[c12]

Not forced but the tooling has been made available to those who ask. Work have provided Microsoft Copilot through Teams and Github Copilot through my IDE of choice.

I found the Microsoft Copilot to be reasonably good when given a complete context with extremely limited scope such as being provided a WSDL for a SOAP service and asked to write functions that make calls and then writing unit tests for the whole thing. This had a right way and a wrong way of doing things and it did it almost perfectly.

However, if you give it any problem that requires imagination with n+1 ways of being done it flounders and produces mostly garbage.

Compared to the Microsoft Copilot I found the Github Copilot to feel lobotomised! It failed on the aforementioned WSDL task and where Microsoft's could be asked "what inconsistencies can you see in this WSDL" and catch all of them, Github's was unable to answer beyond pointing out a spelling mistake I had already made it aware of.

I have personally tinkered with Claude, and its quite impressive.

My colleagues have had similar experiences, with some uninstalling the AI tooling out of frustration at how "useless" it is. Others, like myself, have begun using it for the grunt work; mostly as "inteligent boilerplate generator."

[ethbr1]

> However, if you give it any problem that requires imagination with n+1 ways of being done it flounders and produces mostly garbage.

I'd never thought about LLM failure modes like this, but it makes sense.

Cross too many possibility streams, instead of prompting / contexting down to one, and it vacillates between them and outputs garbage.

[pier25]

When you say Microsoft Copilot you mean inside Visual Studio?