Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

theverge.com

370 points by Anon84 a day ago


kemotep - 18 hours ago

Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.

There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.

There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?

Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.

It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.

And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?

tylerchilds - 18 hours ago

This is funny because everyone’s AI strategy should have been

“What do we actually need to be productive?”

Which is how Anthropic pulled ahead of Microsoft, that prioritized

checks notes

Taking screenshots of every windows user’s desktop every few seconds. For productivity.

paxys - 18 hours ago

For one reason or another everyone seems to be sleeping on Gemini. I have been exclusively using Gemini 3 Flash to code these days and it stands up right alongside Opus and others while having a much smaller, faster and cheaper footprint. Combine it with Antigravity and you're basically using a cheat code.

paxys - 18 hours ago

Crazy to think that Github Copilot was the first mainstream AI coding tool. It had all the hype and momentum in the world, and Microsoft decided to do...absolutely nothing with it.

softwaredoug - 18 hours ago

It really says something that MS/Github has been trying to shovel Copilot down our throats for years, and Anthropic just builds a tool in a short period of time and it takes off.

It's interesting to think back, what did Copilot do wrong? Why didn't it become Claude Code?

It seems for one thing its ambition might have been too small. Second, it was tightly coupled to VS Code / Github. Third, a lot of dumb big org Microsoft politics / stakeholders overly focused on enterprise over developers? But what else?

phito - 21 hours ago

Well yeah, it is just better. At my work we have a copilot license, but we use it to access Claude Sonnet/Opus model in OpenCode.

andyjohnson0 - 21 hours ago

https://archive.ph/vc3Cn

srinath693 - 5 hours ago

The embarrassing part isn't that Microsoft employees prefer Claude Code. It's that Microsoft had every advantag, the OpenAI partnership, the distribution, the enterprise relationships, the $13B investment and still built a product their own engineers don't want to use. That's not a model problem. That's a product taste problem. Anthropic built Claude Code with like 30 engineers. Microsoft has tens of thousands. At some point you have to accept that no amount of investment compensates for not actually understanding what developers need.

jonathanoliver - 18 hours ago

Kinda reminds of the time Microsoft used git internally but was pushing Team Foundation Server.

veryfancy - 18 hours ago

GitHub Copilot with Opus 4.5 as the model is great. I have not tried Claude Code, so maybe I don’t know what I’m missing.

superfrank - 16 hours ago

I feel like I must be missing something, but I just cannot understand the hype around Claude Code. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully bought in on using AI for development and am super happy to use Copilot or Cursor, but as an experienced developer just chatting with the terminal feels so wrong. I've tried it so many times to switch and I can't get into it.

Can anyone else share what their workflow with CC looks like? Even if I never end up switching I'd like to at least feel like I gave it a good shot and made a choice based on that, but right now I just feel like I'm doing something wrong.

wendgeabos - 16 hours ago

So, is claude code really better than codex with latest gpt model, or do people just hate on openai so much that no one (but me apparently) is using them? I am asking this question seriously because if so I will make the switch, but codex seems to be quite good to me so I don't want to waste time switching.

fastThinking - 21 hours ago

So Copilot is for customers, Claude is for getting actual work done?

kcb - 20 hours ago

And probably running on their macbooks...

apexalpha - 2 hours ago

Putting a co-pilot button on laptops before they even figured out what exactly they want to do with it is just peak MicroSoft Product Strategy.

sweetrabh - 7 hours ago

The rapid adoption of AI coding agents raises important questions about trust boundaries. When an agent like Claude Code needs to handle sensitive operations - API keys, credentials, database connections - how do you prevent those secrets from ending up in the model's context or logs?

We ran into this building a password automation tool (thepassword.app). The solution: the AI orchestrates browser navigation, but actual credential values are injected locally and never enter the model's reasoning loop. Prompt injection can't exfiltrate what's not in the context.

As these tools move into enterprise settings, I expect we'll see more architectural patterns emerge for keeping sensitive data out of agentic workflows entirely.

dataviz1000 - 21 hours ago

I installed Claude Code yesterday after the quality of VSCode Copilot Chat continuously is getting worse every release. I can't tell yet if Claude Code is better or not but VSCode Copilot Chat has become completely unusable. It would start making mistakes which would double the requests to Claude Opus 4.5 which in January is the only model that would work at all. I spent $400 in tokens in January.

I'll know better in a week. Hopefully I can get better results with the $200 a month plan.

kachapopopow - 16 hours ago

I think they are also using AI to name everything because no human on this planet would come up with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

torginus - 17 hours ago

To this day I cannot wrap my head around the fact why did Microsoft allow a culture to grow inside the company (either through hiring, or through despondence) that at best is indifferent towards the company's products and at worst openly despises them?

I'm sure no other tech company is like this.

I think technologies like the Windows kernel and OS, the .NET framework, their numerous attempts to build a modern desktop UI framework with XAML, their dev tools, were fundamentally good at some point.

Yet they cant or wont hire people who would fix Windows, rather than just maintain it, really push for modernization, make .NET actually cool and something people want to use.

They'd rather hire folks who were taught at school that Microsoft is the devil and Linux is superior in all ways, who don't know the first thing about the MS tech stack, and would rather write React on the Macbooks (see the start menu incident), rather than touch anything made by Microsoft.

It seems somehow the internal culture allows this. I'm sure if you forced devs to use Copilot, and provided them with the tools and organizational mandate to do so, it would become good enough eventually to not have to force people to use it.

My main complaint I keep hearing about Azure (which I do not use at workr)

pjmlp - 20 hours ago

That isn't going well for Satya.

h4kunamata - 11 hours ago

After their gaming stock crashing, making Windows 11 completely useless, not to mention its Copilot adoption getting nowhere, this was just a matter of time.

Windows 11 falling apart after AI adoption tells their AI, vibe coding is not going as planned.

If you saw their latest report claiming to focus on fixing the trust on Windows, it is a little too late, even newbies moved to Linux, and with AMD driver support, gaming is no longer an excuse.

major505 - 15 hours ago

I think is funny, because is not the first time I hear about microsoft employees not using the company products.

I worked on a project with some microsoft engineers to create a chatbot plugin for Salesforce, using Microsoft Power Virtual Agent, and the comunication tool they used was Slack and not teams. And I was obligated to use teams because of the consuting company I worked at the time.

And also the version control they used at the time was I think SVN, and not TFS.

strongpigeon - 16 hours ago

A friend of mine over there told me their VP put a mandate that everyone should install and use Claude Code and write a weekly report on their usage (what they did, what worked, etc.). They also track token usage and have a leaderboard of who uses the most token.

It reminds me of this [0] Dilbert comic, but heh.

[0]: https://x.com/idera_software/status/573165928264810496

ddtaylor - 15 hours ago

I think Copilot is a platform or marketplace more than anything an Microsoft doesn't really need to care about what models are being used. They don't need to have a secret sauce as much as they need to make the entire ecosystem easy to use. They have had a lot of success over the years with VSC and this seems to build on that.

gloomyday - 17 hours ago

Microsoft products are decreasing in quality at an astounding rate. You can clearly see that sales people took over the whole company.

gurrkin - 10 hours ago

A lot of Claude love in here. I have used Claude on the web (free tier) well over a year ago and had good results with it, but I need good integration with IntelliJ since I work almost exclusively in Kotlin. Can anyone attest to it? The reviews on the plugin are awful, but so are the reviews for the Copilot plugin. I find Copilot pretty good in there, though the tooling is a little second-class, and it often gets "stuck" in the terminal.

dude250711 - 21 hours ago

We can certainly see, every Windows update requires flipping a coin now.

throwappleaway - 12 hours ago

Claude Code is everywhere inside Apple too. Almost everyone has access to it and many use it

- 14 hours ago
[deleted]
songodongo - 16 hours ago

I don’t understand how their various Copilot tools are so bad. Are they using a proprietary model instead of ChatGPT or Claude?

EMM_386 - 18 hours ago

What are we discussing here?

The tools or the models? It's getting absurdly confusing.

"Claude Code" is an interface to Claude, Cursor is an IDE (I think?! VS Code fork?), GitHub Copilot is a CLI or VS Code plugin to use with ... Claude, or GPT models, or ...

If they are using "Claude Code" that means they are using Anthropic's models - which is interesting given their huge investment in OpenAI.

But this is getting silly. People think "CoPilot" is "Microsoft's AI" which it isn't. They have OpenAI on Azure. Does Microsoft even have a fine-tuned GPT model or are they just prompting an OpenAI model for their Windows-builtins?

When you say you use CoPilot with Claude Opus people get confused. But this is what I do everyday at work.

shrug

TZubiri - 16 hours ago

Friendship ended with OpenAI, Now Anthropic is my best friend

bakugo - 21 hours ago

Explains why Windows updates have been more broken than usual lately.

But I guess having my computer randomly stop working because a billion dollar corporation needs to save money by using a shitty text generation algorithm to write code instead of hiring competent programmers is just the new normal now.