What Is Copilot Exactly? | Hacker News Reader

What Is Copilot Exactly?

idiallo.com

93 pointsWhyNotHugo59 comments

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.

It does a good job of when a VIP employee demands "copilot", you have to buy a bunch of different licenses for them because no one knows exactly what they want (they just want copilot, no not that one).

Sorry if this is a stupid question but shouldn't you try to clarify which product specifically they have in mind before you spend money on something that might not be the right thing?

You can try, but you will often be unsuccessful because of the sheer number of skus, all with similar and sometimes overlapping capabilities & the poor documentation on MS' part. Additionally, VIP users may not like to clarify. They saw a demo of "something" and need it yesterday...

The opposite of what Oracle used to do (arguably successfully). Break up useful components of middleware or database servers so you have to add a litany of expensive features, similar to trying to pick a trim on the BMW website.

The nice thing about being a Github shop but not really a Microsoft shop is the range of Copilot" might refer to narrows quite a bit. "Github Copilot" is a relatively coherent collection of products, and never have to be bothered with any of the other stuff.

That said I suspect this is in part an attempt at making the name so ubiquitous that people start using it the way they currently use ChatGPT. Like Kleenex or Bandaid or Google, where the name of the product is just the brand.

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.

Which component is the bombardier?

That’s Finance. They don't fly the plane; they just wait for the right moment to drop the bill for those premium tokens.

> "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.

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.

We had a good laugh when our IT informed us that Remote Desktop was being renamed Windows App. I really wonder what is going on over there because from where I'm sitting it makes no effin' sense at all.

This is dumb enough that it can’t be accidental. I genuinely believe the strategy is to create vague but recognizable brands but avoid labeling _products_ with recognizable names.

Microsoft seem to think that it’s better to have some names we all know like 365, Azure, Copilot snd then the products are just floating around under those brands.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw but I have no idea why they would want this.

Product confusion definitely seems like an intentional strategy. Fits right in with the mountain of other user-hostile strategies being employed.

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.

Many people working the front-end space seem to really like Cursor. It seems to have a dedicated audience. Myself, I have never liked VS Code so I don't have a pull towards it.

I think the costing there is the problem and with (GitHub) Copilot. Not owning their own model and not able to take advantage of the (probably brutally subsidized) fixed monthly packages that have relatively generous limits means Cursor and Copilot can't compete cost wise on a per-token basis.

JetBrains has similar problems with its "Junie" product.

Maybe some of these will have second chances once Anthropic and OpenAI run out of $$ runway and are forced to charge something closer to actual cost. Or if the Chinese open weight models do some more catching up.

Do you regularly talk to anyone in a Microsoft shop (like most enterprises)? If you work in a ms ”partner” company there’s rarely a choice between the Microsoft product and something else. Azure over AWS is a given etc.

I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins. The rest is autocomplete in the IDE.

I actually find it to be a great deal, especially because they charge by request rather than token. So if you provide detailed prompts a lot of work can get done for very little cost.

[0] https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...

> I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins.

Does the bug where premium requests get consumed for spinning up subagents still exist?

https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1qttkzs/increa...

I've stuck to Visual Studio Code's GitHub Copilot integration because of this, because I'm on a tight budget and didn't fancy burning through my premium requests.

No, I've never encountered that.

But I'm also not sure what qualifies as a bug here, given Microsoft's weird billing model. If you get charged for subagents, you'll burn through your premium requests in no time. If you don't get charged for subagents, you can get nearly unlimited usage of premium mode by using a go-between agent with a cheap/free model.

Currently I'm doing the latter, although I have to assume Microsoft will crack down on it at some point.

I use Copilot pretty much exclusively because it's our "approved AI solution" at the office and they block access to Claude. Since I'm so used to Copilot at work, I just end up using it all the time.

Really? I use Github Copilot. It is great actually, and I actually prefer it to Claude (loosely held opinion tho).

What's wrong with Cursor? I get as much use out of Cursor using Auto with some Opus for $20 as I do out of CC for $140.

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

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.

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

ActiveX

Nah. DotNet.

Next name: ThinksForSure. It worked for PlaysForSure [1] so why not for this next step towards the abyss?

[1] https://grokipedia.com/page/microsoft_playsforsure#discontin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure#Critici...

MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.

Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.

I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.

I have long suspected that Microsoft product branding and naming has more to do with their intended sales and contract structure than actually being informative with respect to what the product does.

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

This is the most Microsoft thing ever.

And shows up even when you are trying to use one specific Copilot. I want to try Copilot CLI, but it only seems half documented. A lot of things point back to Copilot in VS Code (or Jetbrains and Eclipse).

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?

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.

Depending on which Copilot you are talking about, it became generally available in mid to late 2023.

Sorry, The exact dates and numbers I may have misremembered.

You are right that it could have been later and now that I think about it, it might have been 4k -> 8k characters.

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.

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. :(

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.

Why do they all start with C?

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

... Enterprise Edition

... LTSC

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

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

ROFL

> Cursor

Might as well be Copilot at this point with how CLIs have been adopted.

Amazing ending. I have been told "no one should be using copilot" - and I agree!

A 10x engineer who doesn't even know what tools they are using?

Yeah, coffee was spilled here. What a twist.

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

Copilot cli isn’t as good as Claude but it’s not just fancy autocomplete either. Copilot cli seems to be converging with the rest and you can use mcp servers, skills, launch fleets of agents that use tools etc.

And yet none of these tools have sensible or working permission configs. Apart from prompt-and-pray or requiring explicit permission for every file operation and shell commands, the only genuine way to stop them from running destructive operations is OS-level sandboxing. From a security and error-safety perspective, all of these tools are like letting a bright and curious 8 year old have full access to your machine.

Mistake

> 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.

Isn't the line you quoted about asking a real person co-worker?

Oh it is yeah.

I'm pretty sure they're referring to their coworker as "he," not an LLM.

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