Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott, has made some bold predictions about the future of coding jobs. Speaking on the 20VC podcast, Scott shared that AI will play a huge role in software development over the next few years.
“95% of code is going to be AI-generated (in the next five years),” Scott said. But before developers start panicking, he reassured that “it doesn’t mean that the AI is doing the software engineering job…. authorship is still going to be human.”
Scott explained that AI isn’t replacing developers—it’s just changing how they work. Instead of manually writing every line of code, engineers will focus more on guiding AI through prompts and instructions.
“It creates another layer of abstraction,” he said. “We go from being an input master (programming languages) to a prompt master (AI orchestrator).” In other words, instead of coding directly, developers will tell AI what they need, and the AI will generate most of the code.
AI agents still have a long way to go
While AI is getting better, Scott pointed out that it still has major limitations—especially when it comes to memory. Right now, AI assistants and agents can’t remember much from past interactions, which makes them “awfully transactional.”
“In the places where agents have memory — it is limited,” Scott said. But that’s going to change soon. “Memory is going to get a lot better over the next year. This means that as you're using an agent, it remembers more about past interactions and it will be able to conform itself to your preferences.”
Scott’s insights suggest that coding jobs won’t disappear, but they will evolve. Developers will spend less time on repetitive coding tasks and more time designing, problem-solving, and managing AI-driven workflows.
With AI advancing rapidly, the way we build software is set to become faster, smarter, and more efficient. But at the heart of it all, human creativity and decision-making will still be key.
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