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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0]

In any case, I think this is the best use case for AI in programming—as a force multiplier for the developer. It’s for the best benefit of both AI and humanity for AI to avoid diminishing the creativity, agency and critical thinking skills of its human operators. AI should be task oriented, but high level decision-making and planning should always be a human task.

So I think our use of AI for programming should remain heavily human-driven for the long term. Ultimately, its use should involve enriching humans’ capabilities over churning out features for profit, though there are obvious limits to that.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

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How much was previously generated by intellisense and other code gen tools before AI? What is the delta?

> I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0]

Similar to google. MS now requires devs to use ai

I know a lot of devs at MSFT, none of them are required to use AI.

From reading around on Hacker News and Reddit, it seems like half of commentators say what you say, and the other half says "I work at Microsoft/know someone who works at Microsoft, and our/their manager just said we have to use AI", someone mentioned being put on PIP for not "leveraging AI" as well.

I guess maybe different teams have different requirements/workflows?

O ya, when I was at Microsoft, everything varied widely by team and organization.

I can imagine there are groups where it is true. I mostly want to push back on the idea that there's one monolithic culture that is Microsoft.

The GitHub org is required to for sure, with a very similar mandate to the one Shopify's CEO put out.

LLM use is now part of the annual review process, its self reported if I'm not mistaken but at least at Microsoft they would have plenty of data to know how often you use the tools.

So demanding all employees use it... results in less than 30% compliance. That does tell me a lot

How much of that is protobuf stubs and other forms of banal autogenerate code?

Updated my comment to include the link. As much as 30% specifically generated by AI.

I would still wager that most of the 30% is some boilterplate stuff. Which is ok. But sounds less impressive with that caveat.

The 2nd paragraph contradicts the title.

The actual quote by Satya says, "written by software".

Sure but then he says in his next sentence he expects 50% by AI in the next year. He’s clearly using the terms interchangeably.

That quote was completely misrepresented.

You might want to study the history of technology and how rapidly compute efficiency has increased as well as how quickly the models are improving.

In this context, assuming that humans will still be able to do high level planning anywhere near as well as an AI, say 3-5 years out, is almost ludicrous.

Reality check time for you: people were saying this exact thing 3 years ago. You cannot extrapolate like that.

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