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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   743 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 30, 2026

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Since LLMs are all anyone can talk about...

I've been messing around in some experimental projects ahead of my new job starting. A thing I may have to do is upgrade some .Net Framework projects to .Net 10. It turns out Microsoft has actively broken every means of doing this except to use Copilot. There used to be a .Net Upgrade Assistant but it's been deliberately broken in new versions of Visual Studio. So copilot it is I guess.

It generated some very nice looking assessment.md and plan.md files, and generally walked you along, giving you the exact prompts that were valid at each step of the process. And that's about the last nice thing I can say about it.

The first thing that went wrong was after generating the plan.md file, I guess it forgot what it was doing, and prompted me to start a new @modernize prompt, even though I was already in one. Well, whatever. That new prompt found the old plan.md file and just picked up where the other got confused and forgot what it was doing. It very quickly said it was finished, and the project built and passed all the unit test.

It had actually done nothing.

When I point this out, it cheerily began actually updating projects. After probably an hour of it thinking very hard on each one, and needing constant reassurances to continue, it claimed it had finished, all projects build, and they pass all test.

This was another lie.

But it had gotten far enough along that I could manually fix the remaining issues (mostly package versioning issues it claimed it had already fixed), and viola, my simple solution with about 8 small projects was upgraded from .Net Framework 4.8.1 to .Net 10.0. Hurray! Only took me all afternoon babysitting an LLM that lied consistently, followed by manual touch ups.

This morning I discovered there is actually a CLI tool. It's no longer supported, but using that took me about 20 minutes. It still flubbed some thing, and bafflingly upgraded several projects to .Net Standard 2.0 instead of .Net 10 despite my specifically telling it not to. But that's just editing a value in the csproj file after the fact. Oh, also telling it to analyze any of the projects consistently crashed. But all in all I think it did a better job than Copilot.

I sure am glad RAM prices have gone up 3-4x for this!

While AI has many issues, and is very far from perfect, I do need to rise to it's (limited) defense.

Copilot is BY FAR the worst AI system I have used. It lags so far behind ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini (or their respective CLI agents) it's kind of mind-blowing that it was made by an American tech company at all.

Copilot was the only AI we had at work for a while and it was genuinely faster to use Google AI studio with anonymized data/to make generalizable frameworks to then use on client files by hand than to use copilot for anything.

Seriously copilot is so bad I genuinely believe, given it's such a huge % of people's AI experience, that it is in very large part responsible for people not taking AI as seriously as they should.

Copilot is so bad, don't use it.

it's kind of mind-blowing that it was made by an American tech company at all.

I don't consider MIcrosoft and American tech company anymore.

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