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.

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.

> "Actually, I made a mistake. I meant Cursor."

ROFL

It feels like the Microsoft version of "IBM Watson", where they renamed seemingly unrelated projects to Watson.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

The gap between "AI autocomplete" and "AI agent with tool use" keeps widening. Copilot is still in the first camp.

I too love Copilot 365 OneDrive Fabric for Business E5 powered by Yammer P2.