If they mean “30% of the code we wrote last month” then I might believe it. Though I bet it is not across the board but deep in one or two areas. Still, it’s a crazy number.
But he said something like “30% of the code in our repositories” which would mean everything, including their entire legacy of code. And that I simply do not believe.
Its a shit article with Tech crunch changing the words to get people in a flap about AI (for or against), the actual quote is
"I'd say maybe 20 percent, 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software"
"Written by software" reasonably included machine refactored code, automatically generated boilerplate and things generated by AI assistants. Through that lens 20% doesnt seem crazy.
My first thought on reading that is: yeah, like about 98% of the human genome is "junk DNA" that we have little or no idea what it might be doing. Sometimes when we cut it out, nobody ever notices, sometimes when we cut it out the system won't boot up.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if they entered the entire codebase for Windows 11 into an LLM and asked it to optimize it or some shit lol
"30% of my pants is pooped"
Horseshit.
The current state of code generated by AI is sketchy at best. I often get plain wrong answers because the model tries to derive. It comes up with calls to functions and properties that just do not exist.
"You are right, I made a mistake. Here is a better answer." Continues to give wrong answers.
Apart from that, apps that are glued together from AI generated code are not maintainable at all. What if there is a bug somewhere and you so not comprehend what is actually happening? Ask AI to fix it? Yeah good luck with that.
I do use AI for simple questions, and it works fairly well for that, but this claim by MS is just marketing bullshit.
It shows
Stole it as if I wrote it
So the CEO is trying to tell investors that they are saving money by not paying employees. But to me it sounds more like: we are letting our sub-par products continue to enshitify, and any other company using AI to program will be equal competition.
I think he's trying to say that their AI writes code good enough for Microsoft. Which is a message to other business leaders that your company too can benefit from copilot, just hand over your credit card!
Microsoft has absolutely gotten worse in the consumer space, but that isn't really their business these days.
They're worse in the business space too. Teams is crashing on me daily.
Satya Nadella has given an evasive answer there and both Zuckerberg and the journalists have been taken in.
It is common in programming languages that have a lot of boilerplate to use code generation, where you take some information about data and generate code automatically, like code that translates data between formats (for example reading and writing xml for saving to disk or json to send over the network). Being very routine to write and easy to deduce logically from other information, this process has been automated for years and years, long before AI existed.
Microsoft's flagship software such as operating systems, office software, is unbelievably vast and complex, far beyond the complexity of most business software, and has been developed over decades. They absolutely have not replaced 30% of their code since the very recent advent of useful AI. I can believe that 30% of it is automatically generated, but not by AI.
Yeah, I can tell every time I have to use that dinosaur of an OS.
This is my own experience but the past few years Windows has been extremely dependable for me and then in the last few months the updates they’ve have been terrible. I’ve seen more blue screens recently than I have in a lot of years.
All this to say that if it is 30% AI code being used then it’s very telling!
Windows was always garbage to be honest, windows 7 was the best release in my opinion. You are correct though it is way worse these past months. By the way does your mouse lag when the update notification comes up?
He used the words "written by software". This is ambiguous and doesn't mean AI, for example, using annotations for variables and generating the getters and setters would count. Right click and create function body for interface function definitions also.
They're exaggerating to pretend their AI is more useful than it is.
Intellisense in visual studio has also been really good for over a decade. Which is technically also written by software and not me.
Work for a big software company. With all the offshoring of devs, I expect most of our code is now AI. And it shows.
Wonder how much of Windows 10 was written by Stack Exchange?
Windows is 95 percent pure bloat now imo, an os just needs to handle my hardware and launch my programs anything else is just eating my resources.
this makes way more sense than hundreds of shitty devs.
Even their AI crashes all the time, its brutal.
Government spyware finally has a challenger for the title of "primary reason that most Microsoft software runs like hot garbage".
That’s… not something to be proud of.
And its all Teams.
Everybody saying this is why their products are shit are really confusing me. It's not like Microsoft just started being terrible. They've been terrible for a real long time. Way before AI was a thing. This is just a symptom of Microsoft's awfulness not a reason for it.
Ok, it's like this.
Ms used to release shitty stuff. And they'll continue to release shitty stuff except now it'll be 30% more shitty.
Well, that explains Windows 11.
We know Microsoft.
Hardly possible not to noticce..
How much of Linux is?
If you count all of my contributions, 0%.
None of my contributions have been included. I am a terrible programmer.
Power move by the zucc by first asking how much genai is used at Microsoft then refusing to answer his own question at Facebook 😂
Copilot. Piloting you towards effortless bugs, and with all the telemetry, we don’t need to test our patches and updates. You, the user are doing that for us. Sincerely, Microsoft.
This only makes sense if they are counting intellisense auto complete as "AI written"
Windows hate train looks fun, but as someone who works in the industry, most of that code is probably just unit tests and boilerplate stuff.
Copilot is decent at quickly writing huge amounts of mostly correct, tedious unit test code, depending on your language/framework. And since Microsoft works with languages like C# and .NET for their native apps, and likely backend too, there is quite a bit of verbosity that Copilot can take care of. Also, documentation might count as well.
No real code is AI-generated. He's just saying shit like this to keep idiot investors happy.
So this explains why Microsoft Swiftkey is total dogshit now. Also why the Outlook app barely works.
Its unbelievable.
I bet they’re counting code written while someone had an AI plugin installed as “written by AI” and I bet that accounts for almost all of that 30%. On top of that, I’m betting that they made it mandatory to have such a plug in, and the other 70% is just code written before they mandated this.
Code written by software doesn't mean AI unless you ignore compilers
Executives lie to boost profits and justify their decisions, I doubt MS execs even know how much of their code is AI generated just like the ad sales company exec they were talking to in the article
“Written by software” does not inherently mean AI.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI.
Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft’s code is AI generated today.
I highlighted part of the article for you.
Are they including stuff written by intellisence and boiler plate for legacy code?
Boy am I glad not having to touch their software.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
