Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella disclosed that approximately thirty percent of the code within the company’s repositories was authored by AI. He shared this during an interview with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon AI event. Shortly into their conversation, Zuckerberg asked Nadella, “Do you have a sense of how much of the code, like what percent of the code that's being written inside Microsoft at this point is written by AI as opposed to by the engineers?” Nadella replied that Microsoft monitors acceptance rates, which currently stand “somewhere between 30 to 40 percent and are rising steadily. ” He noted that much of Microsoft’s codebase still uses C++, which he described as “not that great, ” though it is maintained in “pretty good” shape, whereas more recent Python code is “fantastic. ” Overall, Microsoft finds AI excels at generating entirely new code rather than modifying legacy code, but it is increasingly integrating AI across its codebase. Nadella estimated, “maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code inside our repositories across some projects is probably written completely by software. ” He then turned the question to Zuckerberg, who couldn’t recall exact figures and pointed out that some AI coding metrics include auto-completion tool usage, which doesn’t fully represent software written autonomously by AI. Zuckerberg explained that Meta has teams focused on AI-assisted coding where it can leverage its historical code changes. Zuck highlighted that Meta’s main focus is developing AI and machine learning engineers to advance Llama itself. He predicted that within the next year, “probably half the development will be done by AI rather than people, ” and that this share will increase subsequently. Nadella speculated whether development tools and computing infrastructure need redesigning to be AI-agent driven. He cautioned that while AI can teach coding, human critical thinking remains essential, as large language models (LLMs) often invent software dependencies and can cause issues. He noted AI can improve code it generates, but demands knowing how to query effectively, and raised questions about ownership of AI-produced code. Reflecting on the convergence of documents and applications, Nadella described his own process of researching topics using AI chatbots and saving the output, pointing out that auto-coding can turn such workflows into software creation.

“Starting with a high-level intent and ending with a ‘living artifact’ that would have previously been called an application will profoundly affect workflows, ” he said. This merging also blurs the “artificial category boundaries” between documents and apps—something Microsoft has tried to address before. “We’ve always wondered why Word, Excel, and PowerPoint aren’t one unified tool and attempted multiple approaches, ” Nadella shared. “Now you can start in Word, visualize things like in Excel, present them, and have everything persisted as a single data structure. That level of malleability wasn’t robust before but is now available. ” His remarks evoke the OpenDoc versus OLE battles of the 1990s—when Microsoft and Apple competed over data sharing among applications—now reframed in the AI era. One final point: neither billionaire commented on whether their AI-assisted coding efforts threaten jobs or if autonomously generated code has caused problems. Zuckerberg expressed optimism, stating he sees AI coding as an opportunity to enhance security. ®