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Posted by Anon84 4 days ago

Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft(www.theverge.com)
406 points | 522 commentspage 2
srinath693 4 days ago|
The embarrassing part isn't that Microsoft employees prefer Claude Code. It's that Microsoft had every advantag, the OpenAI partnership, the distribution, the enterprise relationships, the $13B investment and still built a product their own engineers don't want to use. That's not a model problem. That's a product taste problem. Anthropic built Claude Code with like 30 engineers. Microsoft has tens of thousands. At some point you have to accept that no amount of investment compensates for not actually understanding what developers need.
superfrank 4 days ago||
I feel like I must be missing something, but I just cannot understand the hype around Claude Code. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully bought in on using AI for development and am super happy to use Copilot or Cursor, but as an experienced developer just chatting with the terminal feels so wrong. I've tried it so many times to switch and I can't get into it.

Can anyone else share what their workflow with CC looks like? Even if I never end up switching I'd like to at least feel like I gave it a good shot and made a choice based on that, but right now I just feel like I'm doing something wrong.

theflyinghorse 4 days ago||
Workflow is this: - I have emacs open for code editing/reviews/git. - Separate terminal emulator with 1-3 claudes - I work on a story by splitting it into small steps ("Let's move this email logic to the email.service.ts", "here's the fields I'd need to add to the request, create a schema validation in a separate file, and update the router and controller") - I mostly watch claude, and occasionally walk through the code in emacs whenever I feel like I want to review code. - I handle external tools like git or db migrations myself not letting LLMs near them.

In essence, this is pretty much how you'd run a group of juniors - you'd sit on slack and jira diving up work and doing code reviews.

superfrank 4 days ago|||
> I work on a story by splitting it into small steps

It's funny because that's basically the approach I take in GH Copilot. I first work with it to create a plan broken up into small steps and save that to an md file and then I have it go one step at a time reviewing the changes as it goes or just when it's done.

I understand that you're using emacs to keep an eye on the code as it goes, so maybe what I wasn't groking was that people were using terminal based code editors to see the changes it was making. I assumed most people were just letting it do it s thing and then trying to review everything at the end, but felt like an anti-pattern given how much we (dev community) push for small PRs over gigantic 5k line PRs.

bluGill 4 days ago||||
At that point though isn't it just as fast/easy to cut/paste the code yourself? That was my conclusion after spending a week breaking things down - I was able to get good code out of the AI, but only after spending as much time writing the prompt as if I just did it myself. (note that this was my first attempt at using an agent, maybe I'll learn to do it better)
Daishiman 3 days ago||
With some experience you start getting the hand of how big a task you can hand off, and then you give the agent a way to test the changes, like using a browser and checking for a component, or adding unit tests for the backend.

Having a tight feedback loop for agents is critical for getting good output.

mimischi 4 days ago||||
As an aside: have you thought about using agent-shell?

https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell

1899-12-30 4 days ago||||
have you tried the emacs package agent-shell?
PantaloonFlames 4 days ago|||
yes, similar.
silisili 4 days ago|||
One thing I really like it for is if you have a lot of something similar - let's say plugins. I can then just go to the plugins directory, and tell claude something as simple as "this is the plugins directory where plugins live. I want to add one called 'sample' that samples records". Note that I don't even have to tell it what that means usually.

It will read the existing plugins, understand the code style/structure/how they integrate, then create a plugin called "sample" AND code that is usually what you wanted without telling it specifically, and write 10 tests for it.

In those cases it's magic. In large codebases, asking it to add something into existing code or modify a behavior I've found it to be...less useful at.

chasd00 4 days ago|||
iterm and talk to Claude, command+tab to vscode fix/adjust things, command+tab back to iterm and talk more to Claude. Not the most technically advanced setup but it works pretty well for me. I don't like the turbo auto-complete in vscode, it's very distracting. If i want an agent's help I tab over and ask claude.

Also, use the Superpowers plugin for Claude. That really helps for larger tasks but it can over do it hah. It's amusing to watch the code reviewer, implementor, and tester fight and go back and forth over something that doesn't even really matter.

gganley 4 days ago|||
I'll take a crack at it. I liked using Cursor and it was my first introduction but my main editor is Emacs and I like Emacs, it has a bunch of configuration that has built up like barnacles on the bottom of a ship so it was kind of hard using VS Code. I use a project package (projectile) that allows me to quickly move between different projects (git repos, TRAMP sessions, anything really) and I can open a CC terminal there that I can have pop in and out as I need it. Really it's pretty similar to how I used Cursor.
strongpigeon 4 days ago|||
I use it like having a bunch of L3/L4 engineers. I give them a description of the changes I want to be made, sometimes chat a bit with it to help them design the features and then tell them to have a go at it. Then I create PRs and review them and have them clean up/improve the code and merge it. I try to balance giving it enough stuff to build so I can switch to another agent, and not giving them too much so that they make a weird assumption and run really far with it.

I got really good at reviewing code efficiently from my time at Google and others, which helps a lot. I'm sure my personal career experience influences a lot how I'm using it.

FWIW, I use Codex CLI, but I assume my flow would be the same with Claude Code.

ardmiller 4 days ago||
[dead]
kcb 4 days ago||
And probably running on their macbooks...
GaProgMan 4 days ago||
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.

arcologies1985 4 days ago|||
Probably because "Windows Modern Standby" makes laptops unusable by turning them on in your backpack and cooking them.

https://youtu.be/OHKKcd3sx2c

m-schuetz 4 days ago|||
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.
cosmic_cheese 4 days ago||
Probably because the quality of PC BIOS/firmware is generally abysmal and getting vendors to follow spec is like herding cats.
beart 4 days ago|||
This particular issue really hits a nerve.

Consumers _do not care_ if it is the firmware or Windows.

Dell was one of the earlier brands, and biggest, to suffer these standby problems. Dell has blamed MS and MS has blamed Dell, and neither has been in any hurry to resolve the issues.

I still can't put my laptop in my backpack without shutting it down, and as a hybrid worker, having to tear down and spin up my application context every other day is not productive.

cosmic_cheese 4 days ago||
Yeah I hear you. One of the reasons I’m still inclined towards Mac laptops for “daily drivers” is precisely because it’s disruptive to have to do a full shutdown that obliterates my whole workspace. Other manufacturers can be fine for single-use machines (e.g. a study laptop that only ever has Anki and maybe a browser and music app open), but every step beyond that brings increased friction.

Maybe the most tragic part is that this drags down Linux and plagues it with these hardware rooted sleep issues too.

Nextgrid 4 days ago||||
S3 sleep was a solved problem until Microsoft decided that your laptop must download ads^Wsuggestions in the background and deprecated it. On firmwares still supporting S3, it works perfectly.
m-schuetz 4 days ago||||
Sleep used to work perfectly fine up until, I don't know, 10 years ago. I doubt hardware/firmware/BIOS got worse since then, this is 100% a Microsoft problem.
mrweasel 4 days ago|||
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.
taude 4 days ago||||
Haa, amazing. I had this happen to TWO Dell XPS for me, before finally switching over to Mac.
frozenlettuce 4 days ago||||
I remember having this issue back in 2014... maybe the tech is not there yet.
arcologies1985 3 days ago||
2014 was when Modern Standby was introduced.
kibwen 4 days ago|||
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.
einsteinx2 4 days ago|||
I had the issue with Intel MacBooks but never once with any M-series model.
cosmic_cheese 4 days ago|||
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.
khkjhkjiug 4 days ago||||
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.

epolanski 4 days ago||||
One of my friends is a program manager in MS, I think he requested a Macbook but was denied, was given a Surface instead.

He didn't dislike it, but got himself a Macbook nonetheless at his cost.

Nextgrid 4 days ago||||
> WHY they use Apple hardware

Because Windows' UX is trash? Anyone with leverage over their employer can and should request a Mac. And in a hot market, developers/designers did have that leverage (maybe they still do) and so did get their Macs as requested.

Only office drones who don't have the leverage to ask for anything better or don't know something better exists are stuck with Windows. Everyone else will go Mac or Linux.

Which is why you see Windows becoming so shit, because none of the culprits actually use it day-to-day. Microsoft should've enforced a hard rule about dogfooding their own product back in the Windows 7 days when the OS was still usable. I'm not sure they could get away with it now without a massive revolt and/or productivity stopping dead in its tracks.

koakuma-chan 4 days ago|||
You're an MVP? Minimum viable product? Most valuable player?
mkl 4 days ago|||
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Most_Valuable_Profes...
stoobs 4 days ago|||
These days it could also be Most vaunted prompt
benkaiser 4 days ago||
Am a software engineer at Microsoft using a M3 MBP, opinions are my own and all. Honestly one (of many) reasons I opted to go through the exception process to request a macbook was the screen brightness. The fact you can run software to boost the screen to HDR brightness levels for SDR content is insanely useful for working outside.
wendgeabos 4 days ago||
So, is claude code really better than codex with latest gpt model, or do people just hate on openai so much that no one (but me apparently) is using them? I am asking this question seriously because if so I will make the switch, but codex seems to be quite good to me so I don't want to waste time switching.
tomashubelbauer 4 days ago||
I used to use Claude Code with Opus exclusively because of how good it is IME. Then Anthropic banned me so I switched to OpenCode. I really want OpenCode to win, but there is long way for it to get the same polish in the UX department (and to get a handle on the memory leaks). I am 100 % sure Claude Code is hacks upon hacks internally, but on the surface, it works quite well (not that they have fixed the flashing issue). With OpenCode I also switched to GPT-5.2-Codex and I have to say it's fairly garbage IME. I can't get it to keep working, it takes every opportunity to either tell me what I should do next for it or just tell me it figured a particular piece of the larger puzzle out and that if I want it can continue. It is not nearly as independent as Opus it. Now I'm on the Codex CLI with GPT-5.2 as I figured maybe the harness is the issue, but it is not very good either.
Freedumbs 4 days ago|||
Yes. It's much better. Codex is good for an extra review on plans. There's no need to switch. Use both.
dboon 4 days ago||
Codex is not a good harness, but GPT-5.2 and related flavors produce, in my experience, better code than Opus 4.5, and by a surprising margin.
dataviz1000 4 days ago||
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.

zzbzq 4 days ago||
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.
dktp 4 days ago||
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

oefrha 4 days ago|||
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.
dataviz1000 4 days ago||
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.

joncrane 4 days ago||
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence"
cush 4 days ago||
What were you spending on Copilot?
dude250711 4 days ago||
We can certainly see, every Windows update requires flipping a coin now.
bakugo 4 days ago||
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.

wcoenen 4 days ago||
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.
johnebgd 4 days ago||
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.
unlimit 4 days ago|||
You won't regret. I have been using debian for last 25 years on and off and for last 8 years non stop. I have no complains.
vv_ 4 days ago||
Unfortunately it'll take time for certain companies to release their applications on Linux distro's. So right now I manage with WSL2 + Win 11.
afewmoredecades 4 days ago||
[dead]
newsoftheday 4 days ago||||
I've used Kubuntu for several years, wife too now which is an official, supported flavor of Ubuntu using KDE desktop instead of Gnome. It gives a more Windows like or CDE (Common Desktop Environment - from UNIX systems) feel than Gnome which gives a more Mac feel.
endemic 4 days ago||
Also a pretty heavy Kubuntu user. After spending my formative years tweaking Linux installs, this distro "just works" for me.
pjmlp 4 days ago||||
You might want to change to Debian or some other distro more radical.

https://ubuntu.com/ai

eklavya 4 days ago||
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.
pjmlp 4 days ago||
And eventually on Ubuntu itself, who knows.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4 days ago|||
Linux kernels will all eventually be permeated with AI-gen code as well. It will just take longer to see and feel the effects.
calgoo 4 days ago|||
I'm sure there are a bunch of "Rust is better" people spending all their tokens on rewriting the Linux kernel as we speak.
bflesch 4 days ago|||
Your argument is in bad faith because you are using false equivalence bias.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4 days ago||
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.
vv_ 4 days ago||
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.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4 days ago||
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.

vv_ 2 days ago|||
> 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

And on what grounds do you make this assumption?

bigfishrunning 4 days ago||||
So eventually, doesn't the KPI move from "more code" to "better code"? The pendulum will have to swing the other way eventually; seems like microsoft is just accelerating that process
Eddy_Viscosity2 4 days ago||
> doesn't the KPI move from "more code" to "better code"?

I would love for this to be true. But another scenario that could play out is that this process accelerates software bloat that was already happening with human coded software. Notepad will be a 300GB executable in 2035.

bigfishrunning 4 days ago||
> Notepad will be a 300GB executable in 2035.

And this will cause what I'm talking about -- When nobody can afford memory because it's all going into the ocean-boiling datacenters, all of a sudden someone selling a program that fits into RAM will have a very attractive product

DowsingSpoon 4 days ago|||
This is why, of course, nearly all open source projects are written in Java.
ChrisArchitect 4 days ago||
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

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/technology/claude-code.ht...

Claude Is Taking the AI World by Storm, and Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-code-ai-7a46460...

falloutx 4 days ago|
Anthropic is known for this, they are purposefully putting these stories on the websites execs and managers read. They even astroturf HN every chance they get with 2 blog posts a week (sometimes even more).
kachapopopow 4 days ago||
I think they are also using AI to name everything because no human on this planet would come up with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
cake_robot 4 days ago||
IDK given where they've gone w/ Xbox naming, pre-LLMs
kachapopopow 4 days ago||
this was supposed to be a reply
torginus 4 days ago|
To this day I cannot wrap my head around the fact why did Microsoft allow a culture to grow inside the company (either through hiring, or through despondence) that at best is indifferent towards the company's products and at worst openly despises them?

I'm sure no other tech company is like this.

I think technologies like the Windows kernel and OS, the .NET framework, their numerous attempts to build a modern desktop UI framework with XAML, their dev tools, were fundamentally good at some point.

Yet they cant or wont hire people who would fix Windows, rather than just maintain it, really push for modernization, make .NET actually cool and something people want to use.

They'd rather hire folks who were taught at school that Microsoft is the devil and Linux is superior in all ways, who don't know the first thing about the MS tech stack, and would rather write React on the Macbooks (see the start menu incident), rather than touch anything made by Microsoft.

It seems somehow the internal culture allows this. I'm sure if you forced devs to use Copilot, and provided them with the tools and organizational mandate to do so, it would become good enough eventually to not have to force people to use it.

My main complaint I keep hearing about Azure (which I do not use at workr)

cgh 4 days ago||
At the beginning of my career, sometime around 1999 or 2000, I was at Microsoft with our team because we were trying to integrate our product with this absolute piece of junk called Microsoft Biztalk.

It simply didn’t work. I complained about it and was eventually hauled into a room with some MS PMs who told me in no uncertain terms that indeed, Biztalk didn’t work and it was essentially garbage that no one, including us, should ever use. Just pretend you’re doing something and when the week is up, go home. Tell everyone you’ve integrated with Biztalk. It won’t matter.

coffeemug 4 days ago|||
I work for Microsoft/Azure and my incentives are (roughly in descending order): minimize large/long outages, ship lots of stuff (with some concern for customer utility, but not too much), don't get yelled at for missing mandated work (security, compliance, etc.) I'd love to improve product quality, but incentives for that are negative. We're running a tight ship, and every second I spend on quality is a second I don't spend on the priorities above. Since there isn't any slack in the system, that means my performance assessment will drop, which I obviously don't want. Multiply that by 200k employees, and you get the current state of quality across the whole product portfolio.
alternatex 4 days ago||
My experience in the Teams org is the same. It's all about security, compliance, and recently AI. Fixing bugs and similar "non-flashy" work is a sure way of postponing one's promotion indefinitely.
falloutx 4 days ago|||
Because the products have become terrible, and they keep using more AI to solve it when AI is the problem with Microsoft. Microsoft execs are only riding Azure success, rest of the orgs are completely useless.
anonymars 4 days ago|||
Microsoft used to be well-known for eating its own dogfood. I wonder what happened
Terretta 4 days ago||
To fix the Koolaid you need people that haven't drunk it.
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