I'm gonna be so real with you right now: the most coding I've done in the last year is tinkering in narrative tools like Twine and Ink—both of which are programs geared towards writers such as myself who respect more technical coding as much as they fear it. Still, turning to AI to generate code that's core to your business seems like a bad idea to me.
Well, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would apparently disagree. In a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Llamacon, Nadella said, "I'd say maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software,” with 'software' here being a euphemistic term for AI (via The Register).
Nadella clarified that its AI is writing fresh code in a variety of programming languages, rather than overhauling existing code. Nadella claimed the AI-generated results he's seen using Python are "fantastic", while code generated in C++ still has a ways to go.
That could explain a few things with regard to recent Windows updates, such as the mysterious empty folder apparently essential to system security. On the other hand, it's not immediately clear where this AI-generated code is actually ending up. Besides that, auto-completion tools within coding software (think, predictive text) can fall into the category of 'AI-generated', too, so that 30% figure is fuzzy at best.
Still, CTO Kevin Scott has also commented that he expects a whopping 95% of the company's code to be AI-generated by 2030, and it's not just Microsoft leaning on AI either (via TechCrunch). Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, revealed in a recent earnings call that AI is used to generate 30% of code for the search giant, potentially about to be cut down to size, too. As for Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO could not recall the exact percentage of how much AI-generated code his company is currently using.
Still, both Zuckerberg and Nadella expressed enthusiasm about the prospect of more heavily relying on AI coding agents in the future—with no word on how this may or may not impact jobs.
Zuckerberg hopes AI-generated code will improve security, though a recent study found that AI's tendency to 'hallucinate' package dependencies and third-party code libraries could present serious risks (via Ars Technica). While it makes sense to not always write code from scratch, AI-generated code can leave the back door open for someone to upload a malicious package based on an AI hallucinated line. One can only hope both Meta, Microsoft, and Google thoroughly check their AI-generated code before implementing it anywhere… but something tells me that my hopes for corporate responsibility may be a little optimistic.
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