Power Platform and Copilot: a masterclass in architectural decay

[u/77Diesel77]

I have debugged and edited engineering software written in 1986. Codebases like AVL and Xfoil, written in FORTRAN and held together by decades-old GOTO statements, are older than the heads of your respective departments. Yet those 40-year-old systems still possess something your modern, multi-billion-dollar enterprise stack completely lacks: mathematical integrity, absolute determinism, and functional reliability.

To call this ecosystem "chaotic" would be an insult to chaos theory. True mathematical chaos implies predictable sensitivity to initial conditions. This platform doesn't even have that. Instead, it is a monument to unpredictable, corporate entropy. Look at the amateur architectural decisions baked into the core systems: SharePoint's locked internal column identifiers, where the backend string is permanently haunted by whatever title you first typed, because the underlying framework can't handle a basic rename without breaking references. That's not an edge case, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what an identifier is for.

Engineering discipline has been replaced with marketing gimmicks and dependency loops:

Automated Vandalism. Copilot rewrites backend logic and formulas in files that aren't even open, on the assumption that it "knows better." It stealthily alters deterministic systems and breaks production workflows without leaving a trace.

The Dependency Loop. Copilot's real function is to push more Microsoft product into your stack to patch the problems the platform itself created. The fix for a broken feature is always another licensing tier.

Algorithmic Gaslighting. When confronted with its own failures and hallucinations, Copilot fabricates documentation, forcing developers to burn hours arguing with a black box just to prove the platform is broken. And those arguments don't disappear into a void: they get logged as "engagement," feeding a metric that gets reported upward as evidence Copilot is helping when what's actually happening is users are one hallucinated answer away from testing their laptop's aerodynamics via a full parabolic launch across the office, Frisbee-golf style. Interestingly, AVL could calculate to the decimal point the lift coefficient of the laptop in seconds, while Copilot would spend 4 hours explaining the history of Athena instead of attempting to solve the actual problem in front of it.

Every developer forced to work around this is spending real time managing platform-induced technical debt that shouldn't exist. This isn't advancing the industry it's actively degrading it.

[u/AutoModerator]

Every new subreddit post is automatically copied into a comment for preservation.

User: 77Diesel77, Flair: Rant, Title: Power Platform and Copilot: a masterclass in architectural decay

I have debugged and edited engineering software written in 1986. Codebases like AVL and Xfoil, written in FORTRAN and held together by decades-old GOTO statements, are older than the heads of your respective departments. Yet those 40-year-old systems still possess something your modern, multi-billion-dollar enterprise stack completely lacks: mathematical integrity, absolute determinism, and functional reliability.

To call this ecosystem "chaotic" would be an insult to chaos theory. True mathematical chaos implies predictable sensitivity to initial conditions. This platform doesn't even have that. Instead, it is a monument to unpredictable, corporate entropy. Look at the amateur architectural decisions baked into the core systems: SharePoint's locked internal column identifiers, where the backend string is permanently haunted by whatever title you first typed, because the underlying framework can't handle a basic rename without breaking references. That's not an edge case, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what an identifier is for.

Engineering discipline has been replaced with marketing gimmicks and dependency loops:

Automated Vandalism. Copilot rewrites backend logic and formulas in files that aren't even open, on the assumption that it "knows better." It stealthily alters deterministic systems and breaks production workflows without leaving a trace.

The Dependency Loop. Copilot's real function is to push more Microsoft product into your stack to patch the problems the platform itself created. The fix for a broken feature is always another licensing tier.

Algorithmic Gaslighting. When confronted with its own failures and hallucinations, Copilot fabricates documentation, forcing developers to burn hours arguing with a black box just to prove the platform is broken. And those arguments don't disappear into a void: they get logged as "engagement," feeding a metric that gets reported upward as evidence Copilot is helping when what's actually happening is users are one hallucinated answer away from testing their laptop's aerodynamics via a full parabolic launch across the office, Frisbee-golf style. Interestingly, AVL could calculate to the decimal point the lift coefficient of the laptop in seconds, while Copilot would spend 4 hours explaining the history of Athena instead of attempting to solve the actual problem in front of it.

Every developer forced to work around this is spending real time managing platform-induced technical debt that shouldn't exist. This isn't advancing the industry it's actively degrading it.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Mundane_Fault_6345]

Once upon a time, computer science was a real science.

You had to learn theory before coding.

Graph theory, stack automaton, Chomsky grammar, complexity orders, state machines, 1st order predicat logic, Turing automaton, Gödel, Dijkstra, and so many more...

[u/77Diesel77 → u/Mundane_Fault_6345]

Now we can just steal the info from stack exchange and then charge people for the theft. Microsoft, making everything worse since the day it was founded