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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Do we know that Windows 11 has suffered due to the use of genAI or is that just a random snipe?

It's based off that 30% of code written by AI quote from the MS CEO last year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

Note that he said written by, not assisted; and also that there's been some major QA issues with win11 the last year, enough for Microsoft to have made a public apology/commitment to improve...

So, no definitive evidence, but the rest of the breadcrumbs provide enough to say that yes it does appear to have suffered from it.

Given the Debian policy seems more geared towards aided/assisted an existing dev than replacing them and shipping because the code works on the golden path on a devs monster pc ... Well I'd still keep an eye on it but trust OSS OS engineers to have some competence at knowing if this works and adjusting the policy later if it proved to be wrong.

Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does

Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.

I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadership is demanding everyone be super reckless? But why would anyone with experience even touch those areas of the operating system enough to break them that badly?? The mistakes they're making really do not seem like mistakes that would be made by even the most rushed possible senior engineers. Maybe they're letting completely inexperienced people touch super low levels and that's the problem? Or completely inexperienced machines...

I suspect they have used rounds of salary-based cuts to boost their PnL in the past, like some other large companies I've worked at, and that only bites you down the road because each time they do it they'll ask, "who do we have to keep?", but you're still losing experienced people and eventually you will get mid-level or junior engineers working on core code.

I don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense considering what's been happening to Windows over the past 10 years.

Raymond Chen is still there. Hell, Dave Cutler is still there.

I suspect their experienced senior engineers that actually knew the products have left, and they cannot attract talent like they once did.

Keep in mind that Microsoft laid-off a large share of their developers shortly before and during the interval the GP talks about.

Repeatedly.

You are right that's one or the other. Probably both are contributing.

Apologies for not replying to you right away. I intended to follow up but HN wouldn't let me because my account is too new. No, it wasn't a random snipe. I used Windows extensively from 95-Vista and Win 10 for work. In my person user experience W11 is bafflingly bad, and the MS team are making design choices that honestly make me feel like Windows ME was doing more right in that area.

Now the argument that genAI is helping them find and fix bugs faster has a lot of merit because it can be pretty darn good at that. But for lack of a better phrase, 'The Windows 11 Experience' feels, as other users pointed out too, either vibe coded or like the dev teams went insane. I live and die by Debian in my servers and I really hope the same kind of thing doesn't happen to them.

They’ve broken their own record of massive breaking updates in the last year.

lol windows doesn’t need AI to be the dumpster fire it’s always been

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