Azure AI-103, Day 1: Mark Can’t Log In. The Duck Might Have COVID.

By Dani Lemonade

17 views

Today I started a four-day Microsoft Azure AI-103 course, Develop AI Apps and Agents on Azure. Six other people joined the Zoom call. They introduced themselves as developers and vibe coders. The first boss fight in this advanced AI course was a fucking login screen.

Let’s call him Mark. German, runs his own company, calls himself a vibe coder. Mark can’t log into the training lab. The instructions are right there. Mark asks another question. The answer is right there. At this point the man has outsourced reading to the entire Zoom call. Read the fucking manual, Mark. It’s a login screen, not a hostage negotiation.

Every time he unmutes, my jaw clamps shut a little harder. By Thursday I’ll have a certificate and a prescription for a night guard.

Our instructor, let’s call him Rangeed, is a lovely guy from India. I’m struggling to follow his accent over Zoom, so I turn on the captions. Zoom is also struggling. Now I’m getting subtitles with an accent. Rangeed is explaining Azure. Zoom is confidently publishing a retraction in real time.

I’m ready for Foundry Playground. Create a project, deploy a model. I did all that in AI-901, so at least I know where I am for a minute.

Then Rangeed opens Microsoft Paint.

There’s a duck. Rangeed uses it to explain attributes and labels. A beak, feathers, the kind of evidence that might help a model decide it’s looking at a duck. Fair enough. I’m with you, Rangeed. It’s a duck.

Then we get to whether the duck has COVID.

I beg your pardon? We went from “Is this a duck?” to “Has this duck been in close contact with anyone?” in the time it takes to change brushes in Paint. Rangeed is giggling. I’m staring at a duck drawn in Paint, wondering if it has to isolate in a separate tab.

I came here to build AI agents. So far I’ve watched a man with his own company get beaten by a login screen, asked Zoom to subtitle its own confusion, and sat in on a duck’s medical assessment.

By the end of Day 1, the duck has a case history and the founder still has a login screen. Three days to go. God help us.