Always Check Your Inputs
Background:
- About 8 Waves of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in 2025 (in Less Than 5 Months)
- 3 Months in 2025, 4 Waves of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft, Now Offices Shut Down Permanently
- Microsoft's Debt Grew 2.1 Billion Dollars in the Past 3 Months Alone or 8.2 Billion in the Past Half a Year
- Microsoft in Trouble as Azure Breaks and Only Days After Promising Investment in "Datacentres" Construction of Actual Datacentres Paused (Expect More Azure Layoffs Very Soon)
- Microsoft Isn't Laying Off Tens of Thousands to 'Invest' in Slop ('Hey Hi'), It's Laying Off Tens of Thousands Because It's Running Out of Money (and Willing Lenders)
Garbage in, garbage out. Or wrong assumptions, wrong corollary.
I don't want to embarrass the person I respond to here, so links and names will be omitted.
I just saw the following message, to which I felt the urge to respond:
Recently Microsoft has announced substantial layoffs.Microsoft to cut up to 9,000 jobs as it invests in AI - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxl0w1w394o
Aside from the fact that BBC News [sic] is taking bribes from Bill Epsteingate (for well over a decade already), it is perpetuating a false number - as usual that came from Microsoft itself. The real number is a lot higher, apparently with a lot more to come.
We already responded to this "invests in AI" thing. It's a huge lie. Of course the "BillBC" is perpetuating it. This frames a failure as a promise.
Such restructuring of the workforce is taking place when the company is making large investments in generative AI, which can among other things, generate computer source code.
Nonsense. The myth of "investment" aside, LLMs don't make source code, they do low-grade plagiarism and produce poor quality "code", typically strung together by non-coders or bad coders.
Naturally people assume that Microsoft is assigning coding more and more to AI and fewer engineers are needed.
No, they outsource to bad coders. They lower the salaries.
Microsoft claims 30% of new code is written by AI - PCWorld https://www.pcworld.com/article/2768784/microsoft-ceo-claims-30-of-new-code-is-written-by-ai.html
This is false. We debunked this already, e.g. in [1, 2].
Microsoft's CEO reveals that AI writes up to 30% of its code - some projects may have all of its code written by AI - Tom's Hardware https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsofts-ceo-reveals-that-ai-writes-up-to-30-percent-of-its-code-some-projects-may-have-all-of-its-code-written-by-ai
A scammer and liar said something, mainstream media repeated it. Like "Bill Says" and "Trump Says"...
It's not journalism, but it is churnalism for sponsors like Bill Epsteingate. Nobody bothered to check if this was even true.
But I observe a major contradiction. If Microsoft's engineers find AI code generation efficient and effective, so should those working on free software projects.
It's not "AI", it's slop. Good coders would not save time by reaching out to slop. They can, however, find good code libraries and properly reuse them, as many do. Then they can also comply with the licences and keep things updated/patched, based on upstream modifications/updates. This is coding should be done. "Vibe" coding is not coding.
An associate too has noted the part about the number of dismissed Microsoft employees being much higher. Then he said we must "point out that the misleading posts from Microsoft are misleading people..."
He also took note of many recent articles (predating the latest wave of layoffs by 1-2 days) or the blog posts "about how Microsoft is forcing its remaining employees to use LLM slop in their code. That Microsoft must force people to use LLMs shows there is at best no advantage in coding given the internal competition within and between departments and even employees."
Citing this Microsoft propaganda site, he says: "If there had been even the smallest benefit from LLM slop, it'd be used everywhere there already."
They operate and make policies based on wishful thinking. At what cost and whose risk?
There should be submissions of AI-generated code, discussions of the quality of such code, user reviews of various AI-powered development tools and suggestions of how AI can enhance traditional development tools, but I see none of it.
It does not work. See for example:
Slop code, slop commits, and slop "git messages" are banned by many projects for good reasons, based on direct experience.
I arrived to this conclusion after a cursory check of some developers' lists in the following archive:https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/
Maybe I'm not looking hard enough. If anybody can point out to good examples of AI usage in free software development, I'd like to know.
It's not "AI", it's slop, and it's generally rejected.
Companies that hail "AI" are making up excuses for their own failures, which result in mass layoffs and/or replacing "Expensive" staff with unskilled "AI", which sometimes means All Indians.
I believe that if AI is capable of code generation, it should be up to other, related tasks. Code inspection is one of them. In many regards inspecting existing code is easier than creating code from scratch. It is strange that we hear a lot about AI code generation and little about AI code inspection.
See the above link regarding Curl. Too many false positives only serve to obscure real (human-submitted) bug reports and audits. They do far more harm than good. They're a noise. █