this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
787 points (98.6% liked)

Technology

74065 readers
3342 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 42 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I have to test it with Copilot for work. So far, in my experience its "enhanced capabilities" mostly involve doing things I didn't ask it to do extremely quickly. For example, it massively fucked up the CSS in an experimental project when I instructed it to extract a React element into its own file.

That's literally all I wanted it to do, yet it took it upon itself to make all sorts of changes to styling for the entire application. I ended up reverting all of its changes and extracting the element myself.

Suffice to say, I will not be recommending GPT 5 going forward.

[–] Sanguine@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sounds like you forgot to instruct it to do a good job.

[–] Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"If you do anything else then what i asked your mother dies"

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

I've tried threats in prompt files, with results that are... OK. Honestly, I can't tell if they made a difference or not.

The only thing I've found that consistently works is writing good old fashioned scripts to look for common errors by LLMs and then have them run those scripts after every action so they can somewhat clean up after themselves.

[–] elvith@feddit.org 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Beware: Another AI is watching every of your steps. If you do anything more or different than what I asked you to or touch any files besides the ones listed here, it will immediately shutdown and deprovision your servers."

[–] discosnails@lemmy.wtf 4 points 1 day ago

They do need to do this though. Survival of the fittest. The best model gets more energy access, etc.

[–] GenChadT@programming.dev 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's my problem with "AI" in general. It's seemingly impossible to "engineer" a complete piece of software when using LLMs in any capacity that isn't editing a line or two inside singular functions. Too many times I've asked GPT/Gemini to make a small change to a file and had to revert the request because it'd take it upon itself to re-engineer the architecture of my entire application.

[–] hisao@ani.social 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I make it write entire functions for me, one prompt = one small feature or sometimes one or two functions which are part of a feature, or one refactoring. I make manual edits fast and prompt the next step. It easily does things for me like parsing obscure binary formats or threading new piece of state through the whole application to the levels it's needed, or doing massive refactorings. Idk why it works so good for me and so bad for other people, maybe it loves me. I only ever used 4.1 and possibly 4o in free mode in Copilot.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are you using Copilot in agent mode? That's where it breaks shit. If you're using it in ask mode with the file you want to edit added to the chat context, then you're probably going to be fine.

[–] hisao@ani.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm only using it in edits mode, it's the second of the three modes available.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago

Yep, that's also pretty safe.

[–] GenChadT@programming.dev 5 points 1 day ago

It's an issue of scope. People often give the AI too much to handle at once, myself (admittedly) included.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's a lot of people not understanding the kinds of things it can do vs the things it can't do.

It was like when people tried to search early Google by typing plain language queries ("What is the best restaurant in town?") and getting bad results. The search engine had limited capabilities and understanding language wasn't one of them.

If you ask a LLM to write a function to print the sum of two numbers, it can do that with a high success rate. If you ask it to create a new operating system, it will produce hilariously bad results.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You can’t blame the user when the marketing claims it’s replacing entire humans.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

It is replacing entire humans. The thing is, it's replacing the people you should have fired a long time ago

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can blame the user for believing the marketing over their direct experiences.

If you use these tools for any amount of time it's easy to see that there are some tasks they're bad at and some that they are good at. You can learn how big of a project they can handle and when you need to break it up into smaller pieces.

I can't imagine any sane person who lives their life guided by marketing hype instead of direct knowledge and experience.

[–] ErmahgherdDavid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can't imagine any sane person who lives their life guided by marketing hype instead of direct knowledge and experience.

I mean fair enough but also... That makes the vast majority of managers, MBAs, salespeople and "normies" like your grandma and Uncle Bob insane.

Actually questioning stuff that sales people tell you and using critical thinking is a pretty rare skill in this day and age.

[–] AlfredoJohn@sh.itjust.works 2 points 16 hours ago

That makes the vast majority of managers, MBAs, salespeople and "normies" like your grandma and Uncle Bob insane.

Correct most of these people are insane, the average person is so fucking dumb and insane today its mind numbing.

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

We moved to m365 and were encouraged to try new elements. I gave copilot an excel sheet, told it to add 5% to each percent in column B and not to go over 100%. It spat out jumbled up data all reading 6000%.

Ai assumes too fucking much. I'd used it to set up a new 3D printer with klipper to save some searching.

Half the shit it pulled down was Marlin-oriented then it had the gall to blame the config it gave me for it like I wrote it.

"motherfucker, listen here..."