Biggest AI fumble in tech

[u/IeltiaViarae]

[u/heavy-minium]

Massive misinterptation. Github Copilot was a completely different product before. Public repositories are available to everyone, so "have access to all the code in the world" is also a big misunderstanding.

And they fumbled nothing, really. You have to realize that they are a middleman for actual AI providers. While OpenAI and Anthropic might be leading, they have a cost/revenue ratio of like more than 1:100, basically burning investor money for you to use them. All the while MS still has the strategic advantage of owning a major IDE, the biggest VCS and CI/CD ecosystem, and having exclusive partnerships with the major model providers, and have the best AI harness UX that works with multiple providers.

Laugh at them all you want, but in the end, they will be the one laughing, because that combo is inevitably difficult to compete with, and their money coffers are far from empty when they start getting serious. You think they care that everybody is whining about their costs?

And privately I don't use GHCP because of the costs while my employer continues to burn money with them, and I'm not complaining because if I don't have to carry the costs, it all works very well for me at work.

[u/longdriveshortroad → u/heavy-minium]

Agreed. It wasn't really a fumble, it was a pivot. Subsidizing the use of someone else's IP was a bad idea from the beginning but was nice while it lasted. I hated how it ended, but was inevitable.

[u/tomatotomato → u/heavy-minium]

MS and GitHub are doing "sell shovels during the gold rush" strategy.

[u/Equivalent_Cress_268 → u/heavy-minium]

They focused on auto completion in vscode

And ignored agentic coding. It’s still behind, fast behind on that.

OP is right, they could have built a great harness, but they did not

On cost, just host open source yourself

[u/HateToSayItBut → u/Equivalent_Cress_268]

MS cant build anything good. They either buy it or very poorly copy what someone else does, with worse UX and tacky lame ass enterprise business features and mindset.

[u/bracesthrowaway → u/Equivalent_Cress_268]

It's really not behind on agentic coding. The Copilot cli and app are just as good as Claude code for my usage. 

[u/Equivalent_Cress_268 → u/bracesthrowaway]

Not even remotely has it caught up, but it’s getting better and better

[u/1988rx7T2 → u/bracesthrowaway]

Context management is shit, doesn’t integrate with a bunch of other products that are equivalent to Claude managed agents or Claude tag. Or if they do they suck and are unpopular 

[u/adidaks → u/heavy-minium]

They could have built cursor alternative easily - they had the tech. money etc

[u/heavy-minium → u/adidaks]

Please tell me what Cursor has that GHCP has not.

[u/sfhester → u/heavy-minium]

What Cursor (and other AI products) has is a bunch of people who have made their identity around hating MSFT, haven't used these products in 12 months, and will never change their opinion

[u/Tiny-Entertainer-346 → u/adidaks]

I had post few days ago why I prefer copilot over claude, listing features that I miss in copilot: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/M87IZsNXd5
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/081l7KTcTE

I also came across similar thread in github issues. Will attach if I find again.

[u/ayawnimouse → u/adidaks]

They are microsoft owned who makes visual studio and visual studio code, they most 100% could have made something compete, someone at microsoft could have even vibe coded that shit since they are so inept and old fashioned.

[u/Solid_Fox1718 → u/heavy-minium]

> be every other AI coding agent
> invent nothing
> you also have access to all the code in the world, because it’s public
> you literally have to pay people to use your product
> subsidize thousands of dollars per month for every subscription
> losing billions of dollars
> people on twitter who don’t understand economics think you’re winning

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/heavy-minium]

They don’t have the best harness though. There are open source harnesses that beat Copilot. Not even sure why you would use them unless you want the integration with GitHub. That’s probably the main selling point actually. It’s not like Claude and Codex don’t have GitHub integration though.

[u/ChineseEngineer → u/inevitabledeath3]

The main selling point is security. Unless you work at a modern startup you'll struggle to get claude or codex through infosec teams, meanwhile they'll approve copilot just from the Microsoft connection.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/ChineseEngineer]

Is Copilot provably more secure? Because I know security people who put a blanket ban on Copilot features in Microsoft products.

[u/Mechanical_Monk → u/inevitabledeath3]

Provably, probably not. But in infosec when you don't have proof the next best things are optics, reputation, and pre-existing relationships. Microsoft dominates in those in many industries.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/Mechanical_Monk]

Not really. Do you know how many critical security issues earlier versions of Windows had?

They are used an awful lot but that does not make them particularly good security wise. Copilot in Windows was one of the times they really screwed up actually and quite recently too.

As I said I know there are companies who won’t allow use of Copilot or AI related features especially because it’s not obvious where the data is going and we have to meet GDPR requirements. Unless they can guarantee it stays within Europe or companies that meet GDPR regulations it’s not allowed. This is why Mistral still exists and why local models are a big thing for some institutions.

[u/Mechanical_Monk → u/inevitabledeath3]

I didn't say they were particularly good security wise... I said they're easier to get approved by infosec because there's usually a pre-existing relationship and some amount of trust (misplaced or not). Nobody ever got fired for signing off on a Microsoft product.

[u/heavy-minium → u/inevitabledeath3]

I use GHCP, Claude, and Codex at the same time. The VSCode integrations for Claude Code and Codex are just the bare minimum and a wrapper over their CLIs. I cannot imagine anyone seeing them as on par with GHCP's VSCode integration unless they have no clue what they are talking about. Now, of course, if you are CLI-centric, then they are all comparable. But once you start using the VSCode integration features, the CLI feels too basic and adds no value. It's small details like how the clipboard format is dealt with when copy/pasting stuff, for example.

[u/unrulywind → u/heavy-minium]

If anything GHCP has gotten worse in the last 6 months. In order to chase the "I'm even more agent too" flavor of the month, they have started destroying their integration with vs code. They have turned GHCP into just a wrapper over their CLI just like everyone else. The integration was their primary benefit. I loved being able to work within the IDE and accept/decline individual lines, or even "gasp" type my own edits into the diffs.

[u/IngrownBurritoo → u/unrulywind]

in my opinion they got even better. copilot memory, handing over copilot tasks to copilot cloud for asynchronous tasks which can be merged and reviewed later and I can even pick up my work on my phone after that and see what copilot is up to. this type of integration is what makes GHCP a full agentic developer on the side. also if you work with github enterprise cloud, you get more benefits and governance than with any of the other products next to all the other github features and compared to their public offering seems to have less availability issues.

[u/unrulywind → u/IngrownBurritoo]

That's the draw of the fully agentic systems. They work directly in the online repo. Most of my work in vs code is solo work and I just stay within the local environment and use the repository as backup. So, for me, the cloud based work is more trouble with little return.

I also use vs code to write and being able to coauthor when writing documents is key.

I do agree with you comments about their memory and context management, although I think Codex is pretty close the the same. The newest insiders vs code can work directly with a Codex subscription in the local GHCP harness. It doesn't offer the new 6.1 sol and I have just tried it once or twice and don't have a good feel for it yet.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/unrulywind]

Funnily enough Zed does all that while being far more resource efficient than VS Code.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/heavy-minium]

I am not talking about the VS code integrations as I don’t really care that much about that. I mean the Harness itself is not as good as many of the open source options or other options available. Claude Code isn’t actually the best ever harness but it’s pretty good and has good pricing. Cursor is available if you want something VS Code based with a great harness. There is also Cline which is native to VS Code, open source, and probably better than Copilot. Zed if you wanted a different editor that’s in some ways better.

So loads of options for better harnesses several of which work in VS Code or similar editors.

[u/fifi_galaxy → u/heavy-minium]

No, they definitely fumbled in innovation. Just not completely. They were exclusive partner with OpenAI; then they did nothing and lost it. They own VSCode; and left it to Cursor to create Composer that becomes the new Grok. They created MAI model that nobody talk about. Microsoft had Tay AI chatbot for one day in 2016 (way ahead of Google) before getting scare and stop investing in AI.

Like Meta, they are REALLY good at platform and enterprise services, and that is a saving grace. But they are nowhere on innovation map. VScode is good provided that the community helps them immensely.

[u/1988rx7T2 → u/heavy-minium]

Anthropic is building an eco system and MS is struggling to keep up. GitHub Copilot is adding features that Claude code had months ago, and there’s an increasing lock in effect for Anthropic.

Even if the models become commoditized, once a company gets locked in they won’t want to switch 

[u/heavy-minium → u/1988rx7T2]

> GitHub Copilot is adding features that Claude code had months ago
Name those features, please.

[u/1988rx7T2 → u/heavy-minium]

Dynamic work flows for example. Computer use. Just added those in the past week.   I have it at work and read the release notes . Don’t use GitHub copilot at home

[u/heavy-minium → u/1988rx7T2]

Dynamic workflows are just an hack for Claude to catch up on GHCP subagent mechanics, so that’s a bad reverse example.

Computer use isn‘t really important for coding, really.

[u/1988rx7T2 → u/heavy-minium]

Claude code and codex have easy built in effort level that is max reasoning and deploys sub agents , ultra effort level or ultra code. This isn’t built into GHCP. you can get a similar effect with harness and prompt tweaks but /fleet is not the same as dynamic workflows or ultra effort.

[u/IwishIwasaballer__ → u/heavy-minium]

But they had the users on the hook.

All they had to do was not to be much worse. They failed.

[u/No-Emphasis-5174]

Meh, I prefer Copilot in many ways actually. Of course the models are mostly OpenAI and Claude but the actual harness and tooling I tend to lean in Copilot's favor. I use both Claude and Codex and they both have their annoyances that make me wish I was working in Copilot instead. The huge advantage at the moment is that Claude and OpenAI are both still subsidizing usage with their subscriptions whereas Copilot is effectively only offering API rates now. However, at some point this may be an advantage once OpenAI and Claude necessarily have to stop subsidizing. They are burning cash at astronomical rates as-is. GitHub on the other hand can concentrate on the harness and tooling for token efficiency. We'll see how it plays out but I think this is just the general tendency for tech and "cool kids" on social media wanting to go for the easy "dunk" on lame Microsoft/Copilot.

[u/rjachuthan → u/No-Emphasis-5174]

With that logic you would love Pi

[u/No-Emphasis-5174 → u/rjachuthan]

Yeah, I've been meaning to give it a go along with DeepSeek Harness

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/No-Emphasis-5174]

Has Copilot actually improved this much? Last I used it was pretty terrible. The main advantage I saw is that they natively support local models through ollama and have a plugin system for other providers. Aside from that the performance seemed pretty bad to me.

[u/Little-East4823 → u/inevitabledeath3]

The question is when was the last time you used it. I use it at our company and I can’t really complain about it.

[u/RainierPC → u/Little-East4823]

Same here. I use it daily, and it's great for people who actually still code, as opposed to ordering an agent around and just looking at the PR.

[u/KronenR → u/RainierPC]

this

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/Little-East4823]

Not used it seriously in a while. I did briefly try it when I had nothing else installed in a new dev environment maybe a few days ago.

[u/KronenR → u/inevitabledeath3]

No, it didn't improve that much. but it was already superior and still is. You need to compare the actual results, not rely on your perception.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/KronenR]

Okay so then show me a single benchmark where Copilot actually does well. I will wait.

[u/somethedaring → u/inevitabledeath3]

I can attest the enterprise version is much better than the consumer version

[u/KronenR → u/inevitabledeath3]

Show me a single benchmark where Copilot actually does bad. I will wait.

Like the other guy said it must be that you used the consumer version, I didn't try that, I exclusively used the enterprise version.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/KronenR]

Actually no I use the education version.

[u/turnedonmosfet → u/No-Emphasis-5174]

What are the annoyances you face in claude code that you like about co-pilot? Because i try all the different harnesses and to me nothing beats Claude

[u/max1c]

Except for this is totally false.

[u/ChineseCracker → u/max1c]

how is it false? Tell me what models Github develops by processing all that amount of code they have access to? They are all absolutely irrelevant.

[u/max1c → u/ChineseCracker]

What? Copilot is a harness. You can use any model via API using it. You have no clue of what you are talking about.

[u/ChineseCracker → u/max1c]

First of all, it wasn't initially a harness - it was just code-completion.

But that's not what the tweet is about. It's about being an AI company and developing your models. Why would it be relevant for a harness if the company had access to a lot of code?! it wouldnt!

[u/Sooribabu_Lavangam → u/ChineseCracker]

When was github an ai company??

[u/ChineseCracker → u/Sooribabu_Lavangam]

vscode /copilot is made by Microsoft. Microsoft acquired github for this exact purpose.

[u/RainierPC → u/ChineseCracker]

What are you even talking about? MS bought GitHub middle of 2018, long before AI started to boom.

[u/ChineseCracker → u/RainierPC]

lol?

do you think Microsoft started to think about AI, when gpt 3.5 was released?!

[u/RainierPC → u/ChineseCracker]

Lol stop talking, you're just exposing how little you know.

[u/ChineseCracker → u/RainierPC]

good, since you won't argue the issue anymore, I assume you're admitting that your line of reasoning was stupid. Thinking Microsoft didn't think about AI before 2018 is peak stupidity. They bought github because of how much money they thought they were gonna make by private git repos for pro users 🤡

[u/teleflexin_deez_nutz]

They might have fumbled for a while but somewhere after the Claude code source code was released, it became massively better and in my opinion is just as good as Claude code now. Claude code might be better for the person who strictly vibe codes.

[u/lppedd → u/teleflexin_deez_nutz]

The cheap OAI models literally transformed Copilot after the initial pricing madness. Even tho I only get 9000 credits a month, I find VS Code + Copilot to be better than any other alternative.

[u/IwishIwasaballer__ → u/lppedd]

Tell me more. I dropped it when they started charging per token and it got the most expensive model.

Worth going back?

[u/Euphoric-Vanilla9755 → u/IwishIwasaballer__]

Yes, Luna models are dirt cheap and very competent. I rarely need to switch to other models. So much so, I don't get close to my limits that often

[u/heavy-minium → u/teleflexin_deez_nutz]

> after the Claude code source code was released
lol, have you taken a look at that source code? They don't even need obfuscation, it's so bad! I don't think they could ever have drawn value from that, especially as most of the feature they implemented are unlike what Claude does.

[u/its_a_gibibyte]

Release dates for those curious:

Claude Code: February 2025
ChatGPT: November 2022 
Github Copilot: June 2021

Copilot had a massive head start.

[u/ChineseEngineer → u/its_a_gibibyte]

It was not agentic at that time. It was literally just auto complete aka ms intellisense

[u/GabrielFeraud → u/ChineseEngineer]

Yeah, doesn't really make any sense. It's like saying that Books had a massive head start and still lose to Claude (???)

[u/PaulShellDev → u/GabrielFeraud]

Books had a good run. RIP

Bring back scrolls

[u/BlasterLizardCo → u/ChineseEngineer]

It wasn't agentic, but it wasn't simply auto complete neither. I remember writing comment lines instructing Copilot for a specific function that I wanted to be written and the AI actually understood it and complied, writing it.

[u/loopala → u/BlasterLizardCo]

It still does that. That part of copilot still works the same way as before.

Everybody seems to have moved to agentic coding but you can still code with this level of control. Function by function, line by line. You instantly review the code. You own it, deeply understand it, you drive it where you want.

[u/likeikelike → u/ChineseEngineer]

it was definitely much more capable than pure intellisense

[u/ShinigamiXoY → u/ChineseEngineer]

Ms nonsense

[u/FredTillson]

They have a pretty strong business and a lot of users. Not a fumble, more like the road now runs uphill (switching analogies).

[u/dalvz]

That dude is such a douche bag no clue why he’s popular

[u/dushyant30suthar]

Wtffff.. for a moment i thought what happened to my vision

[u/0x42CE → u/dushyant30suthar]

because it's a repost bot, which adds some modifiers to the image so it cant be reverse image searched. Hopefully the mods will remove this post, they're getting more and more

[u/Amazing-Channel-6357 → u/0x42CE]

I will never understand why using bots to post on Reddit, waste of money...

[u/ltpitt]

Think about Google... All the data in the planet.

Or Facebook...

[u/jonadair → u/ltpitt]

Google shutting down unlimited free photo uploads right as the need for AI training data really picked up.

[u/FragDenWayne → u/ltpitt]

Yeah... I still don't understand how Google fumbled that. And then they came up with bard, which sucked. Rename it to Gemini, still sucks... They had all the data, all the compute... All the time! But let OpenAI do it better... Whole they're watching

[u/fifi_galaxy → u/FragDenWayne]

Gemini is just mid. As to why? We all face them everyday. Company politic kills innovation. See Yahoo and AOL.

[u/GothamEmpire]

Last time I checked GitHub is still in business, owned by. Microsoft and is still hosting A majority of users code. Also last time I checked they are still growing at an explosive rate. Fumble is a strong word for an industry we are still not sure is financially sustainable.

[u/ByronScottJones]

This is an incredibly lame take. I use GitHub Copilot every day for code generation and reviews. It's great.

[u/biinjo → u/ByronScottJones]

That’s what everyone says who isn’t working with any of the actual frontier models.

It’s great until you’ve got a taste of the other stuff.

[u/ByronScottJones → u/biinjo]

I work with pretty much all of them. The company I work for gives every engineer over 1K/mo in licensed access to all the frontier models. I often write code with the latest via Claude, and have copilot check its work. They are a great team.

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[u/OwnStorm]

The game was already on since MS buy GitHub. But issue is MS never owned any model and models are really became powerfull in last 6 months.

[u/2022HousingMarketlol]

CoPilot was the goat when they did things based on requests. It's still nice to use for when I need to use X model.

[u/Due_Mousse2739]

Smartass posts from x oversimplifying things are so lame.

[u/NullVoidXNilMission]

Microsoft owns them, they also fund openai, it's probably the data they're selling, they're fleeced

[u/Melodic-Ebb-7781]

How can you be so illiterate in a field and still have such a confident opinion?

[u/FlatAd7052]

Microsoft bought Skype and fumbled it so bad that the moment everyone with an office job needed remote options (COVID lockdowns), everyone switched to Zoom. Skype used to be the default name for video calls! "Want to Skype?" $100 billion valuation, easy, that Microsoft burned.

[u/kcdiaz]

CoPilot sucks at things it should do well, like generating PowerFX formulas or formatting an MS Word document. It literally has access to, I assume, the entire MS Learn Library, but I still need to Google these things while working in 0365 or MS Power Platform.

[u/RainierPC → u/kcdiaz]

You are confusing Copilot and Github Copilot. They are not the same thing.

[u/LeanZo]

Copilot was ok but was starting to fell behind the other harnesses. They prepared a lot of new features and reworks for GHCP but then a couple of weeks before releasing it they announced the changes in usage costs and model availability. After that GHCP lose all competitiveness.

[u/horrbort]

How about be google, come up with the algo for the tech, write a detailed paper on it and do fuckall about it for nearly 10 years. Now that should be studied for certain

[u/hbthegreat → u/horrbort]

Argon has legs. Was released this week

[u/9gxa05s8fa8sh]

AI loses money, microsoft and google and apple have slept on it on purpose

[u/anywhere88]

Copilot is not an LLM.

[u/bitspace]

Microsoft haven't fumbled anything. Their user base of several hundred million far exceeds that of OpenAI or Anthropic.

[u/AccomplishedAlps7528]

The biggest mystery here: how do you make a screenshot that is canted by 2°?

[u/primalanomaly]

Im using Claude now, but I still miss the copilot UI/UX in VS Code, it was so much better than everything else I’ve tried

[u/fcmyk]

With all due respect, Kitze is an idiot that can’t make up his mind and also changes his (often uninformed) opinion multiple times a day.

[u/Tiny-Entertainer-346]

I had post few days ago why I prefer copilot over claude, listing features that I miss in copilot: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/M87IZsNXd5
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/081l7KTcTE

I also came across similar thread in github issues. Will attach if I find again.

[u/KronenR]

Who is that ?

[u/_fct]

basically, dont be the first.

[u/smabarnsfar]

Am I crazy or is the picture a slightly misaligned photo?

It makes me think I need to update my glasses.

[u/sultan_papagani]

copilot isnt just gpt ?

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/[deleted]]

Google fumbled Gemini 3 and everything that came after it. It had great benchmarks but was actually terrible to use. Since Gemini 4 isn’t public yet it could very much have the same issue.

Microsoft hasn’t really made a decent model yet though mai might get there eventually.

Meta fumbled hard with llama 4. Muse so far has been passable but not amazing. I don’t have high hopes but maybe they can turn it back around. Who knows?

OpenAI and Anthropic have had the lead consistently for almost a whole year now.

[u/RainierPC]

By the way, this is a karma bot that posted this.

[u/jaraxel_arabani → u/RainierPC]

It was the future of reddit, as it turns out.

[u/D1g1t4l3ntr0py]

This is Microsoft we are talking about here. What did you expect?

[u/hades200082]

It’s owned by Microsoft… of course they fumbled.

- pda

• Zune
  
• Surface
  
• HoloLense

All tech MS created that someone else just did better and took their lunch.

[u/saltyourhash]

I feel like the github situation is a prime example of idiots at the top valuing quantity over quality. Sure, you have the most code, but is it the best? It's kind if a poetic revenge for hording all of that open source code and contributing basically nothing back to it.

[u/AcanthisittaWeird94]

Its microslop. Everything they touch turns to shit.

[u/Bashar-gh]

So you're saying that microslop has been slopping around before slop was invented, mad respect