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**Jerod Santo:** So, you have both arms of that. You have the IDE people in Visual Studio, and then you have the text editor people in VS Code. And through those platforms you can launch all this other stuff, right? Like, all this Copilot stuff. Is that how you look at it, or is that just how I look at it? |
**Amanda Silver:** I think that we can kind of bootstrap a lot of developers to get more familiar with Copilot, for sure... And I think that in a lot of senses the code editing experience -- the table stakes have changed. You have to have AI as part of the code editing experience. So I don't know if it's as much as us ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. And I don't mean forcing it. I just think that you have this platform in which you can launch other stuff. And Copilot really has had a great opportunity there, to just be like "Bam. Right there. You're already using VS Code..." |
**Amanda Silver:** That's true. |
**Jerod Santo:** "It works great in VS Code. Click the button, bam." |
**Amanda Silver:** I think that in a lot of senses -- you know, Microsoft has always been a developer-first company, since the MS-DOS BASIC days. That's been where Bill Gates' heart was at, and I think that as it moved through Balmer to Satya, we've consistently had a great sponsorship for our developer tools and platf... |
**Jerod Santo:** So it helps, but it's not like a cure-all. |
**Amanda Silver:** Yeah. Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's still got to be good. |
**Amanda Silver:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think it's telling though that it happened with VS Code, though. It's 50 million developers across two different editors, combining them I guess that way... And that's a lot of developers you have a captive audience. I think that's what he's alluding to, is you have a captive audience to say... |
**Amanda Silver:** I would say, actually, that developers are one of the most empowered audiences across all of the audiences that we target. That they vote with their feet more than any other audience that exists, whether it's consumer, enterprise etc. Enterprise - totally different way that they drive decision-making... |
\[26:13\] And we see all the time developers picking up new coding editors, picking up new frameworks... They're technology enthusiasts. That's actually one of the things that makes the job so rewarding, is I can launch something at the beginning of the day, and by the end of the day I know if it was a hit or a dud, be... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Amanda Silver:** The way that we think about it is we have to win their loyalty every day with actual great product experiences. |
**Jerod Santo:** So this reminds me of a post I actually put in Changelog News today - I think Avdi Grimm wrote this - called "Developer Tooling is a Lousy Business." And he actually enumerated some of the points that you're making. You're saying it's great for us as developers, because we have the agency you speak of,... |
**Amanda Silver:** That's right. |
**Jerod Santo:** And so in that sense, I guess, how is Copilot changing? Because I remember when it first came out and it was autocomplete, and it kind of was game-changing in that way, but it was really a non-deterministic autocomplete. That was good; it had its problems. And it has grown since then, and you guys cont... |
**Amanda Silver:** Yeah. Well, so in a lot of senses Copilot has gone through the same epics that AI itself has gone through. Over the past couple of years the AI basically got to the point where it was good at doing token prediction, and things like that, but then over the last couple of years we introduced chat, and ... |
So for Copilot, we started with completions, and the completions at first were just a single line of code, and then they got to full function bodies, and then they got to longer, maybe a whole file... And then last year we introduced multi-file edits, so that you could actually make multiple changes to your codebase at... |
But agent mode - it is shocking what you can accomplish in just a really short amount of time, just letting it go. Basically, what you do with that -- and it's also had its own acceleration. But what you do with agent mode is you go into the prompt, into the Copilot chat experience, and you switch it to agent mode, pic... |
\[29:53\] So for example, in my demo earlier today, all I did was I gave it a source code repo for a website, and I said "Test this solution and write some tests, write some integration tests for me." And it basically started to do all of the automation to bring up the Playwright Automation Framework, bring up the webs... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's really ramping up the potential gains. One thing that I fear with that is the more you change, the harder it is to find the thing that went wrong. It's like the needle in the haystack problem, where if it's an auto-complete of a single line - cool, I can just see what it says. If it's a func... |
**Amanda Silver:** Change log? |
**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. |
**Amanda Silver:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** And now I've got my code review step, basically, and there's so many things there that I just get a little bit apprehensive of like "Am I going to be able to find potentially where that one needle is in the haystack that maybe make the whole thing go haywire?" Are there guards, are there helps? Are the... |
**Amanda Silver:** I think that's something, first of all, that we need to think about in the design of the tool itself. We need to make sure that we are not introducing something that creates so much cognitive load for you to ingest in terms of change management that it's beyond your ability to reason over. So we are ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Break it down? |
**Amanda Silver:** ...to kind of control just how much code is actually going to be generated. Other reasons that we do that as well. But I think the other thing is we really want to make sure that we are working with the workflow that you're used to. So another thing that we introduced today is the coding agent, where... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Amanda Silver:** So what that I think enables is for you to then still think about the tasks that you're assigning to the agent in the same granularity that you would assigning it to another developer on your team. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you could theoretically do a multi-file edit, build something, prompt it for that, and then run an agent against that and say "Debug this. Make sure it's sound code." |
**Amanda Silver:** Correct, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So versus -- your question was "The fear of the code sucking", basically. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. I've got my coding agent, and my code review agent. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, don't worry, because at the end you can just unleash your agent, and just say "Agent, check that." |
**Amanda Silver:** \[33:47\] That's right. I mean, you could certainly have parallel adversarial agents kind of working against each other. You could set up that kind of system where you basically start to build your code, you then want to say "Okay, I'm going to have one agent that's going to be focused on the readabi... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Amanda Silver:** It's actually going to do it. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** "It's actually going to do it." |
**Amanda Silver:** It's going to do it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I just think these little functions you can call... You know, "Check this, check that, write tests here, confirm..." That's really wild. And they do it. |
**Amanda Silver:** Yeah. And we also have, obviously, pull request reviews as a part of Copilot as well. So we also apply it at that kind of large scale for -- basically, every code change that we make inside of Microsoft, or open source repos as well, we do kind of AI-based code reviews. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. I know you're using the classical data science form of adversarial there, but I kind of had a moment where I was like "It would be fun to just pit these agents against each other." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I was, too. |
**Jerod Santo:** Like, "Listen, okay? This agent is not very good at their job, and they always get things wrong. Now, your job is to watch them, keep an eye on them..." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. He's known to hallucinate... |
**Jerod Santo:** "You don't like them very much, you know..." |
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