Here at Neowin, we"ve regularly covered software that can be used to "debloat" your Windows installation. These pieces are primarily published because many of our readers are clamoring for ways to make their installation cleaner by potentially also getting rid of all the AI features that Microsoft has been stuffing into the OS.
However, a common disclaimer associated on the GitHub pages for these debloating software is also to use it at your own risk. Personally, I am not a fan of using debloating scripts for multiple reasons. For starters, I"m not comfortable with running code that I don"t understand, written by a third-party developer who I can"t trust, on my Windows PC. Additionally, debloating scripts often tend to modify Windows Registry values, which can have unintended effects, and can even break your current or future installations of Windows. Microsoft releases Windows updates based on the vanilla version of Windows and it obviously isn"t aware if your individual PC has a customization that may break your entire PC the next time a Windows update with a compatibility "issue" is pushed.
While I am against debloating software in general, people seem to be going one step ahead in this dangerous direction. That is, using AI to generate scripts that can debloat your PC and make it faster. A recent thread has been gaining traction over on the r/windows11 and r/windows subreddits where u/winguy74 has talked about generating PowerShell scripts with AI to solve their PC"s performance issues.
The user says that they installed Windows 11 on old hardware, where menus felt sluggish and startup was slow. To remedy these performance issues, they used AI to generate "a cleanup script that removes most of the unnecessary apps". According to the user, they noticed performance gains and they have also highlighted some metrics from Task Manager below:
Well, well, well... where do I even start? For starters, having 10 fewer processes shouldn"t result in a noticeable gain anyway, it"s coincidental at best. Secondly, this alone cannot be a metric to measure performance, there are lots of other KPIs that can be tracked. In fact, if you look at the screenshot on the right coming from the presumably debloated version of Windows 11, you"ll notice that the CPU utilization is actually three times higher, at 10%. Finally, the user seems to have a very powerful AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor. If you have performance issues while running daily workflows, you have bigger things to worry about.
It honestly feels like rage-bait at this point, and it very well could be, given how naively the Redditor is portraying themselves. They claim that they followed YouTube tutorials to generate the script because they are not an expert who can make manual edits to Windows Registry on their own. They are also countering many of the arguments made by others about how this is a very dangerous way to debloat Windows.
If this is rage-bait, I applaud the Redditor. But even if it"s not, this still emphasizes a very important lesson. Do not run code that you can"t trust, and especially not one generated by AI that has no idea about the granularity of your current installation. There are tons of documented instances of AI misunderstanding instructions or not following them properly, and deleting crucial user data. Why run a script you can"t trust and risk damaging your PC for a few percentage points gain in performance, and even that is not guaranteed? It"s just a bad idea to run scripts generated by AI (or any developer that you don"t trust, for that matter) on your PC that potentially modifies your Windows install.