They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active".

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...

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.

The execs buying Microsoft products are presumed to be as clueless as the execs naming Microsoft products.

AI really should be a freaking feature, not the identity of their products. What MS is doing now is like renaming Photoshop to Photoshop Neural Filter.

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.

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.

My default everyday model is still Gemimi 3 in AI Studio, even for programming related problems. But for agentic work Antigravity felt very early-stages beta-ware when I tried it.

I will say that at least Gemimi 3 is usually able to converge on a correct solution after a few iterations. I tried Grok for a medium complexity task and it quickly got stuck trying to change minor details without being able to get itself out.

Do you have any advice on how to use Antigravity more effectively? I'm open to trying it again.

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.

[0] based on user Thumbs up/Thumbs down voting

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.

It's on the top of most leaderboards on lmarena.ai

Both Claude and ChatGPT were unbearable, not primarily because of lack of technical abilities but because of their conversational tone. Obviously, it's pointless to take things personally with LLMs but they were so passive-aggressive and sometimes maliciously compliant that they started to get to me even though I was conscious of it and know very well how LLMs work. If they had been new hires, I had fired both of them within 2 weeks. In contrast, Gemini Pro just "talks" normally, task-oriented and brief. It also doesn't reply with files that contain changes in completely unrelated places (including changing comments somewhere), which is the worst such a tool could possibly do.

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.

I got really good at reviewing code efficiently from my time at Google and others, which helps a lot. I'm sure my personal career experience influences a lot how I'm using it.

FWIW, I use Codex CLI, but I assume my flow would be the same with Claude Code.

In essence, this is pretty much how you'd run a group of juniors - you'd sit on slack and jira diving up work and doing code reviews.

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

It simply didn’t work. I complained about it and was eventually hauled into a room with some MS PMs who told me in no uncertain terms that indeed, Biztalk didn’t work and it was essentially garbage that no one, including us, should ever use. Just pretend you’re doing something and when the week is up, go home. Tell everyone you’ve integrated with Biztalk. It won’t matter.

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.

That was using the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model, I wonder if using the Opus 4.5 model would have managed to avoid that.

Claude still cant do half the things Crush can do.

Plus: you can use Kimi 2.5 with Crush soon

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.

1. Classic Coding (Traditional Development) In the classic model, developers are the primary authors of every line.

    Production Volume: A senior developer typically writes between 10,000 and 20,000 lines of code (LOC) per year.
    Workflow: Manual logic construction, syntax memorization, and human-led debugging using tools like VS Code or JetBrains IDEs.
    Focus: Writing the implementation details. Success is measured by the quality and maintainability of the hand-written code. 

    Production Volume: Developers using full AI integration have seen a 14x increase in code output (e.g., from ~24k lines to over 810k lines in a single year).
    Work Distribution: Major tech leaders like AWS report that AI now generates up to 75% of their production code.
    The New Bottleneck: Developers now spend roughly 70% of their time reviewing AI-generated code rather than writing it.

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

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

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