Just a thought: the timeline of the vibe techs rolling out and the timeline of increasing product rot, sloppiness, and user-hostile “has anyone ever actually used this shit!?!” coming out of MS overlap.

Vibing won’t help out at all, and years from now we’re gonna have project math on why 10x-LLM-ing mediocre devs on a busted project that’s behind schedule isn’t the play (like how adding more devs to a late project generally makes it more late). But it takes years for those failures to aggregate and spread up the stack.

I believe the vibing is highlighting the missteps from the wave right before which has been cloud-first, cloud-integrated, cloud-upselling that cannibalized MS’s core products, multiplied by the massive MS layoff waves. MS used to have a lot of devs that made a lot of culture who are simply gone. The weakened offerings, breakdown of vision, and platform enshittification have been obvious for a while. And then ChatGPT came.

Stock price reflects how attractive stocks are for stock purchasers on the stock market, not how good something is. MS has been doing great things for their stock price.

LLMs make getting into emacs and Linux and OSS and OCaml easier than ever. SteamOS is maturing. Windows Subsytem for Linux is a mature bridge. It’s a bold time for MS to be betting on brand loyalty and product love, even if their shit worked.