Satya Nadella says as much as 30% of Microsoft code is written by software

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.

Sorry if this is unrelated.

I still remember as a 25yr old programmer in England, attending a job in what was basically a porta-cabin in the countryside around Birmingham. Inside all the walls were covered in 1980s "Hang in there" motivational posters, only they were originals and it was unironic ( it was like a time capsule ). After shocking the boss by agreeing to a cup of water offered by the secretary which caused a massive problem as they had no glasses, the over weight boss sat me down and asked me:

"What percentage of windows is written in C++?" The position was for web development...

I guessed correctly ( it was about 40% ).

I then apparently failed the interview as he suddenly asked me if my girlfriend wanted to interview for the position ( there was no indication she was even in the field of CS ).

The moral of the story is apparently the code ratio of Microsoft products is a big deal to random middle managers in the black country. ( Thats what the region is called because the soot from coal mining would blacken the landscape - yes its what Mordor was based on by Tolkien).

1. Has the total amount of code risen, such that the amount of human code is unchanged?

2. What's the bug rate like from AI code? is MS investing the time to check this code, or assuming it is correct?

3. Who writes the test cases?

4. 30% in what terms? number of lines of code? number of commits? what code is in play here? bulk test code, which is huge and per-line very low value, or is this serious, difficult, complex code used in critical project functions?

5. How much design work is being performed by LLM? as opposed to churning out lines of code.

6. Do the developers actually trust this code and trust LLMs for this, or is it they have a KPI they have to meet and so everyone now has "30% LLM code", all of which is pretty much useless?

People are going to ask if this is true etc. Not understanding that is doesn't matter if it is true, or if it is rather 20%, 2% or 40%, if it is new code or else.

What matters is what "investors" and bean counters believe to be true. Not much relief in knowing that they are wrong, when you lose your job or your working conditions suddenly become much worse.

I recently rewrote a 40K lines application to 2K lines. Mostly by using newer tech and better design patterns. (Java to TS, Terraform to CDK, lambda soup to single app, etc.). It was a POC at work to show how things could be different. You'd think this would have made some devs rethink their approach, but no they're using AI to write even more code faster in the old approach.

Written by software != written by AI. But CNBC has to pump.

Just imagine how much better would it look if it said "30% of our code is removed by AI".

I’m a daily user in a corporate environment of Outlook, MS Teams, Sharepoint etc.

MS Teams is using 1200 MB of RAM when it starts running. Skype for Business used less than 180 MB, same functionality.

Outlook is completely unusable at 1366x768 resolution (which only shows up when you use your laptop while traveling!)

I predict that soon you’ll see some large corporations publicly switching to other solutions; the path MS is on which neglects these kinds of problems, will be a natural progression.

Hey Satya, you should ask Windows 11 taskbar team to use "AI" to write code so that the taskbar is resizable and can be moved. Let's see how good the AI is.

You know, there's a really obvious, snide comment to that.

But instead I'll just say I'm curious about the next Windows edition. Traditionally it would be time for it to be the "not as terrible" one, which many currently on W11 would probably welcome with very, very open arms. Would that still hold?

Would there even be a Windows 11? (or, by MS naming schemes, Windows Series W or something)

RIP Microsoft

I use AI heavily in my own programming, so I’m not against, but I suspect this “as much as” is mostly copilot doing “tab completion” style autocompletions, not AI writing and modifying functions on its own.

I think 60% of my code is written by vim. I make pretty heavy use of competitions, especially contextual compilations. Anything longer than 3 characters is only going to be typed once

If true, the methodologies and languages they use must be quite inefficient if they can be automated by machines like that.

“As much as” are weasel words to help them sell their AI coding products to others.

Maybe the majority of that is for code comments and formatting.

Very often the code looks like:

fn actualLogic(param, param, param) ...

switch (some Condition) { case a: actualLogic(Foo, bar) ; case b: actualLogic(bar, Foo) ; ... }

It might be expressed with if statements, pattern matching, function calls etc., but most of the code is boilerplate.

From my experience in a C# codebase most of the code which completes correctly is this boilerplate.

O3/Sonnet/Gemini are able to write actual logic in chat/agent mode sometimes but then the problem is that they rewrite too much, which would count as AI generated code.

These two factors probably play a huge role in the 30% if it's counted in any accurate way.

Well that explains a lot ;)

30% of new code, or of all existing code?

Given all the bugs with each update doesn’t seem to improve the quality.

Misleading clickbait

That explains a lot.

Translated: same engineers are more productive by using IA.

Hmm... But SN himself is not writing code or involved in day to day development. He can claim anything and his incentives are 100% aligned to claiming AI bs.

In similar development, as much as 98% AI generated code wastes my time because I need to delete or press escape to stop the auto completion because a) it is spewing code from official doc verbatim, b) risks injecting licensed code into the product and getting my employer on legal fire, c) it is wrong and exactly not what I want.

The Clippy strikes back