Quothling

Did they get it right? I'm geniunly curious because from my point of view the only company to get AI right so far is Microsoft. This is from the point of view of an EU energy company married to Microsoft services mind you, but Microsoft is the only AI company which actually sells AI to us in a manner that can be considered useful. 7 months ago I thought Copilot (the m365 one, not the github one) was useless. Now I think the chat part is as good as what you'll get on the smaller subscriptions to ChatGPT or Claude, and it's Cowork is very good.

Obviously it's not like having Claude Code or similar, but those would be very hard to run legally and safely in EU regulated industries like us in energy production. You could run Codex but it would require your IT department to have yet another place to manage security and software integrations. Which is a fairly big issue when you have around 1 IT staff member per 300 employees, and an organisation which will buy five different sharepoint solutions for the same problem.

Microsoft sells something that seamlessly integrates into everything else you buy from them. It's easy to manage credit spending and when I say that I don't mean that it's easy to set it up. It's easy to track and budget so the right departments pay for it. It can read your emails, your onedrive, your loop, your sharepoint, your powerbi/fabric and anything else you have access to. Sure it's annoying to be confronted with a point you've made 7 months ago (like how you think Copilot is utter trash) and since changed opinions on it's frightingly good at finding relevant stuff, even in some obscoure legal document on your intranet.

I assume that Anthropic and OpenAI makes money of this somehow, but for the most parts our users wouldn't care if it was the GPT and Claude models or Mistral or Deepseek. Which is why I asked if they had really gotten it right.

As culi also touches on I think it depends on what is meant by frameworks. As someone who belives abstraction are horrible practice unless they serve a really good purpose though, I never bought the "this is easier" part of the big CSS frameworks. I fully accept that people who work on user facing web applications more than I do, which is rarely, had a much easier time using something like bootstrap/tailwind/whatever. I always found having to look up documentation on something wich was infinitely worse than the CSS documentation on developer.mozilla.org to be a a weird experience. I do fully accept that a lot of teams experiences would prove my personal opinions wrong on this.

On the flip-side I always found javascript frameworks to have a purpose. Though to be fair I don't think I've worked with user facing javascript without a framework since jquery came about. I guess you could call that a library, but still.

This is true but a lot of that history and culture has not been capable of producing software which has better quality than what came before. Around here banks are spending hundreds of millions trying to exit mainframe systems, and they've been failing for the better part of a decade. This despite having hundreds of people working on "modern" software paradigms in "modern" languages.

I do think the capabilities of AI depends a lot on how you work. If you're doing very low abstraction, fail fast defensive programming in something like Rust then it's fairly good at writing code with high quality. If you're working in some OOP language with tons of freedom, then my experience is that it's usually not better (or worse) than most human programmers, but certainly much worse than some.

I've got decades of experience in enterprise development and I've also been an external examiner for CS students. We have people with no coding back ground vibe coding internal tools in Python which are terrible, but not really worse than what we've previously bought from some of the cheaper coding houses around here. At the same time we have AI writing internal SDK's and libraries in Rust which will frankly write better code than I do on a thursday afternoon after too many meetings and too little sleep because the children kept me awake all week.

Good code can mean a lot of things though. If you're deep into clean SOLID DRY OOP programming I suspect that an AI will produce unreadable horrible code, much worse than most humans. On the flip-side the AI probably knows the difference between a generator and looping over a List. It probably also knows more about JVM optimization than most of those banking programmers trying to replace COBOL with JAVA.'

I doubt Antropic is a good sample though. Bun is written in Rust and it's a single purpose software, which seem to be an optimal environment for LLM's.

I think it was more a question of what that niche was meant to be. Bun does alright in the "we don't want external dependencies" space of Node development. We switched a lot of our Go projects to it because it allows us to use nothing but Microsoft packages for Azure and Bun, similar to how we were using Go, but now we have a language less. Bun is largely a dropin for node though, and it would be rather easy to switch back.

You don't need all those things, and for the most part you likely never did. Today I think most of it is legacy. A member of one of my teams recently wrote a node template for azure function apps, and when I reviewed it I asked them why they were using 20 dependencies when they needed 3. There was a lot of reasons, but the main reason was "that's what we've always done". One of these prevented updating to typescript 7 which is why I was reviewing it to begin with. A day later they're down to 4 dependencies that are actually being used for something useful.

SPA's and their frameworks still have their use cases. I don't think you can really get full "simplicity" when you have a lot of people working on the same code that goes into enterprise production. I do think that a lot of the more complicated stacks mainly exist because "that's how we've always done it". Which is frankly also a fair consideration if you're not in a position where changing it would generate a lot of value.

I find that it always comes down to people. The fewer people you are, the easier it is to make rapid changes. With a lot of people, and maybe people with very different backgrounds and skill-sets things changes. Change management isn't easy, and often the actual tech stack will matter a lot less than building a good team around it. You obviously still want to work toward changes and approvements, but switching a 100 people from their safe and overly complicated tech stack to something else will take a while. You'll also have to be damn sure it's worth it.

One intereting part about installed fonts is that many enterprise companies buy specific fonts. Then they are rolled out to all their devices, and sometimes at least one of them will have the company name as part of it's name.

Isn't this just the ebitengine doing all the work, with someone having used AI to vibe code TA functionality on top of it?

I've programmed my work keyboard to swap the places of the left windows key and left ctrl. I'll never go back to pressing ctrl with my little finger instead of my thumb again!

I've even been rebellious enough to swap the left ctrl to a command button.

> With Bun I think it was basically a marketing ploy.

I don't know, the vast majority of daily Microsoft Defender offenders I have to wade through, as well as the majority of the intune remidy requests are related to Node being used in various Microsoft applications. The Azure CLI is one of them, but the one which really ranks high on the security risk levels is always something "Agent" or "AI" related folder which I assume are what runs the Copilot and Cowork clients.

I think I had around 800 CVE warnings in relations to Axios in side a Microsoft tool related to AI running node this week, from just 8 devices.

Bun having it's own batteries included is probably a nice benefit to avoid that.

It's cowork. I'm in enterprise in the EU, so we're more restricted in what we use. My issue is mainly with how impossible it is to do any form of reporting on this. Obviously this isn't the most popular opinion among the people subject to it, but for most things we do in the Microsoft enterprise setup we can basically monitor every thing a device does. With Cowork you can't even see which individual task is eating a users credits. At least not yet.

Which is an issue when you need to get department managers to manage their budgets around the amounts of credits their employees spend. The more of a black box it is, the more governance and corporate bullshit you have to deal with.

The copilot part of it runs "unlimited" on the license. Except it's not unlimited, and this is even more of a blackbox because you can't see any sort of spending and the limit is listed as "extensive use".

Now that Microsoft allows you to do /cost for individual tasks (or whatever they call them today). So I tasked Sol, Astra and Fable in cowork with exactly the same vibe coding task on the exact same zip file containing a code project I needed an update for. Astra used 20x and Fable used 15x of what Sol did.

Fable changed a lot of things I had explicitly told it not to change. Arguably a lot of them would've been correct if you didn't work in a place where abstractions are directly against the core principles, but what it produced was basically unusable. I'm not sure if Sol or Astra did best, they produced rather similar code outputs. Astra's was better, but Sol didn't do so bad. It forgot to clean up a few places after it's refactor and it made two bugs I had to correct but other than that it was fine. Astra on the flip-side might have produced code that didn't need changes but it also rewrote every piece of documentation so that it became horrible.

As far as the "experiment" goes, it just shows you that the credit consumption is basically pure magic. You'd think that the Microsoft AI admin tools and the Agent365 FOMO DLC license they sell might give you some sort of reporting, but it doesn't. What you can see is how many tokens a user consumes and the total number of tasks they've initiated as well as whatever running agents they have. You can't see what models they use or which tasks are expensive, which makes it very hard to help them. Early on we had an employee who hit their limit in an hour, and it turned out they had basically uploaded a lot of information and run it in a single long task that kept going over it again and again. We told them it might be a good idea to only give it what it needed and to create more tasks, and even though it's been three months, they have yet to consume as many credits as they did that first hour.

But that's how you support and track it. You see a user spend a lot, then you go to their computer and now that you can actually do the /cost thing, you go through their tasks and try and figure out where they're spending money...

It's obviously improving. A month ago /cost wasn't there and they just released a new dashboard for cowork, but it's still black magic that is impossible to govern.

The whole world is working on this right now, but in some cases it can be extremely money saving. We had a couple of engineers who build a web portal to control some IoT devices because there wasn't one in the market. We've done similar things like that in the past, where we'd buy development from the outside. I can't give you exact costs, but getting it developed is around 5% of the price in AI and HUMAN hours, and then another 10% (bringing it to around 15%) for human hours rewriting it to run securely (and maintainable) in our cloud.

We're working on bringing the last 10% down by giving non-developers various AI skills such as a compliance module that can be pushed to specific Entra groups which will make sure their vibe code madness will stick to external dependencies we've approved. (There are still hard checks later).

For other tasks it's running on guesses, and sometimes you can save help people €1000 a week by teaching them how to use the AI better.

I think Bun is still all the rage in some areas. For us the fact that it makes it easy to work with compliance, means it's often what we pick in place of Node when we work with typescript. Being able to build an API without using anything but the Bun runtime, the Microsoft Azure and our own internal Node packages makes the NIS2 compliance much less of a burden than if we'd work with Node.

That being said. I don't think anyone in my team considers us a "Bun" team in regards to Typescript, all our internal packages are Node packages as an example.

I don't personally have an opinion on it being owned by Anthropic. It was part of our risk assessment, but it obviously passed.

I don't think I'm combining different things. I think the lack of focus on digital sovereignty is just another symptom of a public sector which still doesn't prioritises IT. Which I think follows my original post about our CPR system reaping what it had sown. I don't think you are wrong, but I think as far as my point on taking digitalisation serious, which I think is a required part of a mature public sector, I think all these lacking areas tell the story of a public sector which used to be the best in the world, but has been far too complacent.

As far as Randers cyber security goes. I imagine it'd be "fun" to do an right of access to documents, on the amount of unique visits their Microsoft Defender has registered to chatgpt.com and claude.ai.

MitID is great. It was developed and is still largely operated by the banking sector though. Though to be fair, the public sector was wise enough to adopt it rather than build their own. If you look at actual public sector projects like the recent taxation system for property tax you'll find things are quite a bit different.

Maybe 10 years ago, but other nations have caught up. Italy has their Sistema di Interscambio. Germany and France have taken digital sovereignty serious. Spain is big on open source (and ruby for some reason). Estonia has been miles ahead for more than 10 years. It's true that we have some ease of use systems compared to most of Europe, but we also have a lot of horror stories.

That being said it's not like us being shit at cyber security doesn't mean other countries aren't also shit. Look at Australia getting hacked by AI. I know it's all the rage to blame OpenAI, but really, shouldn't Australia count itself fortunate it wasn't an enemy nation state? Or that their lacking security got exposed before it was.

As someone who spend a decade in the Danish public sector, among other things working in groups on national architecture. I'd say that we reap what we sow. IT and digitalisation is not taken very serious in our public sector. In most places it's placed under something, and until recently it didn't have it's own ministry. Right now it's even a shared ministry, and there is little focus on cyber security. What has arrived in recent years is solely based on the thread of hybrid attacks from Russia.

Compare this to the ministry of transportation, which has full resources. This is despite the fact that most people in this country spend less time commuting than they do working on a computer. Not that transportation isn't important, but maybe digitalisation is as well?

My personal CPR has been leaked a couple of times though. Hilariously the first time it was leaked when a couple of unencrypted laptops were stolen from the biggest IT union in the country. We have a system in place where you can flag your CPR as having been leaked. Though I suppose now we might as well consider every one of them to be leaked. In theory a CPR on it's own was never meant to give any sort of authority or access, but again, this wasn't the practice in a lot of place. So I guess this leak may be a blessing in disguise in that sense as well, as it'll highten security because of broken trust.

> VW

VW EV sales are up in South America, Canada and Europe. It's true that their total global numbers are down, but that's mainly because they lost like 30% in China. Which obviously sucks considering how big the Chinese market is, but then, the Chinese market is it's own sort of thing.

Don't get me wrong, I think your point is valid for a lot of traditional European car brands. Mercedes is certainly one of them which has lost it's "our engines are nicer" brand, but I suspect VW is one of the brands that will do just fine. Especially with the id polo coming out next year.

There is no doubt that it throttles. For the most part I don't notice. I've build a rust SDK around apache arrow which produces Typescript, Python and Go interactions with our datalake. Compiling that is rather slow. It'll take 5-10 minutes on myh corporate pc vs the 15–30 minutes on the air. Whenever I absolutely have to work on it on myh mac I'll usually end up letting Azure DevOps spend it's 30-60 minutes while I do something else.

To be fair. I can also make my m1 air hot if try playing civilization 7 on it. Compiling doesn't make it hot though, but it's not exactly fast.

I'm fortunate enough to have WSL so I frankly do everything in bash. I am also in control of the Intune endpoint exceptions for development machines, to make sure they are allowed to run stuff like cargo, but it has the advantage of letting me remove my devices from the Adobe Acrobat group.

It's still hilarious when defender does it's thing and the fan goes mach 1, or when the firmware updater force reboots in the middle of a meeting after you've clicked the 10 minute extend two times.

It is what it is. I'm sure we'd figure out a way to make enterprise IT horrible on any OS.

They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.

I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.

Being Danish I'd probably rate it China > you > US. Realistically though, I'm probably sending everything to everyone except for you.

I rate the US last because the US government shares information with European governments, so it's the most likely to affect me. I wrote this next to my dishwasher though, and if it's anything like those LG tv's it probably identified what I wrote from the keystroke sounds or something.

I don't think it's quite as black and white. LinkedIn is just one channel, but I imagine you're going to have a hard time finding a workplace where social credit isn't a big part of internal politics. Whether that's being charming, great at your job or using SoMe, it's all about people.

I doubt any company primarily uses LinkedIn for promotions, but it does help your career if you are known for something positive by the people who run the company you work for.

What? It's how the job market works. It's like 90% connections and bullshit. I use GP somewhat similar to GP. Not as directly, but still targeted at helping my career. I've got a few people who write a lot of buzz that are also actually good for a couple of interesting comments back and forth. Once in a while they'll share someone new and I'll link up with them. This keeps you in the algorithm and it doesn't require you to be fake.

Then when something pisses me off at work I'll dig through my "hey this is a brilliant idea, I gotta write it down" ADHD notes I have in apples notes thing. I'll give it to an AI who will rewrite it to a load of crap that sounds way too professional to be something I would write. It will give me a great structure for the sections I want to write out of my crazy mess of a note. So I'll re-write every paragraph using basically none of what the AI output aside from the skeleton. Then I'll post it right before all the middle managers and c-levels take the train home on fridays. This will get me in right when they are LARPing on their linkedin.

Sometimes I'll get a tens of thousands of views. I've even had likes from one of the equity fund managers that owns the company that owns the company I work for. Those times I'll get some comments from the big bosses at the coffee machine or during lunch.

Maybe it's silly, but it works. At some point you'll also get enough followers or recognition or whatever it is they meassure you on that you'll start getting job offers from "real" people. I've had managers contact me directly for positions they were looking to fill. It've never actually gotten a job through linkedin though, but then again, all the jobs I've gotten after my first one has been through my real world network some of which have grown out of linkedin relationships.

I do wish the corporate larping platform our society has decided to use was decentralised though.

Around here "google it" has been replaced by "spørg botten" which means "ask the bot" or "spørg GPT". I've been putting an effort into saying "look it up" and stuff like it instead of "google it" for a couple of years now. Looks like it'll probably be wasted effort soon though.

It probably got lost in translation, but what I was trying to say was that when you're in non-tech enterprise. Nobody is responsible for the IT.

People said the same thing about higher level interpreted languages. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the same movement into a new abstraction like we did when people moved from assembly or C and into Python, Java and C#. This is probably also why LLM's are so good at low-abstraction, explicity, fail fast programming in something like Rust.

Considering how digitally inclined workers are already building various tools on their own. Even though these tools are completely vibe coded and the creator has absolutely no idea how to build things. I imagine we're going to look into a future where the LLM and the prompting becomes the "programming langauge".

I also think we'll see the personal responsibility shift because of this, and I think some traditional IT and software companies will struggle with this. We're an energy company, and where we would've bought a specialized piece of software and a team of consultants to implement it. We can now, not only build a better tool but also rewrite it enough to actually deploy it, all with a handful of people doing other tasks and 4000 Euro worth of credits. 6 months ago I would've laughed into your face if you told me this woud happen, but now, here we are.

I suspect that in a few years (if not sooner) you'll not need any form of software developer in the process for this. You need a buisness domain expert and you need it-architecture + cybersecurity, and most of the architecture + cybersecurity can be done through company wide AI skills. But the code itself never really has to be read for a really large part of software running in companies. You wouldn't do that for something critical, like the software running on your plants, but the web portal with a dashboard containing the status of your devices? Sure, especially because AI lets you do these things with 0 external dependencies.

I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.

I may be in the minority here, and maybe I'm jaded. Having worked with cyber security in both the public sector and the energy industry in Europe, however, I kind of like what the AI's are doing. A lot of our infrastructure is vulnerable because c-levels have been ignoring the issues, even when repeatedly warned. Now they reap what they sow.