Ugh… I’m so tired of “microslop” and “AI slop”.

I’m not defending Microsoft in any way, but they were releasing buggy updates long before the rise of AI.

You know what’s going on inside the large companies that are hoping to cash in on the AI thing? All workers are being pushed to use AI and goals are set that targets x% of all code written be AI-generated.

And AI agents are deceptively bad at what they do. They are like the djinn: they will grant the word of your request but not the spirit. Eg they love to use helper functions but won’t necessarily reuse helper functions instead of writing new copies each time it needs one.

Here’s a test that will show that, with all the fancy advancements they’ve made, they are still just advanced text predictors: pick a task and have an AI start that task and then develop it over several prompts, test and debug it (debug via LLM still). Now ask the LLM to analyse the code it just generated. It will have a lot of notes.

An entity using intelligence would use the same approach to write the code as it does to analyze it. Not so for an LLM, which is just predicting tokens with a giant context window. There is no thought pattern behind it, even when it predicts a “thinking process” before it can act. It just fits your prompt into the best fit out of all the public git depots it was trained on, from commit notes and diffs, bug reports and discussions, stack exchange exchanges, and the like, which I’d argue is all biased towards amateur and beginner programming rather than expert-level. Plus it includes other AI-generated code now.

So yeah, MS did introduce bugs in the past, even some pretty big ones (it was my original reason for holding back on updates, at least until the enshitification really kicked in), but now they are pushing what is pretty much a subtle bug generator on the whole company so it’s going to get worse, but admitting it has fundamental problems will pop the AI bubble, so instead they keep trying to fix it with bandaids in the hopes that it’ll run out of problems before people decide to stop feeding it money (which still isn’t enough, but at least there is revenue).

Now ask the LLM to analyse the code it just generated. It will have a lot of notes.

Not only will it have a lot of notes, every time you ask if to analyze the code it will find new notes. Real engineers are telling me this is a good code review tool but it can’t even find the same issues reliably. I don’t understand how adding a bunch of non-deterministic tooling is supposed to make my code better.

Though on that note, I don’t think having an LLM review your code is useless, but if it’s code that you care about, read the response and think about it to see if you agree. Sometimes it has useful pointers, sometimes it is full of shit.