Any additional functionality added to an already feature-complete program is bloat, no two ways about it. If notepad+AI was a separate program, this would be a different discussion. Even if you can hide it completely, the fact that it’s there at all will affect performance. And even if it’s just a tiny blip in relative performance, it’s still the first step on the road to enshittification.
I think you may be overestimating how much code is required for a program to simply use an AI, as in just calling an AI’s API with a string of text and getting some text back in return. I’ve written code that does this and it’s just a few lines.
The code for whatever UI Notepad wraps around it might be a few hundred more lines, that depends very much on the UI framework and what they want it to look like. But the AI part is trivial. The hard work of actually executing the AI’s code is done on a remote server. Your home computer won’t have to do any of that work.
You’re free to believe that this will not bog down the program at all, and also that this isn’t just the first bad decision they’re making with notepad. I really would like to impress upon you that that is wishful thinking, and not at all the most likely outcome here.
And I think that 90% of the concern people have is arising out of some kind of weird anti-AI hysteria.
Look, even if Microsoft does “ruin” Notepad somehow, it’s a really simple program. Github has a bunch of projects tagged “notepad-clone”, I’m sure there are plenty of free alternatives out there that duplicate the old Notepad as precisely as you may desire. Adding AI is extremely simple on the client side but it’s not so easy to provide the LLM back-end so those replicas probably won’t be able to do what Microsoft is about to do, so I want to see Microsoft try it. I think it’ll be good.
