The author calls it an ecosystem at one point. That’s overselling it.
I suspect “Copilot” is cargo culted naming across disparate parts of an org that’s home to upwards of 100,000 engineers who must all justify their latest bump in your subscription cost.
It’s amazing how much product Microsoft ships - that’s 95% of the thing.. unfortunately the last 5% is the product polish that’d make their stuff actually good. :(
They should just go with the full aviation crew naming scheme. Rename some of them to FO (first officer), second officer, navigator, flight engineer, radio operator. The cheaper models for quick answers will be the "relief crew". Data filtering and loading would be "loadmaster". Instead of referring to the user as "user" call them "captain". Who doesn't like to feel important and in charge!? Embrace the ridiculousness, at least they will all have some distinctive labels to go by.
Title is fantastic, had me laughing at my own ignorance to copilot's offerings before I even started the article.
I do feel like if any of the major companies could do with a rebranding it would be copilot. They are tossing that name on all of their stuff, and it just doesn't carry the weight of any of the big names even though its chatgpt models under the hood.
Personally i associate it with annoying bloatware, and silently judge windows users based on if that icon is still on their tasbar.
It does a good job of when a VIP employee demands "copilot", you have to buy a bunch of different licenses for them because no one knows exactly what they want (they just want copilot, no not that one).
This is weird to me because I don't think I talk to anyone regularly who even uses Cursor anymore, let alone Copilot. It's Claude and Codex now, and then people with more interesting/oddball TUI agents or async web agents.
I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins. The rest is autocomplete in the IDE.
I actually find it to be a great deal, especially because they charge by request rather than token. So if you provide detailed prompts a lot of work can get done for very little cost.
> I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins.
Does the bug where premium requests get consumed for spinning up subagents still exist?
I've stuck to Visual Studio Code's GitHub Copilot integration because of this, because I'm on a tight budget and didn't fancy burning through my premium requests.
I use Copilot pretty much exclusively because it's our "approved AI solution" at the office and they block access to Claude. Since I'm so used to Copilot at work, I just end up using it all the time.
Do you regularly talk to anyone in a Microsoft shop (like most enterprises)? If you work in a ms ”partner” company there’s rarely a choice between the Microsoft product and something else. Azure over AWS is a given etc.
Many people working the front-end space seem to really like Cursor. It seems to have a dedicated audience. Myself, I have never liked VS Code so I don't have a pull towards it.
I think the costing there is the problem and with (GitHub) Copilot. Not owning their own model and not able to take advantage of the (probably brutally subsidized) fixed monthly packages that have relatively generous limits means Cursor and Copilot can't compete cost wise on a per-token basis.
JetBrains has similar problems with its "Junie" product.
Maybe some of these will have second chances once Anthropic and OpenAI run out of $$ runway and are forced to charge something closer to actual cost. Or if the Chinese open weight models do some more catching up.
Everything MS does can be summed up in one word: "Clippy"
I've been using their data reporting product for ever. It's not fancy but you'll be amazed at how many data people use it. Back then it used to be called "SQL Server Reporting Services" or "SSRS". It is now called Power BI Paginated Reports. Over the years, the product has gradually become worse. Publishing, subscriptions, several features are now hard to use. All in the service of Clippy and the Cloud.
I genuinely don't understand how one company can be so bad at naming products for multiple decades. It makes Sony's names for its headphones seem downright catchy.
We had a good laugh when our IT informed us that Remote Desktop was being renamed Windows App. I really wonder what is going on over there because from where I'm sitting it makes no effin' sense at all.
This is dumb enough that it can’t be accidental. I genuinely believe the strategy is to create vague but recognizable brands but avoid labeling _products_ with recognizable names.
Microsoft seem to think that it’s better to have some names we all know like 365, Azure, Copilot snd then the products are just floating around under those brands.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw but I have no idea why they would want this.
I’ve been saying the same thing to people I work with for the past few months. When everything is labelled as copilot it creates such confused ideas when someone says they have created something with copilot… or created a copilot agent. It always invoked 20 questions to interrogate what actually was created, and with what ‘version’ of copilot.
MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.
Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.
I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.
And shows up even when you are trying to use one specific Copilot. I want to try Copilot CLI, but it only seems half documented. A lot of things point back to Copilot in VS Code (or Jetbrains and Eclipse).
The weird thing is some of the capabilities of these different Copilots are completely different, even though presented in the same way. The real pain begins when you assume consistent handling of links to objects in M365. It’s far less intuitive than even this article suggests. Two different prompts even in the same browser tab, different Copilots, different capabilities interacting with the rest of M365.
It feels like a long time ago but around late 2022 or early 2023 ish, I used Copilot very extensively. I thought it was a superpower.
I even went in and edited the text area size iirc from 8k to 32k or something just so I could paste longer context into it.
I really felt like an elite haxor.
However, times have changed. What was "state of the art" in 2023 is pedestrian now. Copilot really had an early lead, in my opinion when Bard felt somewhat off. Now? I don't even think about Copilot. I feel very comfortable putting my thoughts in Claude or even Gemini.
> So I asked him. "What is your developer workflow using Copilot?" I was not prepared for the answer he gave me:
I don’t know why I get annoyed when LLM’s and their output are casually referred to as “he/she”, particularly by non-techies, but I do. There’s something about personifying an LLM that seems incorrect. Perhaps it’s a fear being stoked that increasingly, people might actually be thinking of LLM’s as living beings.
Copilot cli isn’t as good as Claude but it’s not just fancy autocomplete either. Copilot cli seems to be converging with the rest and you can use mcp servers, skills, launch fleets of agents that use tools etc.
the naming problem is real but it is also a symptom of shipping the autocomplete product before having a coherent agent story. github copilot was a code completion tool for 2-3 years before the ‘AI assistant everywhere’ branding happened. now the name has to cover everything from tab completion to autonomous coding agents to M365 assistants, and the only thing they have in common is they all send something to an LLM.
hard to name a category that broad in a way that means anything.
The author calls it an ecosystem at one point. That’s overselling it.
I suspect “Copilot” is cargo culted naming across disparate parts of an org that’s home to upwards of 100,000 engineers who must all justify their latest bump in your subscription cost.
It’s amazing how much product Microsoft ships - that’s 95% of the thing.. unfortunately the last 5% is the product polish that’d make their stuff actually good. :(
They should just go with the full aviation crew naming scheme. Rename some of them to FO (first officer), second officer, navigator, flight engineer, radio operator. The cheaper models for quick answers will be the "relief crew". Data filtering and loading would be "loadmaster". Instead of referring to the user as "user" call them "captain". Who doesn't like to feel important and in charge!? Embrace the ridiculousness, at least they will all have some distinctive labels to go by.
Which component is the bombardier?
That’s Finance. They don't fly the plane; they just wait for the right moment to drop the bill for those premium tokens.
Title is fantastic, had me laughing at my own ignorance to copilot's offerings before I even started the article.
I do feel like if any of the major companies could do with a rebranding it would be copilot. They are tossing that name on all of their stuff, and it just doesn't carry the weight of any of the big names even though its chatgpt models under the hood. Personally i associate it with annoying bloatware, and silently judge windows users based on if that icon is still on their tasbar.
It does a good job of when a VIP employee demands "copilot", you have to buy a bunch of different licenses for them because no one knows exactly what they want (they just want copilot, no not that one).
> "Actually, I made a mistake. I meant Cursor."
Someone who can't describe the model they're using after asking 3 times across several months, probably isn't the 10x engineer you think they are.
This is weird to me because I don't think I talk to anyone regularly who even uses Cursor anymore, let alone Copilot. It's Claude and Codex now, and then people with more interesting/oddball TUI agents or async web agents.
I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins. The rest is autocomplete in the IDE.
I actually find it to be a great deal, especially because they charge by request rather than token. So if you provide detailed prompts a lot of work can get done for very little cost.
[0] https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
> I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins.
Does the bug where premium requests get consumed for spinning up subagents still exist?
https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1qttkzs/increa...
I've stuck to Visual Studio Code's GitHub Copilot integration because of this, because I'm on a tight budget and didn't fancy burning through my premium requests.
I use Copilot pretty much exclusively because it's our "approved AI solution" at the office and they block access to Claude. Since I'm so used to Copilot at work, I just end up using it all the time.
Do you regularly talk to anyone in a Microsoft shop (like most enterprises)? If you work in a ms ”partner” company there’s rarely a choice between the Microsoft product and something else. Azure over AWS is a given etc.
Many people working the front-end space seem to really like Cursor. It seems to have a dedicated audience. Myself, I have never liked VS Code so I don't have a pull towards it.
I think the costing there is the problem and with (GitHub) Copilot. Not owning their own model and not able to take advantage of the (probably brutally subsidized) fixed monthly packages that have relatively generous limits means Cursor and Copilot can't compete cost wise on a per-token basis.
JetBrains has similar problems with its "Junie" product.
Maybe some of these will have second chances once Anthropic and OpenAI run out of $$ runway and are forced to charge something closer to actual cost. Or if the Chinese open weight models do some more catching up.
Really? I use Github Copilot. It is great actually, and I actually prefer it to Claude (loosely held opinion tho).
Everything MS does can be summed up in one word: "Clippy"
I've been using their data reporting product for ever. It's not fancy but you'll be amazed at how many data people use it. Back then it used to be called "SQL Server Reporting Services" or "SSRS". It is now called Power BI Paginated Reports. Over the years, the product has gradually become worse. Publishing, subscriptions, several features are now hard to use. All in the service of Clippy and the Cloud.
I genuinely don't understand how one company can be so bad at naming products for multiple decades. It makes Sony's names for its headphones seem downright catchy.
We had a good laugh when our IT informed us that Remote Desktop was being renamed Windows App. I really wonder what is going on over there because from where I'm sitting it makes no effin' sense at all.
This is dumb enough that it can’t be accidental. I genuinely believe the strategy is to create vague but recognizable brands but avoid labeling _products_ with recognizable names.
Microsoft seem to think that it’s better to have some names we all know like 365, Azure, Copilot snd then the products are just floating around under those brands.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw but I have no idea why they would want this.
Product confusion definitely seems like an intentional strategy. Fits right in with the mountain of other user-hostile strategies being employed.
Maybe I should have complained more loudly about them using the same name as that thing I wrote that I called Copilot. https://hewgill.com/pilot/copilot/index-old.html
I’ve been saying the same thing to people I work with for the past few months. When everything is labelled as copilot it creates such confused ideas when someone says they have created something with copilot… or created a copilot agent. It always invoked 20 questions to interrogate what actually was created, and with what ‘version’ of copilot.
MS really needs to distinguish between them all.
It feels like the Microsoft version of "IBM Watson", where they renamed seemingly unrelated projects to Watson.
MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.
Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.
I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.
ActiveX
Nah. DotNet.
Next name: ThinksForSure. It worked for PlaysForSure [1] so why not for this next step towards the abyss?
[1] https://grokipedia.com/page/microsoft_playsforsure#discontin...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure#Critici...
Here's ChatGPT's list of product names with "Copilot" (aka FrustationPilot):
https://chatgpt.com/share/69cd6af5-f74c-8388-971e-d4b85ce04d...
Copilot Agents
Copilot Analytics
Copilot Chat
Copilot Cowork
Copilot for Finance (later renamed to “Finance Agents”)
Copilot GPT Builder
Copilot in Bing
Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel...)
Copilot in Microsoft Edge
Copilot Labs
Copilot Plugins
Copilot Search
Copilot Studio
GitHub Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Copilot Pro
Microsoft Security Copilot
Sales Copilot
Service Copilot
Windows Copilot
This is the most Microsoft thing ever.
And shows up even when you are trying to use one specific Copilot. I want to try Copilot CLI, but it only seems half documented. A lot of things point back to Copilot in VS Code (or Jetbrains and Eclipse).
The weird thing is some of the capabilities of these different Copilots are completely different, even though presented in the same way. The real pain begins when you assume consistent handling of links to objects in M365. It’s far less intuitive than even this article suggests. Two different prompts even in the same browser tab, different Copilots, different capabilities interacting with the rest of M365.
It feels like a long time ago but around late 2022 or early 2023 ish, I used Copilot very extensively. I thought it was a superpower.
I even went in and edited the text area size iirc from 8k to 32k or something just so I could paste longer context into it.
I really felt like an elite haxor.
However, times have changed. What was "state of the art" in 2023 is pedestrian now. Copilot really had an early lead, in my opinion when Bard felt somewhat off. Now? I don't even think about Copilot. I feel very comfortable putting my thoughts in Claude or even Gemini.
Depending on which Copilot you are talking about, it became generally available in mid to late 2023.
> So I asked him. "What is your developer workflow using Copilot?" I was not prepared for the answer he gave me:
I don’t know why I get annoyed when LLM’s and their output are casually referred to as “he/she”, particularly by non-techies, but I do. There’s something about personifying an LLM that seems incorrect. Perhaps it’s a fear being stoked that increasingly, people might actually be thinking of LLM’s as living beings.
Isn't the line you quoted about asking a real person co-worker?
Oh it is yeah.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to their coworker as "he," not an LLM.
I too love Copilot 365 OneDrive Fabric for Business E5 powered by Yammer P2.
... Enterprise Edition
Why do they all start with C?
> "Actually, I made a mistake. I meant Cursor."
ROFL
A 10x engineer who doesn't even know what tools they are using?
Amazing ending. I have been told "no one should be using copilot" - and I agree!
Yeah, coffee was spilled here. What a twist.
> Cursor
Might as well be Copilot at this point with how CLIs have been adopted.
The gap between "AI autocomplete" and "AI agent with tool use" keeps widening. Copilot is still in the first camp.
Copilot cli isn’t as good as Claude but it’s not just fancy autocomplete either. Copilot cli seems to be converging with the rest and you can use mcp servers, skills, launch fleets of agents that use tools etc.
developers are far too pedantic to make a mistake like that
sometimes imposter syndrome is completely because you are an interloper
I question this 10x dev that OP was talking to
[dead]
the naming problem is real but it is also a symptom of shipping the autocomplete product before having a coherent agent story. github copilot was a code completion tool for 2-3 years before the ‘AI assistant everywhere’ branding happened. now the name has to cover everything from tab completion to autonomous coding agents to M365 assistants, and the only thing they have in common is they all send something to an LLM.
hard to name a category that broad in a way that means anything.