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Comment by yoyohello13 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft in 2025: We fired a bunch of engineers and mandated AI usage. 90% of our code is now generated by AI.

Also Microsoft in 2025: Record setting bugs and anti-features released.

Case study in code quantity is not equal to code quality.

The relation is tangential at best. Microsoft's management was a personification of corporate rot for a long while now, AI or no AI.

They view Windows as a straw to suck users into their higher value products through, and are seemingly unaware of what "UX" is, or how their decisions affect it. Which is how Windows 11 ended up being such a clusterfuck.

> The relation is tangential at best. Microsoft's management was a personification of corporate rot for a long while now, AI or no AI.

Is it though? Wouldn't you expect "personification of corporate rot" to precisely jump on whatever trendy bandwagon there is to make a quick buck, regardless of consequences, then move on?

I would. But if Microsoft's haphazard AI push was the only thing making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10 was, it would be a good OS overall.

I also believe that OS-level AI features can be worthwhile if implemented right. It's just that the chances of that happening at Microsoft, under the current Microsoft leadership, are nonexistent.

To add they want to rewrite Windows in Rust with AI, which I can only assume they hope will keep the software quality up but I doubt it

It's unfortunate that falsehoods spread so quickly.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-re...

> “It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.

> My team’s project is a research project. [...]

I don’t believe for a second that it was a mistake. Probably got a call from some C-level and came up with this excuse.

Do you have any idea just how much code is in Windows?

I did a quick search and estimates are in the 50-60 million lines range.

No way in hell are they going to rewrite all that in a few years. Even if they actually wanted to, which they don't because it would be a truly enormous expense (even for Microsoft).

Not to even mention that huge software projects have a well deserved reputation for failing, and the scope of such a rewrite would probably dwarf any previous rewrite of anything, ever, and by a very large margin.

"Rewrite all of Windows in Rust" simply does not even begin to pass the sniff test.

Good news, because part of the original post was that engineers should soon be able to handle a million lines of code a month. So 60 engineers to birth an OS in a month.

  … Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,” Galen Hunt, who is a top-level Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a now-edited LinkedIn post.…

Maybe he did not say Windows, but it is not a leap to imagine it falls under the umbrella of “largest codebases”

A perfectly crafted turd ....is still a turd.

They should go back to Windows 95 (or NT), convert that to Rust, and then move forward from there. Most of Windows releases since '95 have been garbage.

Don't exaggerate. 98, 2000 and XP also improved things.

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