No, he doesn't say that. He said that "maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software". A guy like Nadella doesn't accidentally say software instead of AI. He knows exactly what he is saying.
Considering that most of their software has been developed for decades and AI assistants have only started becoming useful in the last ~4 years it would be very surprising if 30% of their code is AI written. I doubt they even touched 30% of their code in the last 4 years. But what is perfectly plausible is that 30% of their code is written by code generators. Microsoft has a lot of interface code. All the windows DLLs that are just thin syscall interfaces, the COM and OLE interfaces in their office suite and everywhere else, whatever Office uses nowadays for interoperability to allow you to embed content of one product in another, whatever APIs their online products use, etc. In the leaked Windows XP source code it can be difficult to find the actual source code in between the boilerplate files containing repeated definitions, and in the decades since then the world has only leaned more into code generation.
> No, he doesn't say that. He said that "maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software".
Ouch, this makes the headline not sinply inaccurate. It makes the headline false.
Having generated code is nothing new. Multiple companies I worked for in the past had a lot of automatically generated code for multiple things (from automatically generating tests for API contracts to automatically generating glue code between different modules/services).
Callong that "AI" borders on the level of malicious ignorance.
>Ouch, this makes the headline not sinply inaccurate. It makes the headline false.
To be fair, Hanlon's razor suggests it was most likely written by someone who _would_ conflate software with AI. Though knowing the reward structures in '''journalism''', it could still be deliberate.
And not only that, but how much vagueness and weasel-wording can he pack into one sentence?
"I’d saymaybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software".
> He knows exactly what he is saying
Very much so. He's plainly pulled those figures out of his arse, keeping it vague so he can't be blamed later for lying, for nothing more than "look how much we use AI" marketing purposes.
I would say that most mainstream software projects have a significant amount of code that has been generated by software. IDE new project wizards, Rails, Django, NextJS, create-react-app, etc. are all software that generates code.
Considering that most of their software has been developed for decades and AI assistants have only started becoming useful in the last ~4 years it would be very surprising if 30% of their code is AI written. I doubt they even touched 30% of their code in the last 4 years. But what is perfectly plausible is that 30% of their code is written by code generators. Microsoft has a lot of interface code. All the windows DLLs that are just thin syscall interfaces, the COM and OLE interfaces in their office suite and everywhere else, whatever Office uses nowadays for interoperability to allow you to embed content of one product in another, whatever APIs their online products use, etc. In the leaked Windows XP source code it can be difficult to find the actual source code in between the boilerplate files containing repeated definitions, and in the decades since then the world has only leaned more into code generation.