Monday local time,MicrosoftThe four-day Build 2025 Developer Conference officially kicked off. Thousands of programmers facing the impact of "AI grabbing jobs" gathered together to listen to the latest ideas of the "initiator" Microsoft. In Microsoft CEO Nadella's opening speech, the core update was to upgrade the AI programming assistant GitHub Copilot into a "colleague" for programmers.
According to Microsoft, the AI assistant can now complete work such as fixing bugs, adding features, and improving documentation on behalf of developers. You only need to "assign" tasks to it on the operating interface.
(Source: GitHub)
GitHub revealed that the AI programming assistant can automatically start virtual machines, clone code libraries and analyze code base. It saves changes in real time as it works and provides an overview of the operational logic in the session log. Once completed, the AI assistant will mark the content for review. Developers can leave comments and the assistant will automatically handle the feedback.
In addition, Microsoft also released a series of updates on Monday, including:
Model tuning: Copilot can learn the proprietary information of each company, easily train models and create agents in a low-code manner;
Agent Factory: A complete platform for building applications and agents. Microsoft is adding support for Grok, Hugging Face, Meta, Mistral and other models;
NLWeb: A new open source project that allows users to interact with any website using natural language. Microsoft calls this "HTML for the age of the agent network";
Scalable platform Microsoft Discovery: Accelerating scientific discovery with AI.
At the same time, as the main operators promoting the explosive development of artificial intelligence, Nadella and Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott also emphasized in an interview released on Monday that changes in artificial intelligence have not led to the replacement of company employees by automation, but the requirements for outstanding developers in the new era have quietly changed.
what it means to be human
"You can't just walk in and say, I'm smart and I have a lot of ideas, but I don't know exactly what to do," Nadella emphasized. "No, you have to know what to do when the situation is murky and uncertain. So it becomes extremely, extremely important to clarify your thinking."
Scott also pointed out that Microsoft is hiring more software engineers, but will focus more on their human qualities rather than technical abilities.
He says there's more to being human than the applications you write, or the programming skills you possess. Microsoft is looking for employees who can "think about the full breadth of human history, understand how social systems work, and how human groups behave and expect to interact."
And behind this also lies Microsoft's core strategy in the AI era - quietly integrating into the background of the entire era.
Nadella said that in his first internal letter after becoming Microsoft CEO ten years ago, he foresaw today's moment - an era he called "ambient intelligence": the clicking, typing and scrolling operations that define technology will eventually be replaced, and computers will run in the background to automatically handle daily tasks.
This forward thinking has also made Microsoft shareholders very profitable. In the past ten years, Microsoft's market value has risen from US$300 billion to US$3.4 trillion, and it is currently the world's most valuable listed company.
About five years ago, Nadella approved Scott’s proposal to build the world’s largest supercomputer to train the model that would eventually become ChatGPT. “This is the next phase of the process, so to speak, where we can ride the wave and make computing ubiquitous and invisible,” Nadella said.
To realize this vision, what is needed is human wisdom. "When I hire anyone to join Microsoft, I say, hey, listen, if you want to be cool, go somewhere else. If you want to be cool, join Microsoft," Nadella said.
Scott also emphasizes that uncool doesn't mean boring. In the age of artificial intelligence, engineers will be measured by the breadth of their curiosity and creativity. Obviously, this is not currently a key indicator for evaluating programmers. He noted that some of the conversations he has with his team now are "boring as hell."
That's the core message Scott plans to deliver at a developer conference this week: For some reason, software developers aren't taking full advantage of the AI capabilities available today, and he'll try to "nudge people a little bit" to let their imaginations run free.