LLM's next breakthrough will be removing 30% of the code of a codebase.

Very clearly not what he meant.

> “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 said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I think there’s some quibble to be made about “written by software” vs “generated by AI,” but it doesn’t seem like he’s talking about new code, right? He goes out of his way to phrase it “code that is inside of our repos.”

It doesn’t really make any sense, but it does seem to be what he said. Maybe there was some context, maybe it is about some specific repos that was not included in the quote.

But, it isn’t “very clear” in any case.

It is "very clear" because it's not possible. He didn't go "out of his way"... it's live conversation, not something he could proof read and edit.

It is in the video “Welcome to LlamaCon 2025 - Closing Session!” posted in full on YouTube, around minute 44.

Zuck asks: “in terms of the coding, and how it improves that, do you have a sense of how much of the code, like what percent of the code that’s being written in Microsoft at this point is written by AI as opposed to by engineers?”

Nadella: “yeah so there’s two sort of thing we’re tracking, one is the accept rate itself, that’s around 30-40, it’s going up monotonically, [talks for a bit about the fact that it works well with Python, less so for C++, from context he’s talking about code completions here, now back to…] the place where the agentic code still, it’s ver-it’s sort of nascent—for new greenfield it’s very very high—but as I said nothing is greenfield in many cases and so therefore I’d say maybe at this point the PR—oh by, the way the code reviews are very high, and so, the agents we have for reviewing code [makes a happy expression], so that usage has increased—and so I’ll say, [this is around 45:00] maybe 20-30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos and some of our projects are probably all, uh, written by software. […]

I dunno. In conclusion having listened to it a couple times and done my best at transcribing it fairly close to what he actually said, I’m still confused as to what he meant. I was going to try and make some point with this, but I lost track of it while writing out the quote. At least folks have the full thing to argue about here, more or less!

You know that because you're in tech. But the average person who is reading the news, and is likely to participate in a large protest in the next few years, would not naturally make a distinction between incremental and extant code.