It Shows
Jun 16, 2025 at 05:42PM
As of April 29th, 2025, Microsoft has bragged about “as much as 30%” of their code is written in AI. And in the scope of things, I’m not sure if it’s something they should be bragging about.
The Economic Reasons
One thing I must admit even as a right-leaner as far as politics, is the achilles heel of capitalism and public markets, is the need for companies to post growth in profits over time to stay in business. And there are two ways to do this.
- Expanding markets - Either by tapping into a new market or expanding product offerings, a company can increase the amount of revenue they take in. The revenue that goes unspent turns into profits.
- Cutting Costs - The other way companies can grow in profits is by cutting their costs so more revenue can roll into profits. And the biggest cost a company will have is their payroll.
In many industries the markets are tapped and saturated with suppliers if they’re not controlled by a major monopoly or duopoly power. This makes it very difficult to increase profits by increasing revenue.
So companies resort to cutting costs the vast majority of the time these days as a result. And the first thing they look to cut is payroll and benefits of their employees.
Replacing four employees with one and an extra $30/mo in AI utilization cost looks mighty appealing to these major organizations who tapped their markets already.
The Arms Race
Between a few of the major powers of the world, mainly the USA (where I live), Europe, China, and other Eastern Nations, there is an arms race of technology. Quantum computing is one of the major races. AI is the other. This is the primary reason why the federal government restricted states from passing laws against AI. They want to let AI engineers cook and beat the other major powers at making the world’s most intelligent AI for a time.
The Punchline
Whether it has anything to do with AI is beyond my knowledge, but it seems to me that the quality of Microsoft Windows as a product has gone downhill, fast. Some days I have both of my laptops out, my work one, and my personal one, both with 13th gen i5’s and 16GB of RAM. My work laptop runs Windows 11 Enterprise as deployed by my organization that I work for, which some of the telemetry is turned off. And my personal one runs Fedora KDE. Also to note, my work laptop is 14", and my personal one is 13". So my personal laptop likely has a smaller battery.
The battery life on my work laptop is about 2 hours. The battery life on my personal laptop is about 5, sometimes 6 hours.
So why does Windows make such a difference that the Windows laptop only gets about half the battery life a nearly equivalent Linux one gets?
It comes down to the quality of the code and tech debt. For a while now the latter has been becoming more and more of an issue with the Windows platform. But that can be managed if the quality of the code keeps up with it.
For the Windows users, when your computer says that it needs a restart to install updates, try the “Update and Shutdown” option on the start menu. The past many times I have tried it, it literally just Updates and Restarts. I would always have to manually shut it down again a while after it restarts. It never does it on its own as advertised.
The issue is that AI isn’t to the point where it can start replacing entire teams of programmers, especially if the one coding with an AI agent is smart enough to modify, or reprompt for a modification if the code doesn’t work as well as intended.
So, yeah, they’re saving a boatload of money by firing the higher paid software developers to hire back Datacenter grunt workers for less money. But the amount of money they saved could be offset by losing market share due to frustration of users and developers.