This article seems to conflate strong type systems with functional programming, except in point 8. It makes sense why- OCaml and Haskell are functional and were early proponents of these type systems. But, languages like Racket don’t have these type systems and the article doesn’t do anything to explain why they are _also_ better for reliability.

They do actually build internal tooling! They key is that it’s actually good enough that feedback to the limited, targeted, and quickly actionable. Microsoft’s internal was immature enough that the general feedback you’d always have is “this is unusable”, which is something the teams building the tools could probably figure out themselves before making the whole company spend time beta testing the tools.

The main point is that the tools need to be of a certain quality/maturity for dogfooding to be effective.

I was at Microsoft until July of this year until I left for an SF-based company (not AI though).

The difference between the two with regards to AI tool usage couldn’t be more different- at Microsoft, they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools, which often were under par and you didn’t have a choice in. At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver. And, shocker, turns out they actually spend a lot building and getting feedback on internal AI tooling and so it gets a lot of use!

The Microsoft culture is a sort of toxic “get AI usage by forcing it down the engineer throats” vs the new “make it actually useful and win users” approach at that new place. The Microsoft approach builds resentment in the engineering base, but I’m convinced it’s the only way leadership there knows how to drive initiatives.

The only ones I can really think of are the cloud providers themselves- I was at Microsoft, and absolutely everything was in-house (often to our detriment).

> it exposes that it really was never about emissions or combustion or pollution, you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement

This isn’t the problem- the real problem is that in dense cities, transporting everyone where they want to go via private vehicles just doesn’t work geometrically- see the traffic and parking needs that grow as cities grow assuming private vehicle use only.You end up needing a more space-efficient form of moving people, namely public transit.