[pleonasticity]

I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself. Just because he contributed to the first prototype does not entitle him to claim creation. He wasn’t even the first person inside Microsoft to use LLMs in an IDE completion experience. The work from prototype to product is an order of magnitude more than prototype alone.

[orph]

Orilly? We had no PM, EM, or designer: I played all those roles for 1.5 years.

I was one of the first to touch the OAI code model. Me and Albert developed the in-the-wild testing harness still in use today. We pulled all nighters to get GitHub approved for participation in the MSFT-OpenAI deal using those test results.

Existing Microsoft AI teams worked to halt our work, pushing their own small, worse models instead of OpenAI's.

I protoyped and lobbied for creation of the VScode extension. I invented and hacked the ghost text prototype into VScode, I invented the block based termination and implemented all the tree-sitter based logic needed to do it. Then I had to lobby up to Satya to get VScode to implement proper support in less than 6 months.

I named it Copilot.

I implemented GH auth, made the waitlist and onboarding. Helped design the e2e http/2 go server, after designing the fast.ly based precursor. Coordinated moving from OpenAI datacenter to Azure to improve Asia experience, and oversaw the cutover.

I was Chief Architect. It was my baby. Sad if this is how they are spinning the story internally at GitHub today.

[pawelduda]

Seems like people are eager to attack you because you've shown a bit of arrogance, but if what you wrote is true then it's completely fair to feel frustrated about it. I sympathize with you. I used to feel this way about much much smaller achievements of mine.

Even though I don't use it personally, Copilot is a great tool and the bonus is laughable when you put it next to the impact it had on how people write code. For me lesson learned was that in order to spend your career in a good place and to save yourself months or years of time is to voice your concerns early and move on if all you hear are promises without any follow up.

[seattle_spring]

If your title was Chief Architect then accomplishments like this are baseline expectations for an IC, and your comp would have reflected that. It would have been well into 7 figure territory.

[saberience]

No offense but this comment sounds really egotistical and shows a total lack of self-awareness. Software is all about teams and if you have one guy who thinks he's god's gift it ultimately hurts the whole team. I'm not surprised your compensation is much less than you think it should be, I suspect Microsoft has a more accurate view of your value than you do yourself.

[pokeypokes]

The overwhelmingly most valuable (and difficult) part of copilot is the work done by openAI. You're acting like you single handedly built it.

I can't stand working with people like you, classic main character syndrome.

[ayemel]

Interesting that you switched to “we” and “our” pretty quickly in this comment when describing the work…

[lopkeny12ko]

Your response basically confirms the parent commenter's assessment that you're completely full of yourself and sound awful to work with.

[candybar]

Btw, your message behind this is that you should work at a startup (maybe yours), is that correct? How do you plan to compensate individuals who do this type of work at your own startup?

[jebronie]

Thank you for creating copilot. It's a great achievement. Sad that you did not get the recognition you deserve and grifters stole it.

[belfalas]

In your mind, what would be fair compensation?

[mjr00]

Their profile does say "creator of GitHub Copilot, Dropbox Paper, MobileCoin, and Hackpad" which indicates a bit of an ego problem. Professional software is a team effort, and pretending to be the only person who worked on a project is a red flag. Most people would say lead developer rather than creator...

[treyfitty]

Well, most interviews I’ve been a part of always emphasize “I wanna hear what YOU did, don’t talk about the team.” It kinda optimizes for embellishing ones contributions, and has almost become expected.

[lostmsu]

> Most people would say lead developer rather than creator...

I think "creator" is entirely appropriate in this case based on the features that he contributed.

[AndyNemmity]

If he built the first prototype, I'd call him a creator of it. It had absolutely nothing to do with who was the first person inside of Microsoft to use LLMs in an IDE completion experience.

I call everyone who builds the first thing the creator(s). This isn't uncommon or weird in my mind at all.

He may be totally fully of himself, but I don't see any realistic argument that he isn't one of the creators.

[defasdefbe]

He's not calling himself "one of the creators" though. He's calling himself the creator, which shits all over the hard work of OpenAI, "Albert" and more.

[lisasays]

I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself.

Thanks for the reality check, and Occam's Razor suggests this is (unfortunately) the most likely explanation for what we're reading.

Sure, employees get taken advantage of, and screwed over by politics all the time. But something about going online and openly (and quit caustically) negging your employer while still on their payroll suggests that there's something seriously off about this guy.

And that in any case, his synopsis of the situation is not to be taken at face value.

Edit: Actually we don't have information about his current status with them. My mistake. Thanks to the commenter below for pointing that out.

[ncann]

Wait he's still employed there? How is this not going to result in a HR call up later on? How can he possibly think this is a good idea? I was under the impression that he already moved on to another company and was just bashing his old employer, which is still a bad idea, but this is just weird.

[40four]

Maybe, but he is in the comments here defending himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was something where all the heavy lifting was done by a couple people. That’s often the case. If it’s true, really doesn’t make me want to work at a huge company like that.

[lylejantzi3rd]

> Thanks for the reality check

What reality check? One online commenter you don't know contradicts another online commenter you don't know.

[deepspace]

I was definitely getting ESR vibes when reading the Twitter thread, and was not surprised to see my suspicions confirmed here.

[zormino]

In a later tweet, he even mentions there were 6 other people and they built on top of existing work. Doesn't really sound like he's within a mile of solely creating anything, no matter what spin he likes to apply.

[pjot]

> correction: + much of OpenAI eng, plus years of their bleeding edge research

Pretty telling

[adverbly]

> The work from prototype to product is an order of magnitude more than prototype alone.

The risk from zero to prototype is an order of magnitude more than the risk from prototype to product.

[cloverich]

What? Prototyping is often the easiest and most fun part of projects. Often a prototype taking 1-2 people a few weeks turns into an entire team fleshing it out full over the next year or more. Thats a lot of risk if it goes wrong. Theres usually very little risk in prototypes going wrong, thats one of the main reasons to have a prototype phase to begin with.

[pleonasticity]

What’s the risk in doing your job inside a large corporation?

[lisasays]

How so? If anything it seems the opposite is true. (Prototyping, almost by definition, is almost zero risk. While bringing stuff to market requires real resources, and invokes actual brand and reputation risk. Might be different in some situations, depending on the resources required at respective stages, but that seems to be the long and short of it).

[candybar]

Sure but a lot of things don't happen without that one person pushing for it. If Alex is correct that he's the one who pushed for it to happen and created the momentum for this product feature to exist, despite many others actively pushing against it, that to me deserves a lot of credit.

Now, I have no idea if that's true and to what extent it's true - it's common for ICs to be unaware of the work others have done behind the scenes to convince the right folks and unblock their work (not saying that this is what happened, just that it's not inconsistent with Alex's perception that he drove this himself) - but I'm not sure how anything you're saying disproves his version of the story. You could say that about just about every startup founder.

[rat9988]

What was his contribution to the project? Given the information you give us, he may be the creator of copilot. He may not have made the product, but might be his father, the one who did the crucial original work with most added value, even if it's only 5% of the work.

[mr90210]

> He wasn’t even the first person inside Microsoft to use LLMs in an IDE completion experience

It is you who is full of oneself, your attempt to belittle his contributions shows the kind of human you are. Stop hiding behind the keyboard and tell that to his face.

Downvote at will.