Absolutely! There are so many scenarios where they could actually add some value, and they're fulfilling, like, exactly none of those?
Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we are.
And, again, it's fine with me: I'll just use Claude Code, but if I were a Microsoft VP-or-above, the lack of execution would sort-of, well concern me? But maybe I'm just focused on the wrong things. I mean, Cloudflare brought down, like, half the Internet twice in the past two weeks, and they're still a tech darling, so possibly incompetence is the new hotness now?
Imagine a circumstance where Windows Search was as good as Apple's Spotlight, and could integrate with cloud services to index documents, browser bookmarks, web history, maybe podcasts, etc.)
Hey Copilot, where is that document I was reading about the new network diagramming software Jacob is testing out?
Or Hey Copilot, my disk is getting pretty full. What software is taking up a lot of space that I haven't used for a while? Or are there any files I can move to cloud storage to free up space?
But no, instead it's just 'we're going to take screenshots of all your windows, OCR it, and index it, so that when someone infects your machine they can see your credit card numbers and pornography habits.'
It's so broken. I have a suspicion the AI teams are in some kind of an internal standoff with privacy/compliance teams, and Copilot simply never gets access to any tools or data.
Because if not that, then I don't know what. I can half-ass a better product with ChatGPT API and a PowerShell script, and I could've since GPT-4 was released; in fact the product can actually write itself, it's that simple to do a better job.
Being Microsoft, I'd guess it's less that and more Product Team A doesn't want to spend time building enabling features for Product Team B to look good.
I have Copilot at work, it feels so useless sometimes. As an example, I had a report which I needed to make some batch edits to. I figured why not let the robot take a crack at it, so I clicked the Copilot button and spent a couple minutes describing what I needed changed.
Copilot tells me it can't edit my current document, but it can create a new one. I figured okay, Microsoft doesn't want to set it loose on the original, guess it makes sense that it requires a copy. So I said yes.
Nope. Instead of creating a copy of my document and editing it, it created an entirely new document which excised basically everything in the original report and replaced it with a very short summary - I'm talking 5000 words down to 500. All my tables and figures were gone, as was the standard report template my employer uses.
What utter garbage. Office productivity is a major use case for LLMs, and here the largest vendor of productivity software on the planet is happy to fuck it up.
The chatbot doesn't see the document structure; it sees tokens. When it generates a response, it's not editing; it's rewriting from scratch. Without a mechanism capable of precise diff/patch operations (like Cursor attempts with code), an LLM will always be a destructive tool for complex documents. Microsoft marketed this as an editor, but in reality, it's a summary generator
Compare this with Cursor or Supermaven. There AI acts as an extension of the cursor, understanding the code's AST. VS Copilot often feels like smart copy-paste that doesn't understand where it is
Microsoft, owning VS Code and LSP, should have done this better than anyone, but they lost to startups on UX
Since DECADES Outlook is _not_ capable of putting the first(!) just(!) useful datetime-stamp found in an email which says "calendar" or something in the text when pressing CTRL+R:
This function creates a calendar entry from the current email with current receiver list, but default-date/time is alwsys set to the current even if recipients last ansewer was simply "lets do: 11am" - why does even this simple shit not work today?
You dont need AI for this simple idea even, a robus / probability parser will do fine in 99% cases
I would just be happy to never have a ICS file every saved to my drive again. Whoever created the concept of a calendar invite saving a ICS file has created me hours of frustration.
Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we are.
And, again, it's fine with me: I'll just use Claude Code, but if I were a Microsoft VP-or-above, the lack of execution would sort-of, well concern me? But maybe I'm just focused on the wrong things. I mean, Cloudflare brought down, like, half the Internet twice in the past two weeks, and they're still a tech darling, so possibly incompetence is the new hotness now?