That's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to.
And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be accessed by anyone who doesnt have a TS clearance and physically go into a SCIF.
source: I work in a team very closely related the team who designed digital escort.
Yeah, it’s not a great name. But it originates from the government. When somebody without a security clearance needs to go to a secure area, they must be escorted by somebody.
When the blog post mentioned Hegseth and “digital escort” in the same sentence, I was surprised to learn it wasn’t about his OnlyFans habit at his work desktop.
Yes but this misses the underlying point: this is the same software. It suffers from the same defects. If your management stack keeps crashing and leaking VMs you are seeing a reduction in the operational capacity of the fleet. If you are still there just tour Azure Watson and tell me if you’d want the military to rely on that system in wartime? Don’t forget things like IVAS and God knows what else that are used during operations while Azure node agents happily crash and restart on the hosts. The system should be no-touch and run like an appliance, which is predicated on zero crashes or 100% crash resiliency. In Windows Core we pursued a single Watson bucket with a single hit until it was fixed. Different standards.
I'm only commenting on parent comment's understanding of what digital escort process is specifically. Escort is used by all kinds of teams that are just doing day-to-day crap for various resource providers across azure. I've never worked anywhere close to Azure Core so I don't know about these more low-level concerns. Overall I agree and sympathize with your assessment of the engineering culture.
You also make it sound like getting a JIT approved is getting keys to the kingdom. It's not -- every team has it's own JIT policies for their resources. Should there be far less manual touches? Ideally. But JIT is better than persistent access at least, and JIT policies should be scoped according to principle of least privilege. If that is not happening, it's a failure at the level of that specific org.
I had an interesting experience the other day. I've been struggling with some lyrics to a song I am writing. I asked Claude to review them, and it did an amazing job of finding the weak lines and best lines, and nearly perfectly articulating to my why they were weak or strong. It was strange because the output of the analysis almost perfectly mirrored my own thoughts.
When I asked it for alternatives/edits, they were not good however.
right, must be nice. I live in a HCOL area and have a mortgage and family to support. If big tech lays me off, it's going to be stressful and probably mean me selling my house and moving to LCOL.
I see you are getting downvoted but I don't blame you for this question. I've been curious about what developers of established products are doing with LLM assisted coding myself.
Like most of us, they're certainly using ai-assisted auto-complete and chat for thinking deep. I highly doubt they're vibe coding, which is how I interpret the parent's question and probably why they are being down voted.
This is insulting to our craft, like going to a woodworkers convention and assuming "most of [them]" are using 3D-printers and laser cutters.
Half the developers I know still don't use LSP (and they're not necessarily older devs), and even the full-time developers in my circle resist their bosses forcing Copilot or Claude down their throats and use in fact 0 AI. Living in France, i don't know a single developer using AI tools, except for drive-by pull-request submitters i have never met.
I understand the world is nuanced and there are different dynamics at play, and my circles are not statistically representative of the world at large. Likewise, please don't assume this literally world-eating fad (AI) is what "most of us" are doing just because that's all the cool kids talk about.
Your IDE either uses an LSP or has its own baked-in proprietary version of a LSP. Nobody, and I mean nobody, working on real projects is "raw dawgin" a text file.
Most modern IDE's support smart auto-complete, a form of AI assistance, and most people use that at a minimum. Further, most IDE's do support advanced AI assisted auto-complete via copilot, codex, Claude or a plethora of other options - and many (or most) use them to save time writing and refactoring predictable, repetitive portions of their code.
Not doing so is like forgoing wheels on your car because technically you can just slide it upon the ground.
The only people I've seen in the situation you've described are students at university learning their first language...
I write code exclusively in vim. Unless you want to pretend that ctags is a proprietary version of an LSP, I'm not using an LSP either. I work at a global tech company, and the codebase I work on powers the datacenter networks of most hyperscalers. So, very much a real project. And I'm not an outlier, probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs.
Ctags are very limited and unpopular. Most people do not use them, by any measurement standard.
Using a text editor without LSP or some form of intellisense in 2026 is in the extreme minority. Pretending otherwise is either an attempted (and misguided) "flex" or just plain foolishness.
> probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs
Both vim and emacs support LSP and intellisense. You can even use copilot in both. Maybe you're just not aware...
When your language has neither name-mangling nor namespaces, a simple grep gets you a long way, without language specific support. Ma editor (not sure if it counts as IDE?) uses only words in open documents for completions and that is generally enough. If I feel like I want to use a lot of methods from a particular module I can just open that module.
I don't use an IDE under the common definition. All my developer friends use neovim, emacs, helix or Notepad++. I'm not a student. The people i have in mind are not students.
Your ai-powered friends and colleagues are not statistically representative. The world is nuanced, everyone is unique, and we're not sociologists running a long study about what "most of us" are doing.
> forgoing wheels on your car
Now you're being silly. Not using AI to program is more akin to not having a rocket engine on your car. Would it go faster? Sure. Would it be safer? Definitely not. Do some people enjoy it? Sure. Does anyone not using it miss it? No.
I didn't say using different technology was cheating, and metal tools are certainly part of woodworking for thousands of years so that's not really comparable.
It's also very different because there's a qualitative change between metal woodworking tools and a laser cutter. The latter requires electricity and massive investments.
And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be accessed by anyone who doesnt have a TS clearance and physically go into a SCIF.
source: I work in a team very closely related the team who designed digital escort.
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