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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
>>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
69 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 79.7 ms ] threadThe difference between the two is stark.
I'll know better in a week. Hopefully I can get better results with the $200 a month plan.
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.
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.
“What do we actually need to be productive?”
Which is how Anthropic pulled ahead of Microsoft, that prioritized
checks notes
Taking screenshots of every windows user’s desktop every few seconds. For productivity.
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?
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...
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.
It is a coding everything, autocomplete, ask, edit files and an agent (claude code like).
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
They sucks at names.
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.
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.
Well, that might explain why all their products are unusable lately.
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?
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.
shrug
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...