Last November, you and everyone else fell down the coding agent rabbit hole?
It was an intense time for nerds. During this vacation, I spent a lot of time talking to programming agents. And since then it has been an absolute rocket ship.
Claude Code seems to have gotten the thunder there, defeating Codex and, frankly, the co-pilot. A few years ago, Microsoft’s Copilot coding tool seemed to be leading the pack. Now it’s Claude Code.
I would respectfully disagree. Coding models are part of it, but Microsoft is a great place for developers. Windows is an open platform on open hardware that people can build anything on.
Microsoft wants Scout to be adopted by production workers and even consumers. AI agents make mistakes and hallucinate. How many mistakes will people tolerate?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. Trust, but verify. Give him a compact task and then try it out and see if it works. And then: “Oh, he didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll give him read-only access to something.” For example, when I tell someone that I gave OpenClaw access to my blood sugar levels because I have type 1 diabetes, the knee-jerk reaction is, “How dare you share your health data with an agent?” Receiving vigorous blood sugar notifications is very useful for me. I don’t think this is controversial.
I understand that, but many people are skeptical or hostile towards artificial intelligence these days.
When a recent tool is introduced to the market, whether it’s a chainsaw, a power tool, or an internal combustion engine, chaos ensues as people wonder how to make the tool good for people. Personally, I am not a supporter of artificial intelligence because I vote with my feet. I don’t employ AI image generation or AI video generation because I don’t believe in such things. I employ artificial intelligence to code and I enjoy it.
Yes, developers absolutely love agents, but there is resistance outside of this community. Microsoft noticed this after the impoverished performance of its AI productivity tools. Do you foresee similar difficulties with agent-based AI?
Either they like it or they don’t. I remember when the Walkman came out and people said, “No one will wear these things on their heads. These headphones look ridiculous.” Now we all walk around with these white Q-tips hanging from our ears.
Don’t you feel like Microsoft is playing catch-up?
I would respectfully step back and point out that everyone is in catch-up mode because you’re pulling forward and then going back and forth. It’s a war of thumbs. I remind people that the term “Copilot” was something Microsoft did first and became a term similar to Kleenex.
Do you think this year’s developer conference has put Microsoft back in the race?
Several Mac users hung out with me behind the scenes and watched Surface Ultra laptop announced. They saw all the recent developer tools, looked at us reluctantly, and said, “Hell, you’re making me buy a Surface, aren’t you?”
Fort Mason’s garbage cans are now full of MacBook Airs?
This would be an amazing result, although I would not like to produce more ecological waste.
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