Lost in Lualand

Posted by David Gerard

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/04/microsoft-walks-back-ai-in-windows-11-yeah-right/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7067

Microsoft hasn’t been having the greatest month or two.

In November, Pavan Davuluri,President of Windows and Devices, proclaimed Microsoft’s Agentic Operating System future! Users told him nobody wanted this, and what they wanted was a Windows that worked properly. Davaluri disabled replies on the tweet. [Twitter, archive]

Davuluri tweeted a few days later: “We know we have work to do.” Sure do, mate. [Twitter, archive]

Windows 11 had a teensy problem in January where you’d do a system update and your PC wouldn’t even boot any more. Microsoft released, not one, but two out-of-band patches which they hoped would fixed the problem. Eventually they figured the booting problem happened if the December update hadn’t installed properly. [Bleeping Computer; Bleeping Computer]

Then the Microsoft stock price crashed last week after they issued quarterly numbers full of AI squirrels and confetti.

Time for a new Microsoft marketing perception initiative! Davaluri vibe-marketed a press release into the Verge: [Verge]

Microsoft is redirecting engineers to urgently fix Windows 11’s performance and reliability issues, aiming to halt the operating system’s death by a thousand cuts.

Even better — they’re talking about winding back on the AI spam! [Windows Central]

Copilot integrations like those found in Notepad and Paint are under review.

Probably because those two in particular are the most ridiculous AI integrations in history.

To be clear, Microsoft’s actual plans are to “streamline” the AI experience — not remove it. They don’t really want to do a single thing differently. This is only about perception.

All of this is a reaction to the user backlash, the fact that gamers are even talking about Linux, and the stock price going down. I would believe any of what Microsoft’s babbling as and when I see it. And not one moment before.

One actual change to AI in Windows is that Windows 11 now has an option to remove Copilot in the group policy editor! It’s only for Pro, Enterprise or Education versions. They started rolling this out to the beta channel in January and it looks like it’s live now. So there you go, a tiny bit of change we can believe in. [Bleeping Computer; Bluesky]

The problem, though, is that Windows 11 doesn’t … work. I’m no fan of Windows, but I’ve used Windows 10 and it basically works? If you need a Windows, 10 is fine. Windows 11 is buggy trash.

We don’t know that Windows 11 was vibe coded. There were a lot of headlines last year that 30% of Microsoft code was AI now! Based on something the CEO, Satya Nadella, said in a podcast. But of course, what he actually said was a carefully hedged claim in CEO speak: [YouTube, 45:00-45:08]

maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software.

“Maybe 20 to 30 percent”? In “some projects”? “Probably?” I think that means not really.

So we don’t have smoking gun evidence that Windows 11 is broken trash literally because of vibe coding. But Windows 11 feels like the most vibe coded thing ever. Nobody cared about Windows 11 working. Microsoft, where quality is job number 55 or so!

• Video — Podcast

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/04/microsoft-walks-back-ai-in-windows-11-yeah-right/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7067