We've gotta have a competition to give a name to whatever hellchild is an amalgam of word excel and PowerPoint... Jesus WEPP?

This explains a lot of things...

... and should serve as a warning example.

Based on personal experience I would guess that software engineers are using AI in development 30% of the time.

It'll be something like WorXPoint and everyone will go "what the hell".

But actually it's more likely something like SuperDuperMerger and people will have no idea what it's supposed to be.

It's supposed to be LibreOffice-killer.

MS: "Hey, open-sourcers ... implement this! "

Microsoft 123.

Lotus had WYSIWYG text in their spreadsheet and tried to present it as a word processor before they had Amipro (I forget the details).

Look how well it worked for them!

You mgiht be thinking of the (original) Lotus Symphony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Symphony_(MS-DOS)

No, it was definitely Lotus 123. I remember a young trainee being sent on a training course for Lotus. When she returned, she insisted on using Lotus as a word processor.

It was DOS though.

an amalgam of word excel and PowerPoint.

World Exception Power

an anagram of word excel PowerPoint is excretion plow powder

Buggy McBugface obviously :)

well played sir/madam/AI

It depends on what's meant by that. Individual LibreOffice applications are calls to a common executable with a flag to tell it whis functionality the user wanted. He might simply be catching up with that but it would likely be a complete rewrite. Something for Office users to look forward to.

Surely they'll call it "Office App"?

So Microsoft is, by merging its three primary end-user apps, attempting to create a propeietary version of Emacs.

It's not a "hell child" it's " a living artifact. "

So the Antichrist then?

and do they use AI to write the tests to test the generated code? Is this marking your own homework, and cannot see the defects because it didn't see them in the first place?

Yes. Exactly this. Thumbs up. I don’t think I have a problem with some code being written with the help of an AI. That’s just code monkeying. But tests? The formal declaration of the specification? The do you really understand what the hell you’re supposed to be developing? Seems like a bad idea to me.

This was my thought. It's been many decades since I wrote (first as a schoolboy and then skilled amateur- but in those days most of us were) any software. The hard part wasn't writing the code. It was working out what I needed the code to do- and who for and what they'd do with it, and why. That sort of human stuff.

"do they use AI to write the tests to test the generated code?"

Testing??? This is Microsoft we're talking about - testing is done by the plebs customers!

I call complete and utter bullshit on these numbers. If they were true, then the whole software industry would already be in complete uproar and upside down.

30% of some projects

(My emphasis)

Two is "some". Maybe just the one, rounded up.

I suspect this is probably the internal test project for Copilot, and it represents the absolute best they could get to compile.

Run? Nah, it doesn't need to run!

It compiles, lets put it in production...

The software industry is already upside down. Why do they have to keep patching the rubbish product. I am glad I don't have to patch my car every year or more.

If you had a Tesla you would have to do exactly that...

He says 30% of the code in the repos, He doesn't say where those repos are against the product release.

It will be interesting to see how buggy the next release is.

He also doesn't indicate how that code gets in the repo, but implies the statistic is from committer status. So if he's got 30% of his repos due to uncurated AI commits the next release is going to be .. interesting. I'd hope for his sake that all the commits were made by humans, after testing, and 30% is the proportion that used AI assistance on the changes.

These are true. They asked their LLM and it immediately returned with these numbers.

Uhm, it's already upside down and has been for a very long time.

It's easier than ever to believe 10 impossible things every morning.

LLM inference training is by its very nature lossy, and as a result LLM generated code quality is significantly poorer than the average quality of the code used to train it.

This would normally be a concern , however for Microsoft, below average probably represents a huge increase in code quality, going by the number of critical flaws patched every single month. I can see why they are so keen on it.

It's not having the LLM write code that's the problem.

The problem is how the hell are you testing or debugging that? Because tests can't ALSO be written by AI, and debugging something that another human has written is bad enough, or even something that YOU WROTE YOURSELF. Trying to debug some spam-churn out of an LLM? No thanks, I'd rather be out of work.

Testing? This is MICROSOFT!! Testing is for losers....

That's what end-users are for.

To be fair (and I'm not), it could be done by a DIFFERENT AI, preferably separately trained with different data.

Only if you're prepared to tell all your customers: "Sorry, no human was ever involved, our AI just did this, not our fault".

Good luck with that.

Given the spin that's put out about AI half the people would believe that and the other half would be saying "It can't be worse".

This would normally be a concern , however for Microsoft, below average probably represents a huge increase in code quality, going by the number of critical flaws patched every single month. I can see why they are so keen on it.

I'm not so sure.

Given the IMHO rather dramatic decline in (remaining) quality of their latest releases I'd argue they have actually started this a while back, in which case the promises of Microsoft that this would somehow improve have about the same value and persistence as one from Trump.

For instance, the new Outlook is so feature deficient that it's almost not usable for users who have come to rely on those features. For instance, personally I loath Microsoft deciding that urgent messages cannot be simply merged in the new date sort and will ALWAYS appear first. I can see why that is important for some, but not for everyone and it is in my opinion becoming very clear that Microsoft has simply stopped listening to its users, because, let's face it, it's not like a majority of them even has a choice..

Windows 11 has completely gone to shite and Copilot has never been anything other than complete shite.

If they were 30% written by 'AI' that would explain a lot.

Ai increases explain this abomination

It all makes sense now. no real people coding, garbage churned out based on historic questionable code. No-one understanding it, or testing it internally.

"Ship it to the users, let them find the bugs"

As for a uber-app combining Word, Excel and electronic crayons. The users I've witnessed can barely operate the stand alone applications, dread to think the support calls which will come for someone who can't format their table into columns like Word while making it fly in like PowerPoint.

I suppose eventually they'll shoe-horn Outlook into this abomination too. Programs aren't complete until they can email.

It seems like you are .. It seems like you are .. It seems like you are ..

One ring to rule them all? No thanks...

I make data. I choose a program to generate it; I choose a program to process it. Those two programs may or may not be the same as each other; there may be more than one choice in either field. But _I_ choose...

The end point they're aiming at is you write a description of what you want done with the data, and it's done for you. You don't have to worry about the software. It may pick the package for you. Or it may even code it on the spot.

Whether we get there or not, I don't know. But that's the vision. My guess is it will work for low hanging fruit. Where the boundary between low and high is, I don't know.

That's how programming already works. We write a functional description (we call it the spec), then we write a procedural description (we call it the code) then machines write a register-level description (we call it the executable).

In general, the functional description is incomplete and the programmer makes a bunch of judgement calls to turn it into a procedural description. This results in bugs. You can significantly reduce the number of bugs by having a more thorough functional description, but the people who write those aren't generally capable of doing better, which is why they don't.

Having AI do the procedural 'compilation' puts the onus on the functional spec writer to write a good spec. That's not going to happen.

See title

"Zuckerberg said he thinks AI coding presents an opportunity to improve security"

He's underselling. The more AI-written code you release, the more opportunities you'll have to improve security.

Nadya needs to look at the past - kind of

Couldn't do graphics, but everything else in one

libreoffice24.8 -writer

libreoffice24.8 -calc

etc.

I cannot understand why the trade press burbles on about Power Point. The programs I use, in order of importance, are One Note, Word, and Excel.

I have to say that's what I use too. PowerPoint,or its LO equivalent, is something I have in the background when I'm doing my voluntary "Digital Champion" thing, because Local Authority corporate requires it, and which I pretty much ignore after I've done the "housekeeping" slides.

If you need a long flow of slides behind you to say what you are meant to be telling the audience, you aren't telling the audience properly.

The long list of charts is so when they come back to look at the stuff6 months later they think ! Ah yes, I remember. Without these... people forget or misremember.

Also think of the people who's first language is not English