> 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".

    nes:snes = 6502
    n64 = mips
    gamecube:wii:wiiu = powerpc
    switch:switch2 = arm

>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...

>>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.

Everyone I know who use AI day-to-day is just using Copilot to mostly do things like add a transition animation to a Powerpoint slide or format a word document to look nice. The only problem these LLM products seem to solve is giving normal people a easy way to interact with terrible software processes and GUIs. And better solution to that problem would be for developers to actually observe how the average use interacts with both a computer and their program in particular.

The craziest thing was how Microsoft took the super established brand from decades, and renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365.

I'm not sure if it's named Microsoft 365 Copilot nowadays, or if that's an optional AI addon? I thought it was renamed once more, but they themselves claim simply "Microsoft 365" (in a few various tiers) sans-Copilot. https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-micr...

> 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.

> so why should anyone pay for Copilot?

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

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

  - Adobe Neural Filter Acrobat
  - Adobe Neural Filter App (previously photoshop)
  - Adobe Neural Filter Illustrator
  - Adobe 720 Neural Filter app
  - etc.

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.

It's the same with Gemini for Google Workspace.

I asked it to create a slide deck for me, within Slides, based on a block of notes I wrote. It wouldn't do it. The chat assistant at gemini.google.com wouldn't do it either. They told me how to do it step by step though...which I knew how to do already. Useless.

I also tried the `AI()` Sheets function to fill a range in based on some other data in the sheet. It doesn't accept other ranges, even if you use the &CELL_REF& notation.

For being supposedly the same models with how close MS and OpenAI supposedly are, it's bizarrely bad.

I was trying to just get an Excel function dialed in with some IFs and formatting weirdness. The licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot built into Excel tried several times and failed miserably. One screenshot to ChatGPT (5.1?) and it was one-shot.

I'm not even sure it's the same models any more. It feels years behind. Maybe they limit it or cripple it somehow.

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

It's the horrible "IBM Watson" marketing of our time, and I expect will do as badly for Microsoft as Watson did for IBM.

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

> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

It's also an LLM chat UI, I don't know if it's because of my work but it lets me select models from all of the major players (GPT, Claude, Gemini)

https://github.com/copilot

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

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)

> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

It is a coding everything, autocomplete, ask, edit files and an agent (claude code like).

Sorry for a question out of topic, but is there still an offline office license available? So you buy it and have it locally?

There is also Security Copilot, which I accidentally enabled and got a 3000€ invoice by azure. Thanks, M$!

Github copilot is not just autocompletion, its a chat/agent thing in VS Code.

> Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

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

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

Its long term microsoft culture to be horrific at external naming

So I guess the same situation as with Google Gemini.

They are vibing the naming probably

Have you seen their Xbox line up?

Don't forget Azure Copilot :)

Classic Microsoft.

Xbox one series X

They sucks at names.

Can somebody give me a TLDR on what the "copilot button" does? I've never had one of those laptops and have never understood that. Does it just start the AI front-end? Does it power up the NPU?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Anthropic has a model. Microsoft doesn't.

Recall is great for bashing but relatively inconsequential to anything Microsoft has been doing in this space outside that.

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.

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 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 heard Opus 4.5 might have an edge especially in long running agentic coding scenarios (?) but personally yes Gemini 3 series is what I was expecting GPT-5 to be.

I'm also mostly on Gemini 3 Flash. Not because I've compared them all and I found it the best bar none, but because it fulfills my needs and then some, and Google has a surprisingly little noted family plan for it. Unlike OpenAI, unlike Anthropic. IIRC it's something like 5 shared Gemini Pro subs for the price of 1. Even being just a couple sharing it, it's a fantastic deal. My wife uses it during studies, I professionally with coding and I've never run into limits.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

What everyone is really sleeping on is Deepseek paid API with Cline and VSCode. An agent that can refactor entire codebases with a 128.0k context window that costs dimes. It generates entire blocks of code and tests them for $0.02 a pop. Deepseek paid API brings the low cost large context window and memory. VSCode the interface, CLine the agent.

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'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 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.

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.

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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.

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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.

The "smart autocomplete" part of Github Copilot is still the most useful AI coding thing for me at the moment. I continue to subscribe to it just for that.

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.

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.

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 microsoft just doesnt have top talent building these products

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

The Copilot-Cli is not so bad,

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

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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...).

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.

What I don't understand is why so few people talk about AugmentCode, it uses claude (and others) but builds context of your project and tends to understand your repos better.