{"id":761376,"date":"2026-09-06T01:12:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/761376\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T01:12:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:12:28","slug":"microsoft-engineer-says-typing-code-is-absolutely-over-and-windows-11-is-already-being-built-that-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/761376\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft engineer says “typing code is absolutely over,” and Windows 11 is already being built that way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Microsoft's<\/a>Microsoft’s David Fowler says typing code manually is fading out.<\/p>\n

When a Distinguished Engineer, who has been working at Microsoft for 18 years, says that the era of traditional software development is totally behind us, you pay attention!<\/p>\n

\u201cTyping code is absolutely over,\u201d David Fowler wrote on X.<\/p>\n

\"DavidDavid Fowler says Typing code is absolutely over.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t write this off as another engagement-farming hot take from the crowd. Fowler co-created SignalR, was a founding developer on NuGet and the Kudu deployment engine, and worked on the core of ASP.NET Core. He now leads work on Aspire, Microsoft\u2019s toolchain for building distributed apps.<\/p>\n

Of course, Microsoft is infamous when it comes to AI-powered coding. We can\u2019t forget Satya Nadella saying that 20 to 30% of code at Microsoft is written by AI.<\/p>\n

Fowler isn\u2019t saying developers will stop reading code, or that software engineering is done. His point is that manually typing code line by line, in an editor, is becoming the least interesting part of the job. Aspire, the very project he works on, is already being rebuilt around AI-based app development.<\/p>\n

Microsoft is moving from AI autocomplete to agents that build software<\/p>\n

Back in May 2023, Microsoft Research published a study on Visual Studio IntelliCode<\/a>, testing 19 different designs across seven lab studies with 61 programmers. The problem wasn\u2019t whether AI could generate good suggestions. It was that developers kept missing them because of how they were shown on screen.<\/p>\n

\"CopilotCopilot coding agents with Windows Projects. Source: Microsoft<\/p>\n

All of that was still autocomplete. GitHub Copilot has moved well past it. Copilot\u2019s coding agent can now take a task, build its own environment, work in the background, modify a repository, and open a pull request for review. In February 2026, GitHub added Windows development environments<\/a> to the coding agent, letting it build and test Windows-targeted projects, run linters, and verify builds before handing work back to a human.<\/p>\n

Now, GitHub Copilot\u2019s app can run agent sessions inside WSL<\/a>, making Linux development in Windows easier, with AI.<\/p>\n

If you frowned at that, remember that Linus Torvalds also supported AI-code in Linux<\/a>, saying: \u201cAI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it\u2019s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that \u2018clearly\u2019 even just a year ago, but it\u2019s no longer in question today.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Fowler works on making app development better with Aspire<\/a>. It is a code-first toolchain for building and running distributed apps, where developers define services, containers, and databases inside a single application model.<\/p>\n

Aspire 13.1 made AI coding assistants first-class citizens in that workflow. Aspire 13.2 went further with an agent-friendly CLI and MCP support.<\/p>\n

\"NewNew dashboard in Aspire. Source: Microsoft<\/p>\n

Fowler\u2019s team wrote in April 2026<\/a> that AI agents are \u201creally good at writing code,\u201d but that generating code and shipping a full working app \u201care very different things.\u201d Aspire\u2019s answer is letting agents start services, read logs, inspect telemetry, restart what\u2019s broken, and test again, without a human copy-pasting error messages back into a chat window.<\/p>\n

The tools for software development are being redesigned so AI can operate inside the loop.<\/p>\n

But \u201ctyping code is over\u201d doesn\u2019t mean software engineering is over<\/p>\n

When code is nearly free to generate, the jam moves to architecture, performance, native APIs, testing, and dependency management, because nobody can check line-by-line anymore. Veracode\u2019s 2026 GenAI Code Security Report<\/a> found that about 44% of tested AI code-generation tasks produced code with a known vulnerability. It\u2019s a controlled benchmark, though.<\/p>\n

However, Microsoft\u2019s security team is applying AI to the other side of this problem. Its codename MDASH<\/a> system, an agentic vulnerability scanner, is already being used by engineering teams<\/a> across Windows, Azure, and identity systems.<\/p>\n

Microsoft\u2019s Windows security team said<\/a> MDASH \u201cenabled our security team to perform vulnerability hunting at the scale of Windows with a much higher depth of analysis than was previously possible,\u201d mentioning the work on the Windows kernel, Hyper-V, and the networking stack.<\/p>\n

\"MicrosoftMicrosoft MDASH success rate. Source: Microsoft<\/p>\n

Programmers may be typing less, but Microsoft is definitely making AI dig through some of the hardest code in Windows.<\/p>\n

AI-generated code means more for Windows 11 than we realize<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time we tried to decode Fowler\u2019s one-liner. He\u2019s the same engineer who told us native apps are back<\/a>. And ever since, we\u2019ve witnessed a massive surge in Microsoft\u2019s renewed push toward native WinUI 3 Windows development instead of web wrappers.<\/p>\n

\"WinUI3WinUI3 experiences in Windows. Source: Microsoft<\/p>\n

Redmond now lists WinUI 3 as its recommended native framework for new Windows apps, and in a genius move, the framework is now truly open-source<\/a>. More open, better-documented native tooling gives AI agents more to work with, similar to what Aspire\u2019s codified app model already does.<\/p>\n

For beginners, Microsoft has a dedicated Learn guide showing how to use Copilot to build WinUI apps<\/a>, including code completion, file context, and project-specific instructions.<\/p>\n

\"NewNew smaller Start menu in Windows 11 after August optional update. Credit: Windows Latest<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t confirm if AI wrote Windows 11\u2019s improvements this year<\/a>, but bearing in mind that the list of features and fixes was huge enough to make the OS more usable, I\u2019ll take it any day over slow traditional software development. The cherry on top is that Microsoft managed to fix a ton of bugs as well. We reported that the July update patched 570 bugs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The software giant is also taking steps to make development more hardware-focused with Project Zenith<\/a>. Announced on September 4, it braces a stripped-down, developer-tuned Windows 11 setup with beefy hardware, demanding a strict baseline of 64GB unified RAM and 250GB\/s of memory bandwidth, starting with AMD\u2019s Ryzen AI Halo chips.<\/p>\n

\"Project<\/p>\n

So, instead of paying for every token sent to the cloud, developers get enough local horsepower to run 30B+ parameter AI models. Of course, this isn\u2019t new, but now there\u2019s a version of Windows better suited for local AI-powered development.<\/p>\n

Developers may stop typing code, but they won\u2019t stop engineering software<\/p>\n

On an optimistic note, I don\u2019t think his post<\/a> is a prediction. And considering Fowler\u2019s experience, we dare not judge it as a senior engineer being lazy about coding. \u201cTyping code is absolutely over\u201d is a single-sentence description of where developers are putting in more effort.<\/p>\n

Code is getting cheap to generate. Value is in deciding what to build. The harder work may be checking an AI agent\u2019s work and making sure the result is fast and secure.<\/p>\n

Microsoft is busy at work building tools for this kind of workflow. The developer isn\u2019t disappearing. We may have finally reached a reality where the keyboard just isn\u2019t the center of coding anymore!<\/p>\n

\t\tSupport original journalism.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWindows Latest depends on readers like you.
\n\t\t\tMake us your Preferred source on
\n\t\t\tGoogle Discover<\/a> and
\n\t\t\tGoogle Search<\/a>,
\n\t\t\tand help our independent reporting reach more people.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft’s David Fowler says typing code manually is fading out. When a Distinguished Engineer, who has been working…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[59,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-761376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-gb","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}