Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#301

Post by tomashubelbauer » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #165

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 Micr…

I think big corporations are just structurally unable to create products people actually want to use. They have too much experience with their customers being locked in and switching costs keeping them locked in. Anthropic needed a real product to win mind-share first, they will start enshitifying later (by some accounts they may already have). The best thing a big corporation can do with a nascent technology like that is to make it available to use to everywhere and then acquire the startup that converts it to a winner first. Microsoft even fumbled that.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#302

Post by cgh » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #241

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…

At the beginning of my career, sometime around 1999 or 2000, I was at Microsoft with our team because we were trying to integrate our product with this absolute piece of junk called Microsoft Biztalk.

It simply didn’t work. I complained about it and was eventually hauled into a room with some MS PMs who told me in no uncertain terms that indeed, Biztalk didn’t work and it was essentially garbage that no one, including us, should ever use. Just pretend you’re doing something and when the week is up, go home. Tell everyone you’ve integrated with Biztalk. It won’t matter.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#303

Post by anonymars » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #241

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…

Microsoft used to be well-known for eating its own dogfood. I wonder what happened

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#304

Post by coffeemug » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #241

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…

I work for Microsoft/Azure and my incentives are (roughly in descending order): minimize large/long outages, ship lots of stuff (with some concern for customer utility, but not too much), don't get yelled at for missing mandated work (security, compliance, etc.) I'd love to improve product quality, but incentives for that are negative. We're running a tight ship, and every second I spend on quality is a second I don't spend on the priorities above. Since there isn't any slack in the system, that means my performance assessment will drop, which I obviously don't want. Multiply that by 200k employees, and you get the current state of quality across the whole product portfolio.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#305

Post by estimator7292 » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

moomin wrote: post #300

marssaxman wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions. They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active…

There’s got to be solid reasons why they do this and have done so for so damn long. At the very least institutional reasons. At best, actual research that suggests they make more money this way. But as a consumer, I hate it.

Marketing has too much power. They get some hairbrained scheme to goose the numbers and just slam a mandate all the way down the org. Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#306

Post by tomashubelbauer » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

wendgeabos wrote: post #269

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.

I used to use Claude Code with Opus exclusively because of how good it is IME. Then Anthropic banned me so I switched to OpenCode. I really want OpenCode to win, but there is long way for it to get the same polish in the UX department (and to get a handle on the memory leaks). I am 100 % sure Claude Code is hacks upon hacks internally, but on the surface, it works quite well (not that they have fixed the flashing issue). With OpenCode I also switched to GPT-5.2-Codex and I have to say it's fairly garbage IME. I can't get it to keep working, it takes every opportunity to either tell me what I should do next for it or just tell me it figured a particular piece of the larger puzzle out and that if I want it can continue. It is not nearly as independent as Opus it. Now I'm on the Codex CLI with GPT-5.2 as I figured maybe the harness is the issue, but it is not very good either.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#307

Post by raincole » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

kemotep wrote: post #127

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 Co…

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

AI really should be a freaking feature, not the identity of their products. What MS is doing now is like renaming Photoshop to Photoshop Neural Filter.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#308

Post by Nevermark » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

moomin wrote: post #300

marssaxman wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions. They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active…

There’s got to be solid reasons why they do this and have done so for so damn long. At the very least institutional reasons. At best, actual research that suggests they make more money this way. But as a consumer, I hate it.

Perhaps the "consistent" naming helps them shove more through the Enterprise door.

If a large company has bought into "Co-Pilot", they want it all right? Or not, but let's not make carving anything out easy.

Just a thought.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#309

Post by estimator7292 » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

anonymars wrote: post #280

pixl97 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions Microsoft cannot and will not ever get better at naming things. It is said the universe will split open and and eldritch beast will consume the stars the day Microsoft stops using inconsistent and overlapping names for different and conflicting products. Isn't that right .Net/dotnet

Many will never know the joy of trying to search for it back in the days when punctuation was ignored (C# says hello too) Related: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-servers-iden...

Try going on LinkedIn and searching for C# and .net jobs.

Completely impossible. The search is bad to begin with, but it explicitly ignores anything that isn't a-9.

Re: Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

#310

Post by superfrank » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

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.