Comment by madamelic
18 hours ago
I disagree. Microsoft had been doing just fine at making completely awful and broken products before AI coding was a thing.
18 hours ago
I disagree. Microsoft had been doing just fine at making completely awful and broken products before AI coding was a thing.
Yes, exactly. AI isn't some magic dust that you can sprinkle into your workforce and get more productivity and better results. It is at best a force amplifier for what you already have. If you're making awful and broken products, you will make even more awful and even more broken products at a higher rate than before.
It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
Homer: There's three ways to do things: the right way, the Microsoft way and the AI slop way.
Bart: Isn't that the Microsoft way?
Homer: Yes, but faster!
Microsoft had a very specific niche of making completely awful software that wasn't actually broken - in fact, that was often the infuriating thing.
If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
The .NET team is a counter example, aside from the GUI situation.