- Windows 11 just got a revamped internet speed test in preview
- This feature was shuttled swiftly through development using agentic AI in combination with human oversight
- Microsoft boasts that this is about: “Getting from idea to customer value faster. Without AI slop.” Others are more cynical, though
Windows 11 just got a useful change in preview, with its built-in internet speed test being revamped, and the new version was produced using AI (in conjunction with human oversight, I should add).
Windows Latest spotted that Marcus Ash, Microsoft‘s VP of Windows Design and Research, posted on X to explain that the “team moved pretty fast on this one”, adding that following feedback asking for the speed test to be improved, “within a day, Diego had a working prototype.” (Diego Baca is VP of Design for Windows).
Ash tells us: “From there, our connectivity team worked with partners to bring the experience into Windows. The design and build work was driven by an agentic AI workflow, with a person guiding the process in their spare time.”
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The Microsoft exec further explains that this is where he sees “a lot of potential in AI” and using agentic workflows, in terms of “Getting from idea to customer value faster. Without AI slop. That is the way.”
Analysis: AI, oversight, bugs, and jobs
Of course, this is a controversial topic. Mention AI being involved in the coding of Windows 11 and some tempers will flare online, even though we know this is happening anyway. Microsoft has made no secret of that fact.
Indeed, among the AI hate and flames on social media, a lot of people are point out that these days pretty much all software is being developed in conjunction with Large Language Models (LLM agents) — even Linux.
As one Redditor makes clear: “Newsflash — every single piece of software you use, except for open source projects that are making a statement, you should expect to have AI written code in it. It is pervasive, it is everywhere.”
The key aspect here is exactly how the AI agent in question is employed.
It’s one thing for such an agent to be given a task to write a piece of code for a certain feature, and then just to slap that into your software or operating system as it is (or maybe after a cursory glance through the work). It’s another thing to have a human programmer working on a feature and using an agent to perform grunt-work (easy but perhaps time-consuming) coding therein — and then to properly check the AI’s output.
Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with the latter approach, at least in terms of the soundness of the coding work. And as Microsoft’s Ash points out, this is really accelerating development times — meaning Windows 11 users will get new features (hopefully capabilities they want, like this improved internet speed test) much more swiftly. Which is exactly why almost every developer is now utilizing this tech.
There are problems here, though, and they’re bound up in the public perception of Microsoft. Do Windows 11 users trust the company to be using AI in the right — i.e., properly checked and vetted — way? Not really, in many cases, as there remains a lot of doubt over the overall quality of Windows 11 code, and rightly so given the regularity, and severity, of the bugs we’ve seen (with more prevalence since 2024, and that 24H2 update).
As another Redditor observes: “People aren’t calling Windows slop because it’s being made using AI these days. They’re calling it slop because it’s being made using AI with woefully insufficient human oversight and even more woefully insufficient QA, leading to repeated disastrous bugs making it to production and end users being treated as beta testers. You want people to stop calling your product slop? Stop shipping updates that take down people’s computers or break existing features.”
The other issue here is that of AI stealing coding jobs from people. Agents may make things happen a lot more quickly, but as Ash notes, this revamped speed test was implemented mainly by an agent — including its design — with the software engineer “guiding the process in their spare time”, making it sound like a rather casual amount of effort on the human side of the equation.
Is it a particularly sensitive approach to be touting the benefits of AI — as real as they may be for an operating system’s ongoing development and maintenance — in this way at a time when Microsoft has been swinging the axe with various job cuts and pushing staff towards voluntary redundancy in a big way? I’d suggest it isn’t, and the timing of this particular push of the value of agentic AI is dubious in that respect.
At least in this case Microsoft is being upfront and transparent about what it’s doing — and we can expect a good deal more AI acceleration of Windows 11’s development going forward.
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Darren Allan
