They are finding a plateau with where the LLMs can go and could use the narrative of a "pause" to explain why capabilities are going to iterate in a more 'evolutionary' way instead of the revolutionary way folks are expecting.

There isn't to my knowledge a mechanism for the models to "self-improve", whatever one may think, at least the output doesn't have access to change the model in any way. The narrative of "oops the AI started evolving itself on accident" doesn't have a way to happen.

Considering that even the vaunted Opus 4.8 can't always develop mundane traditional software beginning, it's hard to imagine it could rework the model itself even if it had such access.

So they know damned well that a huge facet of technology is consistent, deterministic interfaces and behavior. Sure, there's a demand for AI to also provide more flexible interaction in some scenarios which is desired, but many scenarios are benefitted by the dependable interaction of apps.

So on the face of it, the concept of a platform that is a strict subset of the capabilities of platforms already out there (the "app" devices are plenty capable of running the "AI" interfaces) is dumb. This has proven out with the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1, dumb devices that did nothing better and simply signaled affinity with AI.

But Microsoft isn't quite as stupid, so what's the real point... well...

That's really the goal, to reset expectations from having capable personal devices with generally perpetual entitlement to renting every single thing you do from Microsoft. You can have your 'PC' run those deterministic applications you are used to, but it's just going to be a virtual desktop to Azure now.

Well, not quite....

Time zone alone is enough to make them dislike that arrangement.

Another is that navigating foreign employment, or perhaps even worse dealing with a middle man to take care of that for you is a nightmare.

Now you *are* in competition with people who might be later career and are happy to take a more basic salary in exchange from being able to maintain their lifestyle while living wherever they like. I know a few people that said they decided to commit their last decade or so to some rural living and taking just whatever job that goes with that, to keep their benefits alive and mostly keep letting their passive income grow.

Note this observation is *very* specific to the tech industry. The silicon valley phenomenon. Further, significantly specific to the west coast.

Basically, the tech industry from 90s to today in that area has experienced generally robust economic results and quite a few booms, so folks in that neck of the woods have gotten a bit pampered. But I would say it crosses generations, plenty of Gen Xers get caught up in it despite the money faucets turning on a bit later for them.

Most people know that outsourcing can be pretty expensive, but maybe less expensive than hiring local talent. The actual talent is cheap and may be easy to cheat out of an appropriate wage, but the middlemen are no fools and are experienced at making sure they get their cut and a decent rate for their minimal contribution. Also the middlemen are experienced at recognizing *any* opportunity to declare a request beyond the existing statement of work and demand more money before a fairly reasonable request can be serviced, incurring both budget and schedule increases.

Remote work opens up the best of both worlds, shopping around for cheap talent but still having direct control over the worker and not having to pay a middle man. That labor that doesn't know their worth and will never push back can now directly benefit the company. Maybe navigating foreign employment is still a bit much, but they can probably get plenty cheap labor by accepting folks from wherever within their own nation/province/state/whatever with the work from home benefit.

I guess so, looks like it is up to 950 now though, so guess it was a sale...

It was a yoga 7, but maybe it was a special deal for memorial Day. it is now 950...

I mean I just bought a Lenovo laptop with 16G of ram for $700 with touchscreen, a pen, and OLED screen...

It's probably going to be pretty credible, though they are thinking more 'openclaw' and less 'gaming'.

Though I despise everyone playing around with nVidia's "Superchip" terminology.

I tossed that number out as my experience, and it varies wildly task to task and language to language.

For C development, I'd imagine it's super accelerating, as there's so much boilerplate micro managing.

For python, less so as it's a bit less boilerplatey.

If wanting to make a variation on a fairly common pattern, really accelerated. If trying to work in a niche context, frequently more annoying than helpful if you try to prompt, but maybe decent at AI augmented code completion.

They already slop up excessive documentation. That's one of the issues is that a issue report or a pull request that might have formerly been to the point is now a big verbose essay. An issue might drone on about the history of string formatting and the various capabilities and the entire rationale of why hexadecimal is so useful in the context of computing and documenting how prevalent it is.

For a pull request that adds an argument to switch some numeric data to hexadecimal. Bonus points, instead of a refactor to shunt numbers over to a common format handler, it might duplicate the logic N number of times, depending on how things rolled that day. Especially CSS, vibe-coded frontend stuff loves to vomit up needless CSS...

The one line explanation suffices, but I see a wall of text and have no idea what they are on about because it's buried in there somewhere among fluff..

But that's my whole point, what you describe is the 20-50% faster scenario.

What is driving most of the annoyance with pull requests are the folks that just tell it to do something and then it spits out a bunch of plausible code, particularly if not testable.

One example:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/3...

The proposal was *probably* vibe coded and submitted to the kernel to get some attribution, and the code was fundamentally untestable, and constituted basically LLM guesses about what PCIe7 would look like. Structurally credible, but a volume of negative value crap because it's outright incorrect per people that actually know what it looks like and had to waste their time just in case it was a credible origin for this.

*This* is what responsible open source contributors are up against, not because the slop is viable, but just because the slop drowns out the better. Your AI generated code may be fine because you actually oversee it credibly, but by volume most GenAI output is slop, because of the humans feeding the prompt getting more volume if slop suffices for them.

GenAI rewards those that just don't give a crap and trust the output far more than it rewards people that want to make sure the generated output is actually what you want and done well.

So someone turning on the token hose to an agent that can create and comment on pull requests and all this stuff flood with useless crap. They are going to vomit up probably about 100x more "stuff" to the world than a traditional developer, and further it's a fad where there's probably 5x more people trying.

Someone that uses it to generate and curate the result, who would be able to likely contribute even without the agent, *might* be able to be significantly more productive with credible product. But we are talking about maybe 1.2x to 1.5x in the context of credibly shareable code that would be put into projects (a higher multiplier for throwaway single purpose stuff that won't need maintenance or is something like a basic site).

When 99% is slop, it's hard to imagine the 1% to be worth it.

Yeah, I think the big question is was Eclipse as unhinged as the blog posts suggests throughout, or was this unhinged state brought on by unreasonable treatment by Microsoft...

From some analysis, I think MS team became less competent and more bureaucratic, and probably struggled to understand whatever the hell Eclipse was getting at, and Eclipse was perhaps on top of confusing was also potentially offended that they failed to respond in what he thought was an appropriate amount of time.

So Eclipse obviously had real stuff, but maybe MSRC couldn't understand, and Eclipse took it gravely personally and here we are.

The other option is that MSRC engaged as described and drove Eclipse to be unhinged after trying to engage in a reasonable way.

My life experience is probably that the former is the scenario, that he was smart, but communicated poorly and took offense easily when faced with a boringly incompetent corp team and mistook their nature for malice initially. Things might have gotten heated on Microsoft's side, but I would guess Eclipse went off the rails first, based on his communication style on display in his blog...

Funny thing is that it's literally the opposite, it's the worst at stretching the imagination.

Just saw a claude commercial, and their pitch was "hey, you can use us to make a knock-off dropbox"

Their big stunt a while back was "we made a knock-off C compiler"

Everything is about making knock offs because that's what GenAI can do. It can certainly tailor the knock off in ways that were easier than what it formerly took, but roughly knock-off in their bread and butter