Can AI Really Replace Human Developers?

I’m in Seattle this week for Microsoft’s annual Build conference, where the software behemoth has announced a slate of new artificial intelligence–infused products meant to get developers to build and purchase AI agents from Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

Specifically, Microsoft is leaning into the idea of advanced AI chatbots that are capable of carrying out increasingly complex tasks on their own, such as automatically monitoring a web server for outages and patching them, or rewriting an application’s code from one coding language to another. (Google announced similar capabilities at its I/O conference this week, my colleagues Stephanie Palazzolo and Erin Woo reported, and OpenAI announced its own coding agent last week.)