‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers.
‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers - Aftermath
Yeah mine is demanding that we prove that we're using copilot to generate code.
I wouldn't care so much if copilot wasn't a hot pile of garbage. It's incredibly slow, constantly fails halfway through generating a file, can only handle updating or creating one file at a time, and the code it comes up with always needs manual correction to actually work.
I mainly use it to generate unit tests and it frequently makes shit up that clearly won't work. Like directly invoking non-exported functions that I deliberately choose not to export, because they don't need to be exported.
90% of the time it actually takes me longer to use copilot. The only thing it's good is autocomplete.
demanding that we prove that we’re using copilot to generate code
Because that's how one gets value right? It's not because the tool is so efficient people WANT to use it even though they should not (e.g. due to commercial secrets)... no instead you force them to use it. /s
To be fair, it’s a huge cost to the company and they need to justify that there is value. Forcing you to make regular use may be an petty, but getting you to learn it improves your skill base and getting you to use it justifies the cost
prove that we’re using copilot to generate code
How do they expect you to do that? And are they capable of telling the difference if you lie about it?
Oh, that's easy to check, if the code is barely functional nonsensical pile of shit, then it was autogenerated.
I asked the same question in our meeting about it. They apparently have metrics tracking as part of their contract for copilot. But they also want to see demos etc. Basically forcing us to do busy work and increase stress so the execs can justify blowing money and political capital on AI.
I’m sure it logs requests somewhere and they can just check
The only thing it’s good is autocomplete.
Which isn't surprising because that's all most "AI" is...
I mainly use it to generate unit tests and it frequently makes shit up that clearly won’t work. Like directly invoking non-exported functions that I deliberately choose not to export, because they don’t need to be exported.
If you work where I work, their solution is to just #include "the_file.c" so they have access to all the functions/variables I painstakingly marked static specifically to prevent them from trying to unit test the internals.
Lol, that's ridiculous. At least here they aren't requiring us to do that (yet).
In my case, this is modular js code. Copilot doesn't know how to test the internals of the module so it just calls them directly, which would cause an exception because the function would be undefined.
I end up rewriting the test myself whenever it does this because there's no reason to export those functions, it would just cause problems. Typically all this requires is changing the test inputs so the internal logic is covered by the test. It's just too dumb to know that, because it doesn't actually understand the code at all.
How do you prove that you are using copilot?
Is there a way to reference your chat history?
I would put broken commits with a message saying it comes from the LLMs, then revert the whole stuff in another commit to fix the crap.