3 ms·

I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure servi

by xnorswap 11mo ago

I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.

yoyohello13 11mo ago
I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.
- foobarian 11mo ago
  Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?
  - blibble 11mo ago
    > Why is this, I wonder? because that's Microsoft's business model their products are just just good enough to allow them to put a checkbox in a feature table to allow it to be sold to someone who will then never have to use it but not even a penny more will be spent than the absolute bare minimum to allow that this explains Teams, Azure, and everything else they make you can think of
    - ethbr1 11mo ago
      * That's modern Microsoft's desktop product business model I hear tales of the before-times, when they had a QA department and took quality seriously.
      - bdangubic 11mo ago
        How do you QA adding weird prediction tool to say Outlook. I have to use Outlook at one of my clients and have switched to writing all emails in VS Code and then pasting it to Outlook as “autocomplete” is unbearable… Not sure QA is possible with tools like these…
        ethbr1 11mo ago
        Part of QA used to be evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing. ... why, it's almost like in eliminating the QA function, we removed the final checks and balances on developers (read: PMs) from implementing whatever ass-backwards feature occurs to them. Just in time for 'AI all the things!' directives to come down from on high.
        bdangubic 11mo ago
        exactly!! though evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing is hard when no one knows what it is supposed to be doing :)
        ethbr1 11mo ago
        Which was the other benefit of a formal QA org -- you had to be able to tell them what you changed and how it was supposed to work.
      - Terr_ 11mo ago
        UX consistency also took a dive, both in MS products and in all the psuedo-webpage crap shipped as Electron apps.
  - elorant 11mo ago
    Probably compute isn’t enough to serve everyone from a frontier LLM.
smileson2 11mo ago
that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out
vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
"They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way." And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"
- greazy 11mo ago
  I asked copilot in outlook webmail to search my emails for something I needed. I can't do that. that's the one use case where LLM is helpful!
ihsw 11mo ago
[dead]
Arwill 11mo ago
I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.
- xnorswap 11mo ago
  This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / statistics based approach that worked well without suggesting outright rubbish. In .NET we've had intellisense for 25 years that would only suggest properties that could exist, and then suddenly I found a while ago that vscode auto-completed properties that don't exist. It's maddening! The least they could have done is put in a roslyn pass to filter out the impossible.
  - cyberax 11mo ago
    The regular JetBrains IDEs have a setting to disable the AI-based inline completion, you can then just assign it to a hotkey and call it when needed. I found that it makes the AI experience so much better.
    - mrguyorama 11mo ago
      There is no setting to revert back to the very reliable and high quality "AI" autocomplete that reliably did not recommend class methods that do not exist and reliably figured out the pattern I was writing 20 lines of without randomly suggesting 100 lines of new code that only disrupts my view of the code I am trying to work on. I even clicked the "Don't do multiline suggestions" checkbox because the above was so absurdly anti-productive, but it was ignored
mk89 11mo ago
My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks. The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget. 100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe). This means for a year or more, a lot of AI everywhere, impossible to avoid, will make usability sink. Now, if this was only done by Microsoft, I would not mind. The issue is that this behavior is getting widespread. Things are becoming increasingly unusable.
- wlesieutre 11mo ago
  Reminds me of when Google’s core mission was to put Google Plus integrations in everything
- ilteris 11mo ago
  Yep, ship it out now, we'll figure out the rest later. I remember there was that motto, "respect the user." I am so tired.
  - conartist6 11mo ago
    You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care. Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least
    - conartist6 11mo ago
      (unless of course the user is an impostor, a scammer, or a grifter! Then the level is service becomes almost unimaginably high)
raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
I have had great luck with ChatGPT trying to figure out a complex AWS issue with “I am going to give you the problem I have. I want you to help me work backwards step by step and give me the AWS cli commands to help you troubleshoot. I will give you the output of the command”. It’s a combination of advice that ChatGPT gives me and my own rubberducking.
lostphilosopher 11mo ago
This seems like what should be a killer feature: Copilot having access to configuration and logs and being able to identify where a failure is coming from. This stuff is tedious manually since I basically run through a checklist of where the failure could occur and there’s no great way to automate that plus sometimes there’s subtle typo type issues. Copilot can generate the checklist reasonably well but can’t execute on it, even from Copilot within Azure. Why not??

yoyohello13 11mo ago

I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.

foobarian 11mo ago
Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?
- blibble 11mo ago
  > Why is this, I wonder? because that's Microsoft's business model their products are just just good enough to allow them to put a checkbox in a feature table to allow it to be sold to someone who will then never have to use it but not even a penny more will be spent than the absolute bare minimum to allow that this explains Teams, Azure, and everything else they make you can think of
  - ethbr1 11mo ago
    * That's modern Microsoft's desktop product business model I hear tales of the before-times, when they had a QA department and took quality seriously.
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
      How do you QA adding weird prediction tool to say Outlook. I have to use Outlook at one of my clients and have switched to writing all emails in VS Code and then pasting it to Outlook as “autocomplete” is unbearable… Not sure QA is possible with tools like these…
      - ethbr1 11mo ago
        Part of QA used to be evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing. ... why, it's almost like in eliminating the QA function, we removed the final checks and balances on developers (read: PMs) from implementing whatever ass-backwards feature occurs to them. Just in time for 'AI all the things!' directives to come down from on high.
        bdangubic 11mo ago
        exactly!! though evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing is hard when no one knows what it is supposed to be doing :)
        ethbr1 11mo ago
        Which was the other benefit of a formal QA org -- you had to be able to tell them what you changed and how it was supposed to work.
    - Terr_ 11mo ago
      UX consistency also took a dive, both in MS products and in all the psuedo-webpage crap shipped as Electron apps.
- elorant 11mo ago
  Probably compute isn’t enough to serve everyone from a frontier LLM.

smileson2 11mo ago

that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out

vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago

"They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way." And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"

greazy 11mo ago
I asked copilot in outlook webmail to search my emails for something I needed. I can't do that. that's the one use case where LLM is helpful!

ihsw 11mo ago

[dead]

Arwill 11mo ago

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

xnorswap 11mo ago
This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / statistics based approach that worked well without suggesting outright rubbish. In .NET we've had intellisense for 25 years that would only suggest properties that could exist, and then suddenly I found a while ago that vscode auto-completed properties that don't exist. It's maddening! The least they could have done is put in a roslyn pass to filter out the impossible.
- cyberax 11mo ago
  The regular JetBrains IDEs have a setting to disable the AI-based inline completion, you can then just assign it to a hotkey and call it when needed. I found that it makes the AI experience so much better.
  - mrguyorama 11mo ago
    There is no setting to revert back to the very reliable and high quality "AI" autocomplete that reliably did not recommend class methods that do not exist and reliably figured out the pattern I was writing 20 lines of without randomly suggesting 100 lines of new code that only disrupts my view of the code I am trying to work on. I even clicked the "Don't do multiline suggestions" checkbox because the above was so absurdly anti-productive, but it was ignored

mk89 11mo ago

My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks. The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget. 100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe). This means for a year or more, a lot of AI everywhere, impossible to avoid, will make usability sink. Now, if this was only done by Microsoft, I would not mind. The issue is that this behavior is getting widespread. Things are becoming increasingly unusable.

wlesieutre 11mo ago
Reminds me of when Google’s core mission was to put Google Plus integrations in everything
ilteris 11mo ago
Yep, ship it out now, we'll figure out the rest later. I remember there was that motto, "respect the user." I am so tired.
- conartist6 11mo ago
  You would think they would care about the fact that their brand is being torched but I guess they figure they're too big to need to care. Their new philosophy is "the user is too stupid to even think for themselves LOL." It's not just their rhetoric, it's every single choice they've made screaming out their new priorities of which user respect is both last and least
  - conartist6 11mo ago
    (unless of course the user is an impostor, a scammer, or a grifter! Then the level is service becomes almost unimaginably high)

raw_anon_1111 11mo ago

I have had great luck with ChatGPT trying to figure out a complex AWS issue with “I am going to give you the problem I have. I want you to help me work backwards step by step and give me the AWS cli commands to help you troubleshoot. I will give you the output of the command”. It’s a combination of advice that ChatGPT gives me and my own rubberducking.

lostphilosopher 11mo ago

This seems like what should be a killer feature: Copilot having access to configuration and logs and being able to identify where a failure is coming from. This stuff is tedious manually since I basically run through a checklist of where the failure could occur and there’s no great way to automate that plus sometimes there’s subtle typo type issues. Copilot can generate the checklist reasonably well but can’t execute on it, even from Copilot within Azure. Why not??