Comment by procaryote
17 hours ago
Give the low quality of microsoft's products, I am very ready to believe that even simple agents can do a better job.
17 hours ago
Give the low quality of microsoft's products, I am very ready to believe that even simple agents can do a better job.
The engineers are fine. The system is a mess. It reminds me of the recent post about "SimCity - but with permits."
Even basic things like fixing the pothole doesn't get done because, well, permits.
One of my last productive acts when I was at microsoft was to get a two-line change committed in windows to a tree outside my org. It took two full months just to propagate the change up the very fragile and fractured tree of repos from my team's to WINMAIN and from WINMAIN back down to the owning team's org, and my efforts were required every step of the way. It was truly soul-crushing.
Edit: this was in the windows vista days and I hope/expect they have overhauled that entire process in a major way, because things were at a near standstill.
It sounds like you're assuming the poor quality is a result of developer incompetence rather than deliberate management decisions.
Then again, if/when they do lay off so many employees, then Microsoft is putting themselves in the position that eventually they will "have no choice" but to depend more and more on agents to do as much of the work as possible...which i predict means that their products will dip in quality even further, at least until models, agents, etc. can markedly improve...so, a continuation or worsening of the quality. The future looks bleak in a few different ways; oof!
They don't think it be like it is, but it do.
An LLM, a decent prompter, and a weekend could certainly out perform Windows Terminal.
Come now, Windows Terminal can execute your commands in less than a weekend ;)
It takes human talent to make a product as actively irritating as Teams or the Windows 11 Start Menu.