Microsoft AI Toolkit trips users

This doesn’t look abandoned; it looks like a fast-moving Microsoft toolchain that still leaks too much setup and platform churn into the user experience.

• –Microsoft still markets it as an active VS Code extension pack for model discovery, agent building, MCP tools, evals, and fine-tuning, so the product surface is broad rather than dead
• –The docs have been moved and the branding has shifted toward Microsoft Foundry, which adds confusion for users trying to follow stale instructions
• –Open issues around model catalog loading, evaluation import errors, and general “got stuck” reports suggest reliability is still inconsistent
• –For developers, the main tradeoff is clear: you get a deep, integrated AI dev environment, but you also inherit Microsoft’s moving target of catalogs, runtimes, and sign-in flows
• –This is the kind of tool that can be powerful once configured, but the Reddit post suggests the onboarding and failure modes are still sharp enough to feel broken