Microsoft cannot and will not ever get better at naming things. It is said the universe will split open and and eldritch beast will consume the stars the day Microsoft stops using inconsistent and overlapping names for different and conflicting products.

Isn't that right .Net/dotnet

There was also "Active" before that, but .NET was next level crazy...

It's unbelievable how bad they failed at this. If you do the same with Claude or ChatGPT via simple web interface, they get miles ahead.

No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.

I understand your point about naming, but it's always helpful to know what the products do.

One thing that I don't know about is if they have an AI product that can work on combining unstructured and databases to give better insights on any new conversation? e.g. like say the LLM knows how to convert user queries to the domain model of tables and extract information? What companies are doing such things?

This would be something that can be deployed on-prem/ their own private cloud that is controlled by the company, because the data is quite sensitive.

Is it the context menu key? Or did they do another Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Win+L thing?

I only gave it up because it felt like a liability and, ahem, it was awkward to review screenshots and delete inopportune ones.

I have developed decent intuition on what kinds of problems Codex, Claude, Cursor(& sub-variants), Composer etc. will or will not be able to do well across different axes of speed, correctness, architectural taste, ...

If I had to reflect on why I still don't use Gemini, it's because they were late to the party and I would now have to be intentional about spending time learning yet another set of intuitions about those models.

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It's also just not as good at being self-directed and doing all of the rest of the agent-like behaviors we expect, i.e. breaking down into todolists, determining the appropriate scope of work to accomplish, proper tool calling, etc.

GPT-5.2 sometimes does this too. Opus-4.5 is the best at understanding what you actually want, though it is ofc not perfect.

There's also all the other Copilot branded stuff which has varying use. The web based chat is OK, but I'm not sure which model powers it. Whatever it is it can be very verbose and doesn't handle images very well. The Office stuff seems to be completely useless so far.

It's pretty clear that Microsoft had "Everything must have Copilot" dictated from the top (or pretty close). They wanted to be all-in on AI but didn't start with any actual problems to solve. If you're an SWE or a PM or whatever and suddenly your employment/promotion/etc prospects depend on a conspicuously implemented Copilot thing, you do the best you can and implement a chat bot (and other shit) that no one asked for or wants.

I don't know Anthropic's process but it produced a tool that clearly solves a specific problem: essentially write code faster. I would guess that the solution grew organically given that the UI isn't remotely close to what you'd expect a product manager to want. We don't know how many internal false-starts there were or how many people were working on other solutions to this problem, but what emerged clearly solved that problem, and can generalize to other problems.

In other words, Microsoft seems to have focused on a technology buzzword. Anthropic let people solve their own problems and it led to an actual product. The kind that people want. The difference is like night and day.

Who knows what else might have happened in the last 12 months if C-suites were focused more on telling SWEs to be productive and less on forcing specific technology buzzwords because they were told it's the future.

meanwhile ms and github, is waiting for any breadcrumb that chatgpt leave with

https://github.com/features/copilot/cli

Specifically WHY they use Apple hardware is something I can only speculate on. Presumably it's easier to launch Windows on Mac than the other way around, and they would likely need to do that as .NET and its related technologies are cross platform as of 2016. But that's a complete guess on my part.

Am *NOT* a Microsoft employee, just an MVP for Developer Technnolgies.

Tldr: Copilot has 1% marketshare among web chatbots and 1.85% of paid M365 users bought a subscription to it.

As much as I think AI is overrated already, Copilot is pretty much the worst performing one out there from the big tech companies. Despite all the Copilot buttons in office, windows, on keyboards and even on the physical front of computers now.

We have to use it at work but it just feels like if they spent half the effort they spend on marketing on actually trying to make it do its job people might actually want to use it.

Half the time it's not even doing anything. "Please try again later" or the standard error message Microsoft uses for every possible error now: "Something went wrong". Another pet peeve of mine, those useless error messages.

Copilot's main problem seems to be people don't know how to use it. They need to delete all their plugins except the vscode, CLI ones, and disable all models except anthropic ones.

The Claude Code reputation diff is greatly exaggerated beyond that.

No, one researcher at Microsoft made a personal LinkedIn post that his team were using that as their 'North Star' for porting and transpiling existing C and C++ code, not writing new code, and when the internet hallucinated that he meant Windows and this meant new code, and started copypasting this as "Microsoft's goal", the post was edited and Microsoft said it isn't the company's goal.

I use LLMs all day every day, but measuring someone or something by the number of lines of code produced is still incredibly stupid, in my opinion.

"Microsoft has over 100,000 software engineers working on software projects of all sizes."

So that would mean 100 000 000 000 (100 billion) lines of code per month. Frightening.

  Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Generating bilions of lines of code that is unmaintainable and buggy should easily achieve that. ;-)

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

So with this level of productivity Windows could completely degrade itself and collapse in one week instead of 15 years.

This will lead to so much enshitification.

they're fucked