30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has claimed about thirty percent of code in at least some of the Windows titan's repositories was written by an AI.

Nadella revealed that number during an interview with Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg at the latter mega-corp's LlamaCon event this week.

A few minutes into their chat Zuck asked Nadella, “Do you have a sense of how much of the code, like what percent of the code that's being written inside Microsoft at this point is written by AI as opposed to by the engineers?”

Nadella responded by saying Microsoft tracks internal acceptance rates of chatbot-offered code, and that AI contributions are “sort of whatever 30-40 percent – it's going up monotonically.”

The Microsoft CEO said plenty of the company’s code is still C++, which he rated "not that great." Microsoft maintains a lot of C++ too, and Nadella said it’s in “pretty good” condition while more recent Python is “fantastic.”

Overall, Microsoft finds AI is best at writing entirely new code rather than reworking older material, but the biz is finding ways to use AI often across its codebase.

“I'd say maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software,” the chief exec said.

Nadella then asked Zuckerberg the same question, but the social networking nabob said he couldn’t recall a statistic and said data points about AI coding sometimes reflect use of auto-completion tools and therefore don’t accurately describe software written entirely by other software.

Zuck said Meta has teams working on auto-coding in domains where it can see its own history of changes.

The Meta man said “the big one that we're focused on is building an AI and a machine learning engineer to advance Llama development itself.”

Zuck said that “in the next year probably … half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people and then that will just kind of increase from there.”

Nadella riffed on that by pondering whether development tools and compute infrastructure should be rebuilt so they can be driven by AI agents.

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The mutant offspring of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel

The Microsoft boss also thought bubbled about the blurring line between documents and applications.

He explained that he now researches topics by using an AI chatbot and saving the results, and said auto-coding means that process can result in creation of software.

“This idea that you can start with a high level intent and end up with …. a living artifact that you would have called in the past an application is going to have profound implications on workflows,” he said.

It may also dissolve what he described as the “artificial category boundaries” between documents and apps – a problem he revealed Microsoft has tried to address in the past.

“We used to always think about why Word, Excel, PowerPoint isn't it one thing, and we've tried multiple attempts of it. But now you can conceive of it … you can start in Word and you can sort of visualize things like Excel and present it, and they can all be persisted as one data structure or what have you. So to me that malleability that was not as robust before is now there.”

Which sounds like the OpenDoc vs. OLE wars of the 1990s – during which Microsoft and Apple fought over how to share data across apps – brought into the AI age.

One more thing: Neither billionaire commented on whether their autocoding efforts are costing jobs, or if the code their companies generate without human input has proven problematic. Zuckerberg said he thinks AI coding presents an opportunity to improve security. ®