[smuhakg]

Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot.

This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude!

This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That prevents the AI from meaningfully using tools or being multimodal or anything else their competitors have.

If they added a $200/month tier many of their issues would go away.

[batiudrami]

Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.

But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific packages) and it just can’t do it. It can read the spreadsheet and understand them just fine but outputs are garbled nonsense.

[khelavastr]

Copilot is actually significantly more reliable at technical tasks with SQL or C# than others, i've found. Do we have different use cases?

Copilot seems to hit the technical level I'm asking about much more reliably. It keeps a more grounded general semantic model.

[resoluteteeth]

You might be using different copilots since there are approximately three different Microsoft copilot products

Are you using the one that's part of Microsoft 365?

[khelavastr]

the copilot.microsoft.com one, and the Visual Studio one

[smuhakg]

> A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.

That isn't possible with the technology right now and it will not change. Multimodal computer use and long context for high quality outputs are expensive.

This is like complaining about buying an automobile because it's more expensive than a horse.

[maltalex]

“Copilot” is not one product, it’s around 15 different products, seriously.

I think that people often compare apples to oranges by comparing the “copilot” they have in Windows/Office/Teams etc to Claude Code which is ridiculous.

A better product to compare Claude Code to would be “Github Copilot CLI”, but I haven’t seen the two seriously compared anywhere.

[manquer]

In the context of knowledge workers, It is really about Claude Cowork against Microsoft Copilot suite for all their applications, which is what the OP is referencing ?

Github Copilot can use Claude APIs and has its own problems and challenges.

Microsoft AI performance is primarily not being affected by Github - while significant is much much smaller part of the enterprise revenue stream and their DAU compared to their Office suite apps.

Same for their PR exposure. It is lot more likely to here about Copilot in the office context than Github outside of small niche's like this forum.

[quantummagic]

That's on Microsoft for their choice of naming/branding.

[maltalex]

Absolutely. They've made the same mess with "Copilot" as with ".NET" in the early 00's [0]. Everything was ".NET" from consumer oriented services (".NET Passport"), to "Visual Studio .NET" without anyone understanding what ".NET" was.

Now it's "Microsoft Copilot" which is different from "Microsoft 365 Copilot", which is different from "Copilot Chat" and from "GitHub Copilot", and the many other flavors.

It's a mess.

Still, their developer-focused offering seems to be "GitHub Copilot", which among other things includes "GitHub Copilot CLI" [1], their terminal-based agent. It's not bad.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

[1]: https://github.com/features/copilot/cli/

[estimator7292]

I've been a C# developer on and off since the dotnet core/standard split. I still have no clue what .NET was ever supposed to mean.

[MrMember]

Office is now the "Microsoft 365 Copilot App." It's ridiculous.

[SilverElfin]

It’s odd to me how much Microsoft over committed to Copilot. They added unwanted Copilot buttons to laptops. They renamed Office to Copilot. And in the end, it’s a terrible product anyways. They can only get away with this because of the control they have over OEMs, distribution channels, and the inability for consumers to opt out of all of thus.

Meanwhile startups can’t compete fairly because they don’t have the same channels to flood with their own branding.

[joe_mamba]

Copilot was by far the worst for coding. Not that the code snippets it would generate were not good, but due to the insane number of bugs in its UI. It would just spit out blank blocks thinking they contained code. When I asked it to repeat the steps which were empty, it would generate the same empty blocks like "here's your code" lol

How TF can you go to market with such bugs.

[vrighter]

i can't even upload co e properly because it gets mangled

[browningstreet]

We have copilot at work integrated very deeply in our E5 landscape. It def sucks in Office, and I can break Copilot very easily when building small notebooks. It often crashes and the next page build in a notebook doesn’t come close to the previous iteration. That’s maddening.

But, the Teams integration for meeting summaries and in-meeting “what did Bob just say about the data center project?” prompts is magical and very useful. If you live in meetings or are trying not to. They need to put that team on rescue duty.

[joshstrange]

I have no interest in Copilot from Microsoft in general but I do like GitHub Copilot overall. That said, I’m _very_ interested in a viable alternative. I only use it for “fancy autocomplete” and have zero use for the agent/chat capabilities (I use Claude Code for that). It’s been a year or so since I looked at and tried alternatives but when I last did, copilot was the best IMHO.

What are people using as an alternative?