Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.
There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.
There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.
There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.
There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?
Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.
It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.
It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.
And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?
>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.
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...
> No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.
When it came out, Github Copilot was an autocomplete tool. That's it. That may be what the OP was originally using. That's what I used... 2 years ago. That they change the capabilities but don't change the name, yet change names on services that don't change capabilities further illustrates the OP's point, I would say.
To be fair, Github Copilot has followed the same arc as Cursor, from AI-enhanced editor with smart autocomplete, to more of an IDE that now supports agentic "vibe coding" and "vibe editing" as well.
I do agree that conceptually there is a big difference between an editor, even with smart autocomplete, and an agentic coding tool, as typified by Claude Code and other CLI tools, where there is no editor necessarily involved at all.
That's silly. Gmail is a wildly different product than it was when it launched, but I guess it doesn't count since the name is the same?
Microsoft may or may not have a "problem" with naming, but if you're going to criticize a product, it's always a good starting place to know what you're criticizing.
The confusion is when I say “I have a terrible time using Copilot, I don’t recommend using it” and someone chimes in with how great their experience with Github Copilot is, a completely different product and how I must be “holding it wrong” when that is not the same Copilot. That Microsoft has like 5 different products all using Copilot in the name, even people in this very comment section are only saying “Copilot” so it is hard to know what product they are talking about!
I mean, sure. But aside from the fact that everything in AI gets reduced to a single word ("Gemini", "ChatGPT", "Claude") [1], it's clearly not an excuse for misrepresenting the functionality of the product when you're writing a post broadly claiming that their AI products don't work.
Github Copilot is actually a pretty good tool.
[1] Not just AI. This is true for any major software product line, and why subordinate branding exists.
I specifically mention that my experience is with the Office 365 Copilot and how terrible that is and in online discussions I mention this and then people jump out of the woodwork to talk about how great Github Copilot is so thank you for demonstrating that exact experience I have every time I mention Copilot :)
GitHub Copilot is available from website https://github.com/copilot together with services like Spark (not available from other places), Spaces, Agents etc.
they should just acquire one of the many agent code harnesses. Something like opencode works just as well as claude-code and has only been around half of the time.
For one reason or another everyone seems to be sleeping on Gemini. I have been exclusively using Gemini 3 Flash to code these days and it stands up right alongside Opus and others while having a much smaller, faster and cheaper footprint. Combine it with Antigravity and you're basically using a cheat code.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Yeah I'm on the $20/mo Google plan and have been rate limited maybe twice in 2 months. Tried the equivalent Claude plan for a similar workload and lasted maybe 40 minutes before it asked me to upgrade to Max to continue.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, you may have nailed it. Gemini is a good model, but in the Gemini CLI with a prompt like, "I'd like to add <feature x> support. What are my options? Don't write any code yet" it will proceed to skip right past telling me my options and will go ahead an implement whatever it feels like. Afterward it will print out a list of possible approaches and then tell you why it did the one it did.
Codex is the best at following instructions IME. Claude is pretty good too but is a little more "creative" than codex at trying to re-interpret my prompt to get at what I "probably" meant rather than what I actually said.
Crazy to think that Github Copilot was the first mainstream AI coding tool. It had all the hype and momentum in the world, and Microsoft decided to do...absolutely nothing with it.
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.
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.
just my experience of course, but it had a lot of hype. It got into a lot of people's workflow and really had a strong first mover advantage. The fact that they supported neovim as a first-class editor surely helped a ton. But then they released their next set of features without neovim support and only (IIRC) support VS Code. That took a lot of wind out of the sails. Then combined with them for some reason being on older models (or with thinking turned down or whatever), the results got less and less useful. If Co-pilot had made their agent stuff work with neovim and with a CLI, I think they'd be the clear leader.
It really says something that MS/Github has been trying to shovel Copilot down our throats for years, and Anthropic just builds a tool in a short period of time and it takes off.
It's interesting to think back, what did Copilot do wrong? Why didn't it become Claude Code?
It seems for one thing its ambition might have been too small. Second, it was tightly coupled to VS Code / Github. Third, a lot of dumb big org Microsoft politics / stakeholders overly focused on enterprise over developers? But what else?
They absolutely do, the CEO has come out and said a few engineers have told him that they dont even write code by hand anymore. To some people that sounds horrifying, but a good engineer would not just take code blindly, they would read it and refine it using Claude, while still saving hundreds of man hours.
Agreed. I was an early adopter of Claude Code. And at work we only had Copilot. But the Copilit CLI isn't too bad now. you've got slash commands for Agents.MD and skills.md files now for controlling your context, and access to Sonnet & Opus 4.5.
Maybe Microsoft is just using it internally, to finish copying the rest of the features from Claude Code.
Much like the article states, I use Claude Code beyond just it's coding capabilities....
I'm amazed that a company that's supposedly one of the big AI stocks seemingly won't spare a single QA position for a major development tool. It really validates Claude's CLI-first approach.
I installed Claude Code yesterday after the quality of VSCode Copilot Chat continuously is getting worse every release. I can't tell yet if Claude Code is better or not but VSCode Copilot Chat has become completely unusable. It would start making mistakes which would double the requests to Claude Opus 4.5 which in January is the only model that would work at all. I spent $400 in tokens in January.
I'll know better in a week. Hopefully I can get better results with the $200 a month plan.
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.
I would agree. I've been using VSCode Copilot for the past (nearly) year. And it has gotten significantly better. I also use CC and Antigravity privately - and got access to Cursor (on top of VSCode) at work a month ago
CC is, imo, the best. The rest are largely on pair with each other. The benefit of VSCode and Antigravity is that they have the most generous limits. I ran through Cursor $20 limits in 3 days, where same tier VSCode subscription can last me 2+ weeks
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.
I just upgraded to the $100 a month 5x plan 5 minutes ago.
Starting in October with Vscode Copilot Chat it was $150, $200, $300, $400 per month with the same usage. I thought they were just charging more per request without warning. The last couple weeks it seemed that vscode copilot was just fucking up making useless calls.
Perhaps, it wasn't a dark malicious pattern but rather incompetence that was driving up the price.
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.
I still don't understand how Microsoft lets standby remain broken. I can never leave the PC in my bedroom ij standby because it will randomly wake up and blast the coolers.
Sadly even if Microsoft had a few lineups of laptops that they'd use internally and recommend, companies would still get the shitty ones, if it saves them $10 per device.
To be fair, this was also my experience with Macbooks. This "smart sleep" from modern OS manufacturers is the dumbest shit ever, please just give me a hibernate option.
I used to have trouble with sleep on M-series macs on occasion, but after turning off wake on LAN they’ve all slept exactly as expected for the past several years.
100% true story - until a couple of months ago, the best place to talk directly to Microsoft senior devs was on the macadmins slack. Loads of them there. They would regularly post updates, talk to people about issues, discuss solutions, even happy to engage in DMS. All posting using their real names.
The accounts have now all gone quiet, guess they got told to quit it.
The tools or the models? It's getting absurdly confusing.
"Claude Code" is an interface to Claude, Cursor is an IDE (I think?! VS Code fork?), GitHub Copilot is a CLI or VS Code plugin to use with ... Claude, or GPT models, or ...
If they are using "Claude Code" that means they are using Anthropic's models - which is interesting given their huge investment in OpenAI.
But this is getting silly. People think "CoPilot" is "Microsoft's AI" which it isn't. They have OpenAI on Azure. Does Microsoft even have a fine-tuned GPT model or are they just prompting an OpenAI model for their Windows-builtins?
When you say you use CoPilot with Claude Opus people get confused. But this is what I do everyday at work.
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.
2 week old post feeling like part of the other weirdly promotional "Claude is everywhere right now" pieces that were around. Someone called it an advertising carpet bombing run.
A.I. Tool Is Going Viral. Five Ways People Are Using It
Microsoft have a goal that states they want to get to "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code." You can't do that if you write the code yourself. That means they'll always be chasing the best model. Right now, that's Opus 4.5.
> "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.
That's still writing new code. Also, its kind of an extremely bad idea to do that because how are you going to test it? If you have to rewrite anything (hint: you probably don't) its best to do it incrementally over time because of the QA and stakeholder alignment overhead. You cannot push things into production unless it works as its users are expecting and it does exactly what stakeholders expect as well.
No no, your talking common sense and logic. You can't think like that. You have to think "How do I rush out as much code as possible?" After all, this is MS we're talking about, and Windows 11 is totally the shining example of amazing and completely stable code. /s
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.
I believe the "look at all the lines of code" argument for LLMs is not a way to showcase intelligence, but more-so a way to showcase time saved. Under the guise that the output is the/a correct solution, it's a way to say "look at all the code I would have had to write, it saved so much time".
It all comes from "if you can't measure it you can't improve it". The job of management is to improve things, and that means they need to measure it and in turn look for measures. When working on an assembly line there are lots of things to measure and improve, and improving many of those things have shown great value.
They want to expand that value into engineering and so are looking for something they can measure. I haven't seen anyone answer what can be measured to make a useful improvement though. I have a good "feeling" that some people I work with are better than others, but most are not so bad that we should fire them - but I don't know how to put that into something objective.
Yes, the problem of accurately measuring software "productivity" has stymied the entire industry for decades, but people keep trying. It's conceivable that you might be able to get some sort of more-usable metric out of some systematized AI analysis of code changes, which would be pretty ironic.
it's still a bad metric and OP is also just being loose by repeating some marketing / LinkedIn post by a person who uses bad metrics about an overhyped subject
Ironically, AI may help get past that. In order to measure "value chunks" or some other metric where LoC is flexibly multiplied by some factor of feature accomplishment, quality, and/or architectural importance, an opinion of the section in question is needed, and an overseer AI could maybe do that.
Totally agreed. The numbers are silly. My only point is that you don't need 100k engineers if you're letting Claude dump all that code into production.
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.
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...
Which is a bald-faced lie written in response to a PR disaster. The original claims were not ambiguous:
> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”.
Obviously, "every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" is not contained within a single research project, nor are "Microsoft's largest codebases".
The original claims were not ambigious, it's "My" goal not "Microsoft's goal".
The fact that it's a "PR disaster" for a researcher to have an ambitious project at one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, or to talk up their team on LinkedIn, is unbelievably ridiculous.
One supposes, when a highly senior employee publicly talks about project goals in recruitment material, that they are not fancifully daydreaming about something that can never happen but are in fact actually talking about the work they're doing that justifies their ~$1,000,000/yr compensation in the eyes of their employer.
Talking about rewriting Windows at a rate of 1 million lines of code per engineer per month with LLMs is absolutely going to garner negative publicity, no matter how much you spin it with words like "ambitious" (do you work in PR? it sounds like it's your calling).
You suppose that there are no highly-paid researchers on the planet working on AGI? Because there are, and that's less proven than "porting one codebase to another language" is. What about Quantum Computers, what about power-producing nuclear fusion? Both less proven than porting code. What about all other blue-sky research labs?
Why would you continue supposing such a thing when both the employee, and the employer, have said that your suppositions are wrong?
Sure, there are plenty of researchers working on fanciful daydreams. They pursue those goals at behest of their employer. You attempted to make a distinction between the employer and the employee's goals, as though a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft was just playing around on a whim doing hobby projects for fun. If Microsoft is paying him $1m annually to work on this, plus giving him a team to pursue the goal of rewriting Windows, it is not inaccurate to state that Microsoft's goal is to completely rewrite Windows with LLMs, and they will earn negative publicity for making that fact public. The project will likely fail given how ridiculous it is, but it is still a goal they are funding.
The authentic quote “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code” as some kind of goal that makes sense, even just for porting/rewriting, is embarassing enough from an OS vendor.
As @mrbungie says on this thread: "They took the stupidest metric ever and made a moronic target out of it"
I mean, if 1% out of 8 billion is "top" and that applies to Lines of Code, too, than ... more code contains more quality, ... by their logic, I guess ...
I've not heard that goal before. If true, it makes me sad to hear that once again, people confuse "More LOC == More Customer Value == More Profit". Sigh.
I've written a C recompiler in an attempt to build homomorphic encryption. It doesn't work (it's not correct) but it can translate 5 lines of working code in 100.000 lines of almost-working code.
Any MBAs want to buy? For the right price I could even fix it ...
> “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases.
I try GitHub Copilot every once in a while, and just last month it still managed to produce diffs with unbalanced curly braces, or tried to insert (what should be) a top-level function into the middle of another function and screw up everything. This wasn’t on a free model like GPT 4.1 or 5-mini, IIRC it was 5.2 Codex. What the actual fuck? Only explanation I can come up with is that their pay-per-request model made GHC really stingy with using tokens for context, even when you explicitly ask it to read certain files it ends up grepping and adding a couple lines.
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.
What, 5.2 Codex isn’t a good model? Claude 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro with Copilot aren’t any better, I don’t have enough of a sample of Opus 4.5 usage with Copilot to say with confidence how it fairs since they charge 3x for Opus 4.5 compared to everything else.
If Copilot is stupid uniquely with 5.2 Codex then they should disable that instead of blaming the user (I know they aren’t, you are). But that’s not the case, it’s noticeably worse with everything. Compared to both Cursor and Claude Code.
Explains why Windows updates have been more broken than usual lately.
But I guess having my computer randomly stop working because a billion dollar corporation needs to save money by using a shitty text generation algorithm to write code instead of hiring competent programmers is just the new normal now.
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.
I am not getting what that linked url is supposed to mean. It is a very decent business page where ubuntu is selling consulting for "your" projects and telling why ubuntu is great for developing AI systems.
I wasn't making an argument. It was a prediction that all major software, (including the major linux distros) will eventually be majority (>50%) AI generated. Software that is 100% human generated will be like getting a hand knitted sweater at a farmers market. Available, but expensive and only produced at very small scale.
On what reasoning do you make this prediction? Just because corporations are mandating their employees to use AI right now does not mean it will continue.
Any new software developers entering the field from this point on will have to know how to use and be expected to use AI code-gen tools to get employment. Moving forward, eventually all developers use these tools routinely. There will be a point in the future where there is no one left working that has ever coded anything complex thing from scratch without AI tools. Therefore, all* code will have AI code-gen as all* developers will be using them.
* all mean 'nearly all' as of course there will be exceptions.
I have found that Claude Code is better in every way I've used it. I like to use LLM's just as an advanced refactoring tool, especially where plain string search isn't enough. Anyway, my first experience of Copilot was it plainly lying that it deleted files I asked it to, and it insisted the file no longer existed (it did).
There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.
There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.
There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.
There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?
Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.
It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.
It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.
And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?
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