There’s a peculiar satisfaction that comes from watching a tech giant finally hit the brakes on something they’ve been forcing down everyone’s throats. Microsoft’s recent decision to scale back their aggressive Copilot integration across Windows 11 and Office apps feels like that moment when you finally get someone to stop talking about their crypto portfolio at a barbecue—blessed relief.

I’ve been watching this unfold with equal parts amusement and frustration over the past year. Working in IT, I’ve had a front-row seat to the chaos that ensues when Microsoft decides to “innovate” without considering whether anyone actually asked for it. And mate, the Copilot rollout has been a masterclass in corporate tone-deafness.

Well, well, well. Mercedes-Benz is apparently hitting the brakes on their touchscreen obsession and bringing back physical buttons. About bloody time, I say. This news has got me thinking about just how mental the whole car industry went with these tablet-sized screens controlling everything from your windshield wipers to your seat warmers.

The whole thing has been bonkers from the start, hasn’t it? For decades we’ve been told “don’t use your phone while driving” and “keep your eyes on the road,” then some genius in a boardroom decided to stick a massive computer screen right in the middle of our dashboards and make us navigate through seventeen different menus just to turn on the bloody air conditioning. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous.

There’s something deeply unsettling about being pestered by technology that’s supposed to make our lives easier. I’ve been following a discussion online about AI fatigue, and it’s struck a nerve that goes well beyond the usual tech complaints. We’re witnessing something unprecedented: a backlash not against technology that doesn’t work, but against technology that won’t leave us alone.

The frustration is palpable across every platform we use daily. Google’s search results now come with AI summaries nobody asked for. Gmail wants to help write emails we’re perfectly capable of composing ourselves. Even Adobe Acrobat, for crying out loud, keeps suggesting AI assistance to summarise three-page PDFs. One person mentioned their knitting patterns being flagged for AI summarisation – if that’s not a sign we’ve lost the plot, I don’t know what is.

Nothing quite captures the beautiful absurdity of modern workplace dynamics like the relationship between IT departments and their users. I’ve been chuckling over a discussion thread about amusing IT requests that reminded me why I sometimes feel grateful to be on the development side of things rather than front-line support.

The catalyst was a boss demanding that IT solve his laptop’s battery drainage problem - without him having to plug it in or shut it down properly. When you first read that, it sounds completely unreasonable. But dig a little deeper into the responses, and you start to see there might actually be more to the story.

Looking through GitHub repositories has become something of a daily ritual. Between keeping up with the latest tech trends and searching for tools to solve specific problems at work, I spend a fair bit of time scrolling through project pages. And let me tell you, nothing grinds my gears quite like a promising project with zero visual documentation.

The scenario plays out the same way every time. I spot an interesting project title, click through, and find myself staring at a wall of technical text that assumes I already know exactly what the project does. No screenshots, no visual examples, not even a simple diagram. Just installation instructions that might as well be written in hieroglyphics.