybe you retry an API call, maybe you notify some people about the issue, it's all context dependent what you need to do. The AI doesn't know what to do, because how would it? There are a massive (I won't say infinite, but in terms of a human lifespan it may as well be) number of combinations of technology X connecting to technology Y. So there is always going to be a great many problems that no one has ever encountered before. LLMs increasing the number of features in the software doesn't solve those kinds of problems it just increases the number of problem.
I think it's fine to think of it as a tool, like an IDE. But just like an IDE, it doesn't solve the problems, the person using the tool solves the problem.
For instance today, the LLM explained to me how to enable SSL certificate negotiation with TLS 1.3 some shitty IIS setup I have to maintain. I used the LLM because I figured that I'm probably not the only one that has seen that issue. Now the problem I have to deal with is whether the software that updates the certs might break the config, that's a little less likely the LLM will have a reliable solution to. I might just wait until the software updates the cert an manually test if it broke. The day before I had to launch some stuff in the middle of the night so I wouldn't interfere with business operations. The launch was to change something from single linked list to a doubly linked list which is important for reasons I can't explain now. I mean I would explain it, but honestly I can't remember why. I just have in my notes that it needs to be a doubly linked list for the recursion to work properly. Maybe next week when I fix the FE I'll remember why, but if I was correct many months ago (it's a low priority issue), the FE should now have the data it needs to solve whatever problem was there.
So yeah, I use LLMs sometimes for problems that I think other people have seen before but sure as hell can't be driving on what I do. Someone has to make the various pieces of software work together, know the business the software is being used in. More software means more problems that someone has to figure out. If you make n pieces of software with LLMs, you're make n! problems to solve.
Yes AI or LLM isn’t able to code solution itself, but it can fill in a lot of gaps based on what you tell it, it can copy existing patterns.
And you can direct it, it’s a tool like an IDE, just much better .