“A demo is a lie you tell with a straight face.”
Gino Ferrand, writing today from Santa Fe, New Mexico 🌞
If Build 2024 was about AI copilots, then Build 2025 was about AI agents.
Microsoft unveiled a sweeping vision of multi-agent orchestration: multiple AI assistants coordinating across GitHub, Azure, Teams, and Windows to help developers code, deploy, monitor, and even document software. Satya Nadella called it the future of work. GitHub's Copilot Studio added agent workflows. Azure's new Agent Foundry promised plug-and-play orchestration. Windows 11 baked in native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
It was polished. Strategic. Ambitious.
And yet?
Online communities weren’t exactly cheering.
The top-voted Reddit comment in r/dotnet: “This whole AI agent nonsense is completely unnecessary.”
Another joked they were building a “Command Line Harem” of agents to clean their apartment.
The demos? Some flubbed. And developers noticed. One Hacker News thread dubbed the event "the era of failed AI demos."
Is the agent hype real?
To Microsoft’s credit, there is a technical evolution happening here. Agent frameworks like Semantic Kernel and Azure AutoGen are getting more robust. The dream is to define workflows in natural language and let an orchestrated group of AIs execute the subtasks.
But the developer reaction reveals something deeper: AI fatigue is setting in.
When every feature release is framed as revolutionary, and every keynote promises the end of toil, the result isn’t inspiration...it’s skepticism. Engineers don’t want AI for AI’s sake. They want fewer bugs, faster cycles, better DX. If agents help with that, great. But vaporware wrapped in buzzwords won’t cut it.
One developer put it bluntly: "These tools need to solve actual workflow problems, not just look cool in a demo."
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Meanwhile, something bigger is brewing
Buried among the flashy agent talk was a quieter bombshell: Microsoft is now hosting Elon Musk’s Grok models on Azure.
This matters because:
Microsoft is OpenAI’s largest backer
Grok is a direct OpenAI competitor
Musk is publicly suing OpenAI
Now Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini are available as first-party models in Azure AI Foundry, alongside GPT-4o, Claude, and Llama 3.
Some devs saw it as a smart platform play: give customers more choice, avoid lock-in, and offer less-censored models for edge-case queries. Others questioned the reputational risk of partnering with Musk.
One Hacker News user: "Not sure why Microsoft would be fine with the reputational damage of dealing with Elon."
Another replied: "Nobody cares. If Grok solves a problem better, engineers will use it."
What should engineering leaders take away?
Agent tooling is evolving, but it’s not mature yet. Be cautious about chasing demos. Focus on agent use cases with real ROI (code refactoring, PR automation, DevOps support).
AI fatigue is real. Don’t force agent adoption just because it’s trendy. Let value drive uptake.
The model landscape is fragmenting. Azure is now a multi-model platform. Expect teams to mix-and-match models based on need, cost, censorship tolerance, and latency.
Developer trust is earned, not assumed. Engineers will adopt what works. Ignore the hype.
More to come…
Recommended Reads
✔️ Microsoft to rank ‘safety’ of AI models sold to cloud customers (Financial Times)
✔️ Microsoft Integrates xAI’s Grok 3 into Azure AI Foundry (Tehrani.com)
– Gino Ferrand, Founder @ TECLA