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They're attempting to make excuses for their inability to create functional software
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Not suprised
They include tab complete of github copilot which is often as much as a single dot. Same thing they've done with all github copilot stats.
Windows hate train looks fun, but as someone who works in the industry, most of that code is probably just unit tests and boilerplate stuff.
Copilot is decent at quickly writing huge amounts of mostly correct, tedious unit test code, depending on your language/framework. And since Microsoft works with languages like C# and .NET for their native apps, and likely backend too, there is quite a bit of verbosity that Copilot can take care of. Also, documentation might count as well.
No real code is AI-generated. He's just saying shit like this to keep idiot investors happy.
It shows
Beat me to it.
That explains so much
Code written by software doesn't mean AI unless you ignore compilers
Executives lie to boost profits and justify their decisions, I doubt MS execs even know how much of their code is AI generated just like the ad sales company exec they were talking to in the article
This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!
Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.
AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.
If this were true there would massive databreaches. AI is really bad at keeping private keys private. Not to even mention the default credentials it would use because it doesnt have commen sense to change them
I disagree. It feels like your making this assumption from the point of view that people using AI to develop turn their whole brain off and let AI take the wheel. Any dev I know using AI uses it as a time saving measure, i.e. advanced autocomplete, or to assist with troubleshooting as a form of advanced search engine. Also you would have no need to give the AI the actual key itself, at most you would give it the title of the variable the key is saved as.
I find it hard to believe because I work at an adjacent company who has made similar claims and it is complete bullshit.
I do think there is some about of "AI provided a smart complete and the developer hit 'tab' to take the changes" equalling "this code was written by AI" in some metrics that go to the execs. And since the execs mandated high AI use everyone is fine just saying they have high AI use regardless of how true it is.
Fun fact: Nadella has been replaced with an AI agent a couple of months ago and nobody has noticed yet. "Copilot, while I'm away, generate bs on AI adoption and fire a bunch of employees, ok?"
Well, that explains Windows 11.
I'm still forced to use Microsoft Outlook and teams, unfortunately, and boy oh boy is it bad.
Yesterday i spent 45 minutes of a 1,5 meeting (that would have been 45 minutes) on trying teams to please try and use the right microphone, please share a screen (not working under Firefox or chrome now, apparently)
I can't wait for the day that I have some time to get us off that dog shit
I love that Outlook occasionally fires up one of its keyboard shortcuts and clears your entire email you were typing if you're not paying attention.
Fucking love it.
not working under Firefox
Weird
or chrome
Oh, there it is
Feature exclusive, huh!
Outlook is pretty damned bullet proof, Teams, OTOH, is a fucking mess. I can see IT wanting to keep everything in the same ecosystem, that's perfectly sane, but I'm certain Zoom can be setup to honor AD credentials. We set it to use Google SSO.
Ha, yeah my Outlook will randomly just not be able to connect to server when starting up. This is from fresh boot every day, some days it just can't, have to reboot and then it works! Fucking brilliant, they managed to break email.
That’s… not something to be proud of.
And how many times was all that code rewritten?
Yeah that'd explain some stuff. Happy to have switched to Linux
Same. My games even run faster.
This only makes sense if they are counting intellisense auto complete as "AI written"
Was the auto complete in visual studio not a "trained" set before the llm craze kicked off? Would not surprise me if they decided to include that.
Has to be something like that. Nadella is somehow cheating with the number, trying to keep the AI hype going.
You could say ALL of my latest scripts were written with AI. Because I often use it to get a hint or gather some boilerplate code (which I still go over and modify).
Eww. Maybe it’s not really true and Microsoft just wants to remind us that big corporate AI is so legit that all the software you use all day was “helped” by it.
But really for me the issue is the company, not the AI. If I read an article about AI generated code making it into the Linux kernel or some gnu/kde/etc utilities, I don’t think I would worry much because those changes will be reviewed by cranky old nerds who care about the functionality of the software first. I have no such confidence in Microsoft’s processes.
So this explains why Microsoft Swiftkey is total dogshit now. Also why the Outlook app barely works.
Its unbelievable.
I used to be able to swipe freely on SwiftKey, and now I can't really do it without being extra careful and mindful of not spelling the wrong thing. Idk what Microsoft did to the product but I wouldn't call it an improvement.
Idk what Microsoft did to the product but I wouldn't call it an improvement.
I think the article we're looking at here isn't really hyperbolic. They got AI to write all their code and broke the Keyboard.
Just FYI, if you can live without swipping, I recommend FUTO keyboard., it is basically Swiftkey but it actually works and doesn't come with Microsoft's spyware built in.
It's what I use now, and I'm really happy. Don't be fooled by it being in Alpha, because it works flawlessly (minus the swipe, which is hit and miss).
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out
He used the words "written by software". This is ambiguous and doesn't mean AI, for example, using annotations for variables and generating the getters and setters would count. Right click and create function body for interface function definitions also.
They're exaggerating to pretend their AI is more useful than it is.
Don't forget code generation for stuff like bindings or database schemes
Intellisense in visual studio has also been really good for over a decade. Which is technically also written by software and not me.
I mean, really good intellisense is a great improvement, but it's not replacing devs any time soon.
People have been using annotations to generate code since I rode my dinosaur to work.
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.
"Auto complete generated 30% of characters"
Fixed it.
"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
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.
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.
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"Up to" can also be 0%. Why is there even a need to say "up to" here.
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I bet they’re counting code written while someone had an AI plugin installed as “written by AI” and I bet that accounts for almost all of that 30%. On top of that, I’m betting that they made it mandatory to have such a plug in, and the other 70% is just code written before they mandated this.
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