> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

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 really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions

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

Not that I disagree, but this is nothing compared to the ".NET" craze in the early 2000s. Everything had to have ".NET" in its name even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual .NET technology.

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

> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

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.

They will never get better until naming things is a C-Suite level respected position.

I think I could clean up their existing mess if they want help.

Jedd outlines my credentials well here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17522649#17522861

People already do pay for it: office 365. It’s just like getting cloud storage with the subscription. OneDrive has been one of the better cloud storage options for consumers.

Also, a great use is Microsoft Forms I was surprised with the AI features. At first I just used it to get some qualitative feedback but ended up using copilot to enter questions Claude helped me create and it converted them into the appropriate forms for my surveys!

Objectives -> Claude -> Surveys (markdown) -> Copilot -> MS Forms -> Emailed.

Insights and analysis can use copilot too.

Main thing to remember is the models behind the scenes will change and evolve, Copilot is the branding. In fact, we can expect most companies will use multiple AI solutions/pipelines moving forward.

You are describing everything Microsoft has done since at least the late 90s.

My colleague works in a functional role for a medium sized SaaS company(1000-5000 employees), working with banks, family offices, hedge funds. They use teams and copilot, they all hate it.

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.

> It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense.

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.

> so why should anyone pay for Copilot?

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

> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

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.

>There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool. There is also Github Copilot, the subscription, that lets you use Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models.

I’m not a gamer. But it still strikes me as wild that they let go of the Cortana moniker.

So I guess the same situation as with Google Gemini.

Its long term microsoft culture to be horrific at external naming

It reminds me of IBM and Watson, most likely the same brain rot at the top.

You need to see how many times they changed AI related services in Azure. It’s a shit show.

Don't forget Azure Copilot :)

They are vibing the naming probably

This is what happens when you let all decision to the marketing team without any supervision. They became full retarded.

Marketing need as much supervision as a toddler in a cristal store.

Like Microsoft Defender, which is now Defender Antivirus, or Defender for Endpoint if you have a real license. You will also get Defender for Identity, and maybe Defender for Office 365, which is probably not ASR. And Defender for Cloud, not to be confused with Defender for Cloud Apps.

> Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

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

This isn't a Microsoft thing, it's a big dumb corporation thing. Most big corporations are run by dumb executives who are 100% out of touch with the customer (though even if they were in touch, they wouldn't care). Their only consideration is the stock price. If adding new names to things, chanting the magic spell "AI" over and over, and claiming the new name will make them more money can cause the stock price to increase, that's what they'll do. (Making customers happy doesn't make the stock price rise; if it did, we'd all be a lot less depressed and a lot richer)

Fun fact: I used to automatically screenshot my desktop every few minutes eons ago. This would occasionally save me when I lost some work and could go back to check the screenshots.

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

Anthropic has a model. Microsoft doesn't.

Recall actually sounds like it could be useful but there's a snowball's chance in hell that I would trust Microsoft to not spy on me.

You were robbed last night. No way Jelly Roll should have won.

This comment is a bit confusing and surprising to me because I tried Antigravity three weeks ago and it was very undercooked. Claude was actually able to identify bugs and get the bigger picture of the project, while Gemini 3 with Antigravity often kept focusing on unimportant details.

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.

Yeah I don't understand why everyone seems to have forgotten about the Gemini options. Antigravity, Jules, and Gemini CLI are as good as the alternatives but are way more cost effective. I want for nothing with my $20/mo Google AI plan.

I've used Gemini CLI a fair amount as well—it's included with our subscription at work. I like it okay, but it tends to produce "lies" a bit too often. It tends to produce language that reads as over confident that it's found a problem or solution. This causes me extra work to verify or causes me extra time because I believed it. In my experience Claude Code does this quite a bit less.

It's the opposite experience for me. Gemini mostly produces made up and outdated stuff.

Not my experience at all.

It fails to be pro-active. "Why didn't you run the tests you created?"

I want it to tell me if the implementation is working.

Feels lazy. And it hallucinates solutions frequently.

It pales in comparison to CC/Opus.

I think counter to the assumption of myself (and many), for long form agent coding tasks, models are not as easily hot swappable as I thought.

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.

For all the hype I see about Gemini, we integrated it with our product (an AI agent) and it consistently performs worse[0] than Claude Sonnet, Opus, and ChatGPT 5.2

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

Maybe it's the types of projects I work on but Gemini is basically unusable to me. Settled on Claude Code for actual work and Codex for checking Claude's work. If I try to mix in Gemini it will hallucinate issues that do not exist in code at very high rate. Claude and Codex are way more accurate at finding issues that actually exist.

I can think of one major reason why Microsoft and Apple would prefer to feed their codebases into Claude than to Gemini.

I tried to use it, kept saying it was at max capacity and nothing would happen. I gave it a good day before giving up.

Oddly enough, as impressive as Gemini 3 is, I find myself using it infrequently. The thing Gemini 2.5 had over the other models was dominance in long context, but GPT5.2-codex-max and Opus 4.5 Thinking are decent at long context now, and collectively they're better at all the use cases I care about.

I've never, ever had a good experience with Gemini (3 Pro). It's been embarrassingly bad every time I've tried it, and I've tried it lots of times. It overcomplicates almost everything, hallucinates with impressive frequency, and needs to be repeatedly nudged to get the task fully completed. I have no reason to continue attempting to use it.

I think Gemini is an excellent model, it's just not a particularly great agent. One of the reasons is that its code output is often structured in a way that looks like it's answering a question, rather than generating production code. It leaves comments everywhere, which are often numbered (which not only is annoying, but also only makes sense if the numbering starts within the frame of reference of the "question" it's "answering").

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.

For me it just depends on the project. Sometimes one or the other performs better. If I am digging into something tough and I think it's hallucinating or misunderstanding, I will typically try another model.

Eh, it's not near Opus at all, closer to Sonnet. It is nice though with Antigravity because it's free versus being paid in other IDEs like Cursor.

I don't think anyone is sleeping on it.

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

I'm also using Gemini and it's the only option that consistently works for me so far. I'm using it in chat mode with copy&paste and it's pleasant to work with.

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.

Edit: Reading some other comments here I have to add that the 1., 2. ,3. numbering of comments can be annoying. It's helpful for answers but should be an option/parameterization.

It's ok, but it too frequently edits WAY more than it needs to in order to accomplish the task at hand.

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.

I use Copilot in VSCode at work, and it's pretty effective. You can choose from quite a few models, and it has the agentic editing you'd expect from an IDE based AI development tool. I don't know if it does things like browser integration because I don't do frontend work. It's definitely improved over the last 6 months.

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.

They launched GitHub Codespaces, a free containerized dev environment with VScode & Copilot, and it's broken six ways from Sunday. VScode/Copilot extensions are constantly breaking and changing. The GitHub web interface is now much harder to use, to the point I've just stopped browsing it. Nobody over there cares if these things work. (But weirdly, the Copilot CLI works 4x better than the Copilot VSCode extension at actually writing code)

It was kinda cool for a demo, but Claude Code really was the first game changer in AI coding.

Microsoft is still Microsoft.

Did it have all the hype and momentum, though? It was pretty widely viewed as a low- to negative-value addition, and honestly when I see someone on here talking about how useless AI is for coding, I assume they were tainted by Github copilot and never bothered updating their priors.

I think the answer is pretty simple.

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.

Microsoft can just get one of thier devs to build a coding agent but instead all of these companies are just bowing down to Anthropic just because Anthropic is selling execs a dream situation where they can fire most of the devs. None of the other coding agents are any worse than CC, Gemini & Crush are even better, Codex is decent and even something like Opencode is catching up.

I think big corporations are just structurally unable to create products people actually want to use. They have too much experience with their customers being locked in and switching costs keeping them locked in. Anthropic needed a real product to win mind-share first, they will start enshitifying later (by some accounts they may already have). The best thing a big corporation can do with a nascent technology like that is to make it available to use to everywhere and then acquire the startup that converts it to a winner first. Microsoft even fumbled that.

because claude code do it fullstack u know, the model and implementation, the interation is seamless,

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

i think microsoft just doesnt have top talent building these products

iterm and talk to Claude, command+tab to vscode fix/adjust things, command+tab back to iterm and talk more to Claude. Not the most technically advanced setup but it works pretty well for me.

Workflow is this: - I have emacs open for code editing/reviews/git. - Separate terminal emulator with 1-3 claudes - I work on a story by splitting it into small steps ("Let's move this email logic to the email.service.ts", "here's the fields I'd need to add to the request, create a schema validation in a separate file, and update the router and controller") - I mostly watch claude, and occasionally walk through the code in emacs whenever I feel like I want to review code. - I handle external tools like git or db migrations myself not letting LLMs near them.

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.

One thing I really like it for is if you have a lot of something similar - let's say plugins. I can then just go to the plugins directory, and tell claude something as simple as "this is the plugins directory where plugins live. I want to add one called 'sample' that samples records". Note that I don't even have to tell it what that means usually.

It will read the existing plugins, understand the code style/structure/how they integrate, then create a plugin called "sample" AND code that is usually what you wanted without telling it specifically, and write 10 tests for it.

In those cases it's magic. In large codebases, asking it to add something into existing code or modify a behavior I've found it to be...less useful at.

I use it like having a bunch of L3/L4 engineers. I give them a description of the changes I want to be made, sometimes chat a bit with it to help them design the features and then tell them to have a go at it. Then I create PRs and review them and have them clean up/improve the code and merge it. I try to balance giving it enough stuff to build so I can switch to another agent, and not giving them too much so that they make a weird assumption and run really far with it.

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.

I think it depends an awful lot on what you work on. We obviously couldn't give Claude Code any sort of access in the real world in the European energy sector, but even in my personal projects set up to test it. It has not been very good at working with software for IoT devices. It does well with a lot of web projects, but simply using something with batteries included like Django removes 90% of what it might do.

You should try to set it up like junior developers with small tasks for them to do, like people suggest here. Do pay attention to your over all project though. I've had some where the codebase turned out to be an absolute mess, even though each PR I'd gone through a long the way seemed great at the time. Not that this wouldn't happen with humans.

I'll take a crack at it. I liked using Cursor and it was my first introduction but my main editor is Emacs and I like Emacs, it has a bunch of configuration that has built up like barnacles on the bottom of a ship so it was kind of hard using VS Code. I use a project package (projectile) that allows me to quickly move between different projects (git repos, TRAMP sessions, anything really) and I can open a CC terminal there that I can have pop in and out as I need it. Really it's pretty similar to how I used Cursor.

The Copilot-Cli is not so bad,

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

I'm one of those really odd beasts that feels some sort of loyalty to Microsoft, so I started out on Copilot and was very reluctant to try Claude Code. But as soon as I did, I figured out what the hype was about. It's just able to work over larger code bases and over longer time horizons than Copilot. The last time I tried Copilot, just to compare, I noticed that it would make some number of tool calls (not even involving tokens!) and then decide, "Nah, that's too many. We're just not going to do any work for a while." It was bizarre. And sometimes it would decide that a given bog-standard tool call (like read a file or something) needed to get my permission every. single. time. I couldn't do anything to convince it otherwise. I eventually gave up. And since then, we've built all our LLM support infrastructure around Claude Code, so it would be painful to go back to anything else.

Copilot in the streets, Claude in the sheets.

Copilot isn't a model, you can use Claude via Copilot.

There is an entire generation of devs that TFS ruined for version control. I've had to essentially rehabilitate folks and heal old TFS wounds to get them properly using git (so many copies of repos on their filesystem...).

True story: a lot of the Microsoft engineers I interact with actually do use Apple hardware. Admittedly, I onto interact with the devs on the .NET (and related technologies) departments.

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.

Not my experience at all. Copilot launched as a useless code complete, is now basically the same as anything. It's all converging. The features are converging, but the features barely matter anyway when Opus is just doing all the heavy lifting anyway. It just 1-shots half the stuff. Copilot's payment model where you pay by the prompt not by the token is highly abusable, no way this lasts.

Claude Code’s subscription pricing is pretty ridiculously subsidized compared to their API pricing if you manage to use anywhere close to the quota. Like 10x I think. Crazy value if you were using $400 in tokens.

What were you spending on Copilot?

IDK given where they've gone w/ Xbox naming, pre-LLMs

this was supposed to be a reply

I used to use Claude Code with Opus exclusively because of how good it is IME. Then Anthropic banned me so I switched to OpenCode. I really want OpenCode to win, but there is long way for it to get the same polish in the UX department (and to get a handle on the memory leaks). I am 100 % sure Claude Code is hacks upon hacks internally, but on the surface, it works quite well (not that they have fixed the flashing issue). With OpenCode I also switched to GPT-5.2-Codex and I have to say it's fairly garbage IME. I can't get it to keep working, it takes every opportunity to either tell me what I should do next for it or just tell me it figured a particular piece of the larger puzzle out and that if I want it can continue. It is not nearly as independent as Opus it. Now I'm on the Codex CLI with GPT-5.2 as I figured maybe the harness is the issue, but it is not very good either.

Yes. It's much better. Codex is good for an extra review on plans. There's no need to switch. Use both.

Codex is not a good harness, but GPT-5.2 and related flavors produce, in my experience, better code than Opus 4.5, and by a surprising margin.

At the beginning of my career, sometime around 1999 or 2000, I was at Microsoft with our team because we were trying to integrate our product with this absolute piece of junk called Microsoft Biztalk.

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.

I work for Microsoft/Azure and my incentives are (roughly in descending order): minimize large/long outages, ship lots of stuff (with some concern for customer utility, but not too much), don't get yelled at for missing mandated work (security, compliance, etc.) I'd love to improve product quality, but incentives for that are negative. We're running a tight ship, and every second I spend on quality is a second I don't spend on the priorities above. Since there isn't any slack in the system, that means my performance assessment will drop, which I obviously don't want. Multiply that by 200k employees, and you get the current state of quality across the whole product portfolio.

Because the products have become terrible, and they keep using more AI to solve it when AI is the problem with Microsoft. Microsoft execs are only riding Azure success, rest of the orgs are completely useless.

Microsoft used to be well-known for eating its own dogfood. I wonder what happened

To fix the Koolaid you need people that haven't drunk it.

Indeed it's not: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/01/09/is-microsoft-losing... And: https://www.perspectives.plus/p/microsoft-365-copilot-commer...

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.

Its accelerated slopfication of Microsoft. And what are they are doing to fix it? More AI. The thing what is clearly making it worse. I think every division except Azure and Office are losing money at this point.

They have been unstable for decades. Does anyone still use self-hosted (running in a basement) windows servers? Running a windows machine feels like it's about as reliable as fast food order accuracy. Most of the time sure, but I hope you can afford to miss out sometimes.

Is this the "beginning of the end" for OpenAI?

Do you have "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" enabled? This automatically installs preview releases, so you may unwittingly be doing QA for Microsoft.

I switched to Ubuntu last week for my desktop. First time in my 25+ year career I’ve felt like Microsoft was wasting my time more than administering a Linux desktop would take. The slop effect is real.

Anthropic is known for this, they are purposefully putting these stories on the websites execs and managers read. They even astroturf HN every chance they get with 2 blog posts a week (sometimes even more).

You're not using the good models and then blaming the tool? Just use claude models.

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.

I had my first go at using it (Github Copilot) last week, for a simple refactoring task. I'd have to say I reasonably specified it, yet it still managed to to fail to delete a closing brace when it removed the opening block as specified.

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

Lets give Crush some love.

Claude still cant do half the things Crush can do.

Plus: you can use Kimi 2.5 with Crush soon

have people tried Antigravity

I dont know about Apple, but Microsoft is completely consumed by this new AI coding wave. Apple probably still has some reasonable use policy, but microsoft has lost it entirely. I dont see myself using any microsoft software anytime soon.

"my turds now contains 15% candyfloss!"

> "Microsoft have a goal that states they want to get to "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.""

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.

It is kind of funny that throughout my career, there has always been pretty much a consensus that lines of code are a bad metric, but now with all the AI hype, suddenly everybody is again like “Look at all the lines of code it writes!!”

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.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/welc...

"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.

I used to work at a place that had the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote painted near the elevators where everyone would see it when they arrived for work:

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

That is what the AI said:

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.

Cf. -2000 Lines Of Code:

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

Wow such bad practice, using lines of code as a performance metric has been shown to be really bad practice decades ago. For a software company to do this now...

Cool - I was thinking it would be good for them to implode as a company due all the extra harmfull stuff they are doing with Windows recently.

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

Looks like the guy who posted that updated his post to say he was just talking about a research project he is working on.