Artificial intelligence is no longer just assisting developers — it’s actively writing a significant portion of code at one of the world’s biggest tech companies.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that as much as 30% of the code in the company’s internal repositories is now generated by AI tools. He shared this striking milestone during a conversation with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on April 29 at Meta’s LlamaCon conference.
“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella told the crowd.
Meta and Microsoft use AI to write code
Increasing amounts of code at Microsoft are being written with the help of generative AI, Nadella said in response to a question from Zuckerberg. He also explained that developers are seeing mixed results when it comes to AI-written code. Generative AI is making more progress in Python and less in C++, he added.
Nadella then turned the question back on Zuckerberg, asking how much code Meta was writing with AI. Zuckerberg did not provide an exact figure, but predicted, “Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there.”
According to Zuckerberg, Meta is working on an AI model to build more AI in the Llama family.
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Risks from using AI-generated code
Writing code with AI, sometimes called “vibe coding” because developers can prompt the LLM with only a few words or phrases, is considered revolutionary. But it also opens up security risks in software. For example, generative AI may confidently suggest nonsense code or invent fake links. AI-generated code can be prone to errors and lead to downtime.
AI can generate realistic-sounding names for downloadable software packages, potentially allowing threat actors to create malicious software under those false names.
Despite the risks, Microsoft and Meta’s assertions show confidence in their products. Both companies have been at the forefront of the AI boom.
