What Is Copilot Exactly?

lordleft

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.

collabs

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.

didibus

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

CactusBlue

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

sidrag22

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.

rdtsc

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.

genidoi

> 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.

ghewgill

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

tptacek

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.

unyttigfjelltol

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.

minnzen

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

bigbuppo

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

CommenterPerson

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.

yieldcrv

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

illwrks

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.

dbvn

> "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.

workfromspace

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

woah

Why do they all start with C?

cadamsdotcom

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. :(

ikidd

IDK how anyone makes anything of Copilot 365. My wife knows I use models all the time to build things, so she asked me to help her use this "Copilot" thing. I flailed around on her work laptop for a few hours and I'll be damned if I came up with anything more useful than things I could already do with some hotkeys. I'd ask it to do things like I would a coding model and it would just come back with instructions on how to do it myself or find things in the application menus. I have no clue what to do with that, I can't see any value in it at all, so I'm guessing I just couldn't wrap my head around the gestalt it uses. There has to be something there, right, or why would all the muckity-mucks be so excited about it?