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At the Leadership Summit, Satya Nadella spoke at length about the impact GitHub Copilot is adding to the developers ecosystem, saying that 70% of the apps will be built by no code/low code tools.
Describing GitHub as AI showing up in a “fairly magical way”, the Microsoft CEO spoke about how Copilot can now translate between different coding languages. He also brought up the feature of GitHub Copilot that allows it to translate code snippets into English, remarking on the learning use cases that this capability enables. He went on to state, “One of the most elite AI developers out there is saying 80% of his code has been written by Copilot. This is a real game changer in terms of having a Copilot. Take somebody’s skills and really automate it so that they can spend their time [better].” —Pointing to Andrej Karpathy’s tweet.
Autocoding platforms have burst into the mainstream after the release of GitHub Copilot last year. Built on an LLM developed by OpenAI known as ‘Codex’, this AI pair programmer has since picked up millions of paying customers, showing that coders really need a solution that will cut down on the amount of code they need to manually write. As time passes, it is even possible that these solutions can evolve further beyond snippet suggestions and become completely prompt-based. However, one thing is for certain; even if coding dies, programming will continue to advance, spurred by innovation by tech giants and startups alike.
Besides this, Satya Nadella also spoke about the advancements that the country was making in the AI field. He stated that top AI researchers were using Microsoft’s tools to create the next generation of intelligent software.
Responding to a question from the audience, Nadella recounted Microsoft’s legacy in digital transformation. Drawing on examples of building out the BASIC interpreter for the Altair Computer in 1975 to creating a developer ecosystem around its dev tools like VS Code, Satya stated that Microsoft was at the forefront of developer empowerment.
He stated, “Visual Studio Code is pretty much the number one tool chain for anybody who does anything related to software. GitHub is where all the innovation happens today. It’s the largest repository of open source development happening there, and of course everything that is happening in Power Apps”.
