So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
Microsoft has no "move-everything-to-Rust initiative" and never did. That was a bunch of clickbait created based on the personal comments by a single Microsoft developer.
Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
+1 for SyncThing. No cloud, thanks. And unlike OneDrive, it actually works. OneDrive screwed me when I tried it, so I completely uninstalled it. Still on Windows 10 too. Not regretting it so far.
They don't have David Cutler to mow the lawns. I have worked in larger shops (smaller than MSFT but still large enough, almost 10K employees), and people in general are very forgiving about making mistakes. You would think it was a good thing, but what it shows was that no one cared and none took responsibility.
If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.
A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.
At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.
The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.
Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)
If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?
I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.
I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
Genuinely curious—what parts of Windows 11 do you like? I can’t find a single redeeming quality compared to W10, but admittedly I daily drive arch + macOS and only occasionally use my windows machine.
I hope there's more to it than something solvable with AutoHotkey...
So far I just experience a buggier version of Windows 10 with features I don't want.
But it's reliability is bad? It doesn't crash as often as previous versions of windows sure, but instead ends up in various inoperable states that aren't fixed without restarting, which isn't really any better.
Interesting - my annoyance with W11 is nothing to do with AI or CoPilot (or "Privacy", "Phoning home", the usual crap MS haters talk about), it's due to stuff like Windows Explorer getting seriously worse.
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
Vibe coding to the max. Forcing employees to use it and that’s the large scale result. Cause it’s garbage. Hands down on large scale it just doesn’t work. Especially on something the scale of an operating system.
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
ATM windows still has enough of a moat that they can comfortably do the former.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.
Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.
Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
I think I might know...
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
I will say it for you -- they're moving too fast with AI.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1649940/microsoft-reca...
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-receive-an-eve... and https://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-yanks-windows-updat... and https://www.404techsupport.com/2015/03/12/kb3033929-may-caus... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...
IMO, it's all traceable to their decision to lay off their dedicated QA teams in 2014
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.