As a software developer, there’s rarely a day I don’t hear how Copilot is going to change our lives, in work, in Linkedin, or on presentations. For the 2 people who read my articles, I feel it’s worth talking about real experiences.

The Microsoft and media machine

Where do I start with this? Well, if there’s anything that will turn me off generative AI just out of spite, it’s this. How much MS, Google, Apple and others pump AI like it’s a 1980’s capitalists wet dream of the 2000s, is becoming really detrimental to I.T. Recently, I saw an advert for Norton on TV saying “create fake wifi network” like that’s something you could type in and it would work. Don’t worry about routers and SSIDs and packet sniffing, you’re at risk! Buy our resource hogging software that adds nothing over Windows Defender!

Point being, the companies and their cheerleaders (employees and community members) need to tone it down. Show us the actual benefits and drawbacks, be honest and people will be far more keen to adopt in a way that makes sense. I want to shout out Mark Smith and Luise Freese as they’ve posted quite a few things online with really good critical thinking, considering both sides.

Is it good – Generally?

tl;dr it depends. A colleague and I have been drafting an introduction to Power Platform and Dynamics for non-technical audiences at work, so using it to get better quality wording was quite useful. That’s not something you could use voice assistants or a search engine to do.

Somewhere in the middle was looking for general information like stats, or event information, or weather, etc. It’s good at doing this, but ultimately, it’s just a text version of Siri/Google Assistant/Alexa.

Then comes the more “creative” stuff. Dear god. I moderate the Reddit community and I’ve tried to use Copilot to generate a banner, with the Snoo being in front of a computer doing some Power Platform work. The results were laughable – stood on the desk, mangled text on the screen, all sorts.

Is it good – Power Platform?

Yet again, it depends. Agents are just a rebadged Power Virtual Agents and that was always excellent, especially how it can directly plumb into Teams, Power Automate, Customer Service, etc. Where you use them for exactly what their niche is – you can’t beat it.

If you’re not going this far, prompts for advice can be excellent, like why your flow is failing. This can appear automatically sometimes and gives info where the flow checker is empty. Sometimes they don’t understand your prompt though.

On the bottom end – avoid building things with it at all costs. If your statement is too broad, it’ll wipe out your entire flow, or give you an action with completely incorrect functions.

Summary/Next…

I think what it comes down to at the moment, is for it to be good you have to be very specific and it has to be when there’s a binary result to achieve. The more focussed the usage, the better it is. If you’re trying to be more creative, or the claim that it’s going to replace your job – like every other fad of the last 30 years, forget about it.

Think very hard about what you need from it – sometimes it’s a great compliment, sometimes it’s a huge hinderance. It’s no different to any other tool. Just don’t swallow the idea that Number 5 is alive, as it wont be, plus it’ll be a lot less fun than Johnny.

Next time I’ll be mopping up a few common questions like training, jobs, etc. Then moving into a series about software development in general, complemented by the start of a new (hopefully monthly) video series, with free form conversations about the industry.

p.s. give Hardware Unboxed a visit in the link earlier – they are great guys doing high quality work.