You seem to be of the understanding that Microsoft has some sort of unified strategy that tries to optimize for user experience. Might have been true in the beginning of the company's life, but today? They've been using the "spraying and praying" strategy for the last 2 decades at least and this is just another way of applying said strategy.

I bet there's there's a poorly thought out directive from the company bigwigs to integrate AI into all Microsoft products, and middle management is gobbling that up to get ahead in the rat race.

Visual Studio and VSCode have also become infested with little Copilot icons.

I've yet to have a good experience with copilot in Visual Studio

It still surprises me to have shows stopping bugs with it, In THE first party IDE, in Windows, using pure .NET and other microsoft tooling

I couldn't describe a more perfectly vacuum'ed spherical cow, and still, copilot dies randomly even after they have acknowledged the problem and made some fixes

Visual Studio unfortunately still heavily uses legacy .NET Framework, only some parts of instrumentation specifically for C# were moved out of process and run on top of modern runtime. It's a pretty good IDE, much better than the kind of experience you get elsewhere, but I've moved to VSC + Rider since and only use VS occasionally on my "gaming pc" because it has a convenient community-made extension for getting quick .NET's compiler output.

So had jetbrains, and no matter how many times you hide the icons, they always come back.

(points to nose)

As far as I’m aware, Windows doesn’t have anything quite like services on macOS and probably can’t because Windows apps, even those that are first-party, are built with a menagerie of different UI toolkits which means there are no universal hooks for something like services to use.

The reason macOS can do this is because a large majority of apps are either native AppKit or otherwise hook into the system text facilities (which is why text services work in text fields in Chrome and Firefox for example).

You mean it should be integrated into the text box control, and/or the keyboard? That does make a lot of sense to me.

Though some applications also benefit from app-specific integration on top of that.

Maybe it is implemented in the text box control, but it's normally turned off (?)

> Why do writing tools have to be a feature of every app instead of an operating-system wide tool like Apple Intelligence?

Third option: Put it in its own app. I'll decide how I want it to "help".

It's less effective at the OS wide level because the context is incredibly important. Notepad is used very differently from word processing and other applications. Even in the context of notepad- you're using that app very differently when working in python vs a readme.

AI is best integrated at the application level because the application developers are best suited to tune the algorithm and determine which pieces of context are most relevant.

I think this is where it will go inevitably, with only specialized AI tools being features baked into products you like.

A lot of our opinions on AI (like the one you just conveyed) stems from now nascent the design thinking around AI truly is. Like early internet, I suspect 10 years from now the UX of these tools will be much more mature. There'll likely always be a need for what ChatGPT has now, but these do feel like OS features.

> Makes no sense whatsoever to just "sprinkle AI everywhere" except for specialized use cases.

Microsoft really don't know what they're doing. They're trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks without thinking of any externalities such as people getting pissed off and leaving to other platforms.

I'm very glad that there isn't an OS-wide thing like "Apple Intelligence", personally.

Despite how far its rotted, macOS is built on object-oriented APIs. Making Apple Intelligence work for text means adding it to NSText and whatever crappy UIKit objects came over with Catalyst/SwiftUI, not every single app individually bespoke.

Is the Windows Copilot not that? There has been annoying focus-killing long-form automatic autocomplete replacing the text popping in every kind of text area on the computer I use at work. Is this being done on each application?

It's easier than product development and is flashy to market.