Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company's code was written by AI | TechCrunch

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.

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.

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.

That’s… not something to be proud of.

Power move by the zucc by first asking how much genai is used at Microsoft then refusing to answer his own question at Facebook 😂

Well, that explains Windows 11.

this makes way more sense than hundreds of shitty devs.

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.

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.

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!

"Up to" can also be 0%. Why is there even a need to say "up to" here.

It shows

So this explains why Microsoft Swiftkey is total dogshit now. Also why the Outlook app barely works.

Its unbelievable.

Government spyware finally has a challenger for the title of "primary reason that most Microsoft software runs like hot garbage".

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.

This only makes sense if they are counting intellisense auto complete as "AI written"

Well, that would explain a lot.

I'm also guessing that at "up to 30%" of the company's leadership decisions are being made by AI too.

That's why their products are so crappy!

We know Microsoft.

Hardly possible not to noticce..

"30% of my pants is pooped"

It shows

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

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.

This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!

Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.

AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.

Work for a big software company. With all the offshoring of devs, I expect most of our code is now AI. And it shows.

Boy am I glad not having to touch their software.

Yeah that'd explain some stuff. Happy to have switched to Linux

“Written by software” does not inherently mean AI.

Yeah, I can tell every time I have to use that dinosaur of an OS.

If they start with those products today with zero marketing budged and zero user base nobody would use it. Those CEOs are just clowns.

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.

Well that explains a lot

50% of my code is written by Intellisense...

They're attempting to make excuses for their inability to create functional software

Honestly, I'm not surprised.

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.

How much of Linux is?

Not suprised

Fun fact: Nadella has been replaced with an AI agent a couple of months ago and nobody has noticed yet. "Copilot, while I'm away, generate bs on AI adoption and fire a bunch of employees, ok?"

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.

??? No it’s not! Can investors sue because this is such an obvious lie? Pls I have 0.3 Microsoft shares

Wonder how much of Windows 10 was written by Stack Exchange?

If this were true there would massive databreaches. AI is really bad at keeping private keys private. Not to even mention the default credentials it would use because it doesnt have commen sense to change them

Year of the Linux desktop

(Amusing sidenote: my autocomplete's first suggestion after 'Linux' was 'propaganda'.)

Eww. Maybe it’s not really true and Microsoft just wants to remind us that big corporate AI is so legit that all the software you use all day was “helped” by it.

But really for me the issue is the company, not the AI. If I read an article about AI generated code making it into the Linux kernel or some gnu/kde/etc utilities, I don’t think I would worry much because those changes will be reviewed by cranky old nerds who care about the functionality of the software first. I have no such confidence in Microsoft’s processes.

They include tab complete of github copilot which is often as much as a single dot. Same thing they've done with all github copilot stats.

Are they including stuff written by intellisence and boiler plate for legacy code?

And its all Teams.

And how many times was all that code rewritten?

I hope that that's inclusive of something like lines of documentation in comment lines.

Is the part that handles images in word

Sure as hell feels like it!

Does that mean that Microsoft shares are gonna crash?