In contrast, Confluence's AI bot has been a huge help to me.

... One wonders if that is due to the great implementation of the bot, or due to the less than stellar results of confluence search.

In Bitbucket, Rovo tells me it can’t write a PR description because it can’t see the code.

It does automatically write the PR in the first place but if you delete that description then try to have Rovo make a new one it fails hard.

Gemini in Google Docs/Workspace is so frustrating like this. I can get Claude to manipulate a Google Doc using the API, no problem, but talk to Gemini, the AI agent in the same browser window and it says it can't do anything [0]

[0] as of a couple of months ago when I last tried reformatting a slide deck using Gemini (failed) and then Claude (succeeded)

For your protection, citizen.

In contrast, Confluence's AI bot is a living nightmare to me.

Rovo makes changes I don't want that I have to undo and its "search" is bafflingly low quality compared to the old search experience, but most of all it just makes every page take longer to load and puts annoying UI elements in the way of what I actually want to interact with.

It mirrors every single other in-app AI bot experience I've had to date - less useful than the functionality they replaced with it, slow and annoying.

I’m a heavy AI user at work and I agree, Atlassian’s bot is painful. It’s also “gullible.” It will fail to do something and then just assume it cannot, that it cannot create pages or make issues or whatever.

The only one I’ve enjoyed is Grafana’s. It’s been a joy to use tbh.

The fail to refusal pipeline is frustratingly common with these in-app agents.

The “copilot” instances built into Microsoft’s programs are almost entirely useless due to this.

That’s because a full turn with the AI takes about as long as Confluence does to respond to a click.

We got something called "glean". It is better than Confluence search, because confluence search is utter crap. It's just a keyword scan with no concept of relevance.

I feel like I have to keep reminding people at work that LLMs are more expensive and have higher latency and less predictable behavior than plain old deterministic software.

Those tradeoffs must be considered when deciding whether a feature requires regular software or AI.

[delayed]