An internal Microsoft memo has leaked. It was written by Julia Liuson, president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and GitHub. The memo tells managers to evaluate employees based on how much they use internal AI tools like the various Copilots: [Business Insider]

AI is now a fundamental part of how we work. Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.

Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

Let’s be clear: this is a confession of abject failure.

Microsoft’s AI tools don’t work. Microsoft AI doesn’t make you more effective. Microsoft AI won’t do the job better.

If it did, Microsoft staff would be using it already. The competition inside Microsoft is vicious. If AI would get them ahead of the other guy, they’d use it.

We already know that when AI saves someone time at work, it’s because they can fob work off onto someone else. Total work doesn’t go down, and total productivity doesn’t go up.

But Microsoft is desperate to sell AI to anyone it can, because the CEO, Satya Nadella, has a bee in his bonnet. Nadella has decreed: everyone will use AI.

Even though it doesn’t work.

We should expect some enterprising Microsoft coder to come up with an automated AI agent system that racks up chatbot metrics for them — while they get on with their actual job.

• Video version

🕹️ Decker is, in my opinion, the best way to get started at any skill level.

Think of it like the MS Paint of game development. Easy to pick up and always fun to use.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Read here.

Last Friday’s newsletter begins:

My favorite thing about reading “the classics” is that they’re almost always weirder than you think they are. For example: within 50 pages of War and Peace, a bunch of drunks tie a policeman to a bear and throw them in the river. (I try to read a big book every summer, so I figured why not read one of the biggest?)

With backup from Italo Calvino’s Why Read The Classics:

“Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them…”

Read more: “The classics are weird.”

A couple of months ago, I wrote:

I was replying to a comment by Charlie Stross, who noted that LLMs are trained on existing data and therefore are biased against recognizing new phenomena. My point was that in tech, we look forward to learning about new inventions -- new phenomena by definition. Are AI coding tools going to roadblock that?

Already happening! Here's Kyle Hughes last week:

That's not even a new language, it's just a new major version. Is C++26 going to run into the same problem?

Hat tip to John Gruber, who quotes more dev comments as we swing into WWDC week.

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Speaking of WWDC, the new "liquid glass" UI is now announced. (Screenshots everywhere.) I like it, although I haven't installed the betas to play with it myself.

Joseph Humphrey has, and he notes that existing app icons are being glassified by default:

Kinda shocked to see these 3rd party app icons having been liquid-glassed already. Is this some kind of automatic filter, or did Apple & 3rd parties prep them in advance?? --@joethephish, June 10 (thread)

The icon auto-glassification uses non-obvious heuristics, and Joe's screenshots show some weird artifacts.

I was surprised too! For the iOS7 "flatten it all" UI transition, existing apps did not get the new look -- either in their icons or their internal buttons, etc -- until the developer recompiled with the new SDK. (And thus had a chance to redesign their icons for the new style.) As I wrote a couple of months ago:

[In 2012] Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.

-- me, April 9

Are they really going to bag that policy for this fall? I guess they already sort of did. Last year's "tint mode" squashed existing icons to tinted monochrome whether they liked it or not. But that was a user option, and not a very popular one, I suspect.

This year's icon change feels like a bigger rug-pull for developers. And developers have raw nerves these days.

This is supposed to be a prediction post. I guess I'll predict that Apple rolls this back, leaving old (third-party) icons alone for the iOS26 full release. Maybe.

(I see Marco Arment is doing a day of "it's a beta, calm down and send feedback". Listen to him, he knows his stuff.)

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But the big lurking announcement was iPadOS gaining windows, a menu bar, and a more (though not completely) file-oriented environment. A lot of people have been waiting years for those features. Craig Federighi presented the news with an understated but real wince of apology.

Personally, not my thing. I don't tend to use my iPad for productive work. And it's not for want of windows and a menu bar; it's for want of a keyboard and a terminal window. I have a very terminal-centric work life. My current Mac desktop has nine terminal windows, two of which are running Emacs.

(No, I don't want to carry around an external keyboard for my iPad. If I carry another big thing, it'll be the MacBook, and then the problem is solved.)

But -- look. For more than a decade, people have been predicting that Apple would kill MacOS and force Macs to run some form of iOS. They predicted it when Apple launched Gatekeeper, they predicted it when Apple brought SwiftUI apps to MacOS, they predicted it when Apple redesigned the Settings app.

I never bought it before. Watching this week's keynote, I buy it. Now there is room for i(Pad)OS to replace MacOS.

Changing or locking down MacOS is a weak signal because people use MacOS. You can only do so much to it. Apple has been tightening the bolts on Gatekeeper at regular intervals, but you can still run unsigned apps on a Mac. The hoops still exist. You can install Linux packages with Homebrew.

But adding features to iPad is a different play! That's pushing the iPad UI in a direction where it could plausibly take over the desktop-OS role. And this direction isn't new, it's a well-established thing. The iPad has been acquiring keyboard/mouse features for years now.

So is Apple planning to eliminate MacOS entirely, and ship Macs with (more or less) iPadOS installed? Maybe! This is all finger-in-the-wind. I doubt it's happening soon. It may never happen. It could be that Apple wants iPad to stand on its own as a serious mobile productivity platform, as good as the Mac but separate from it.

But Apple thinks in terms of company strategy, not separate siloed platforms. And, as many people have pointed out, supporting two similar-but-separate OSes is a terrible business case. Surely Apple has better uses for that redundant budget line.

Abstractly, they could unify the two OSes rather than killing one of them. But, in practice, they would kill MacOS. Look at yesterday's announcements. iPad gets the new features; Mac gets nothing. (Except the universal shiny glass layer.) The writing is not on the wall but the wind is blowing, and we can see which way.

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Say this happens, in 2028 or whenever. (If Apple still exists, if I haven't died in the food riots, etc etc.) Can my terminal-centric lifestyle make its way to an iPad-like world?

...Well, that depends on whether they add a terminal app, doesn't it? Fundamentally I don't care about MacOS as a brand. I just want to set up my home directory and my .emacs file and install Python and git and npm and all the other stuff that my habits have accumulated. You have no idea how many little Python scripts are involved in everyday tasks like, you know, writing this blog post.

(Okay, you do know that because my blogging tool is up on Github. The answer is four. Four vonderful Python scripts, ah ah ah!)

If I can't do all that in MacOS 28/29/whichever, it'll be time to pick a Linux distro. Not looking forward to that, honestly. (I fly Linux servers all the time, but the last time I used a Linux desktop environment it was GNOME 1.0? I think?)

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Other notes from WWDC. (Not really predictions, sorry, I am failing my post title.)

• Tim Cook looks tired. I don't mean that in a Harriet Jones way! I assume he's run himself ragged trying to manage political crap. Craig Federighi is still having fun but I felt like he was over-playing it a lot of the time. Doesn't feel like a happy company. Eh, what do I know, I'm trying to read tea leaves from a scripted video.

• I said "Mac gets nothing" but that's unfair. The Spotlight update with integrated actions and shortcuts looks extremely sexy. Yes, this is about getting third-party devs to support App Intents so that Siri/AI can hook into them. But it will also be great for Automator and other non-AI scripting tools.

• WWDC is a software event; Apple never talks about new hardware there. I know it. You know it. But it sure was weird to have a whole VisionOS segment pushing new features when the rev1 Vision Pro is at a dead standstill. My sense is that the whole ecosystem is on hold waiting for a consumer-viable rev2 model.

• I think the consumer-viable rev2 model is coming this fall. There, that's a prediction. Worth what you paid for it.

• I'm enjoying the Murderbot show but damn if Gurathin isn't a low-key Vision Pro ad. He's got the offhand tap-fingers gesture right there.

• I'm excited about the liquid glass UI. I want to play with it. Fun is fun, dammit.

• I hate redesigning app icons for a new UI. Oh, well, I'll manage. (EDIT-ADD: Turns out Apple is pushing a new single-source process which generates all icon sizes and modes. Okay! Good news there.)

My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there. As for the genAI tech itself, I guess I’m a moderate; there is a there there, it’s not all slop. But first…

The rent is too damn high

I promise I’ll talk about genAI applications but let’s start with money. Lots of money, big numbers! For example, venture-cap startup money pouring into AI, which as of now apparently adds up to $306 billion. And that’s just startups; Among the giants, Google alone apparently plans $75B in capital expenditure on AI infrastructure, and they represent maybe a quarter at most of cloud capex. You think those are big numbers? McKinsey offers The cost of compute: A $7 trillion race to scale data centers.

Obviously, lots of people are wondering when and where the revenue will be to pay for it all. There’s one thing we know for sure: The pro-genAI voices are fueled by hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fear and desire; fear that it’ll never pay off and desire for a piece of the money. Can you begin to imagine the pressure for revenue that investors and executives and middle managers are under?

Here’s an example of the kind of debate that ensues.

I suggest that when you’re getting a pitch for genAI technology, you should have that greed and fear in the back of your mind. Or maybe at the front.

And that’s just the money

For some reason, I don’t hear much any more about the environmental cost of genAI, the gigatons of carbon pouring out of the system, imperilling my children’s future. Let’s please not ignore that; let’s read things like Data Center Energy Needs Could Upend Power Grids and Threaten the Climate and let’s make sure every freaking conversation about genAI acknowledges this grievous cost.

Now let’s look at a few sectors where genAI is said to be a big deal: Coding, teaching, and professional communication. To keep things balanced, I’ll start in a space where I have kind things to say.

Coding

Wow, is my tribe ever melting down. The pro- and anti-genAI factions are hurling polemical thunderbolts at each other, and I mean extra hot and pointy ones. For example, here are 5600 words entitled I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now. Well-written words, too.

But, while I have a lot of sympathy for the contras and am sickened by some of the promoters, at the moment I’m mostly in tune with Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. It’s long and (fortunately) well-written and I (mostly) find it hard to disagree with.

it’s as simple as this: I keep hearing talented programmers whose integrity I trust tell me “Yeah, LLMs are helping me get shit done.” The probability that they’re all lying or being fooled seems very low.

Just to be clear, I note an absence of concern for cost and carbon in these conversations. Which is unacceptable. But let’s move on.

It’s worth noting that I learned two useful things from Ptacek’s essay that I hadn’t really understood. First, the “agentic” architecture of programming tools: You ask the agent to create code and it asks the LLM, which will sometimes hallucinate; the agent will observe that it doesn’t compile or makes all the unit tests fail, discards it, and re-prompts. If it takes the agent module 25 prompts to generate code that while imperfect is at least correct, who cares?

Second lesson, and to be fair this is just anecdata: It feels like the Go programming language is especially well-suited to LLM-driven automation. It’s small, has a large standard library, and a culture that has strong shared idioms for doing almost anything. Anyhow, we’ll find out if this early impression stands up to longer and wider industry experience.

Turning our attention back to cost, let’s assume that eventually all or most developers become somewhat LLM-assisted. Are there enough of them, and will they pay enough, to cover all that investment? Especially given that models that are both open-source and excellent are certain to proliferate? Seems dubious.

Suppose that, as Ptacek suggests, LLMs/agents allow us to automate the tedious low-intellectual-effort parts of our job. Should we be concerned about how junior developers learn to get past that “easy stuff” and on the way to senior skills? That seems a very good question, so…

Learning

Quite likely you’ve already seen Jason Koebler’s Teachers Are Not OK, a frankly horrifying survey of genAI’s impact on secondary and tertiary education. It is a tale of unrelieved grief and pain and wreckage. Since genAI isn’t going to go away and students aren’t going to stop being lazy, it seems like we’re going to re-invent the way people teach and learn.

The stories of students furiously deploying genAI to avoid the effort of actually, you know, learning, are sad. Even sadder are those of genAI-crazed administrators leaning on faculty to become more efficient and “businesslike” by using it.

I really don’t think there’s a coherent pro-genAI case to be made in the education context.

Professional communication

If you want to use LLMs to automate communication with your family or friends or lovers, there’s nothing I can say that will help you. So let’s restrict this to conversation and reporting around work and private projects and voluntarism and so on.

I’m pretty sure this is where the people who think they’re going to make big money with AI think it’s going to come from. If you’re interested in that thinking, here’s a sample; a slide deck by a Keith Riegert for the book-publishing business which, granted, is a bit stagnant and a whole lot overconcentrated these days. I suspect scrolling through it will produce a strong emotional reaction for quite a few readers here. It’s also useful in that it talks specifically about costs.

That is for corporate-branded output. What about personal or internal professional communication; by which I mean emails and sales reports and committee drafts and project pitches and so on? I’m pretty negative about this. If your email or pitch doc or whatever needs to be summarized, or if it has the colorless affectless error-prone polish of 2025’s LLMs, I would probably discard it unread. I already found the switch to turn off Gmail’s attempts to summarize my emails.

What’s the genAI world’s equivalent of “Tl;dr”? I’m thinking “TA;dr” (A for AI) or “Tg;dr” (g for genAI) or just “LLM:dr”.

And this vision of everyone using genAI to amplify their output and everyone else using it to summarize and filter their input feels simply perverse.

Here’s what I think is an important finding, ably summarized by Jeff Atwood:

Seriously, since LLMs by design emit streams that are optimized for plausibility and for harmony with the model’s training base, in an AI-centric world there’s a powerful incentive to say things that are implausible, that are out of tune, that are, bluntly, weird. So there’s one upside.

And let’s go back to cost. Are the prices in Riegert’s slide deck going to pay for trillions in capex? Another example: My family has a Google workplace account, and the price just went up from $6/user/month to $7. The announcement from Google emphasized that this was related to the added value provided by Gemini. Is $1/user/month gonna make this tech make business sense?

What I can and can’t buy

I can sorta buy the premise that there are genAI productivity boosts to be had in the code space and maybe some other specialized domains. I can’t buy for a second that genAI is anything but toxic for anything education-related. On the business-communications side, it’s damn well gonna be tried because billions of dollars and many management careers depend on it paying off. We’ll see but I’m skeptical.

On the money side? I don’t see how the math and the capex work. And all the time, I think about the carbon that’s poisoning the planet my children have to live on.

I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that are actually useful at prices that make sense.

And in a decade or so, I can see business-section stories about all the big data center shells that were never filled in, standing there empty, looking for another use. It’s gonna be tough, what can you do with buildings that have no windows?