AI Agents are Now Part of the Developer Workflow, Satya Nadella Says
The Microsoft CEO told GitHub Universe 2025 that software development is moving to a model where human developers direct and audit AI systems that write and review code, and said the skill now is learning that process.
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Software development is entering a new phase in which people and AI agents work together on the same code base, rather than developers writing every line themselves, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told GitHub Universe 2025 this week.
Engineers will increasingly ask AI systems to generate code, review proposed changes and prepare pull requests, but the accountability for what goes into production remains with the human developer, he said.
In his words, teams are “witnessing the birth of a new toolchain where humans and agents create code together.”
Nadella framed this as the continuation of a strategy Microsoft has been building for years. The company bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion and has kept investing in developer products such as Visual Studio, VS Code and GitHub Copilot, with the goal of being the environment where developers actually work.
He said that the basic goal has not changed. What has changed is what now counts as a “developer tool.” According to Nadella, that category now includes AI agents that can plan work, open branches, draft code and prepare pull requests for review.
Meanwhile, GitHub used the conference to announce the launch of Agent HQ, which it described as a control layer for AI assistants.
The company said Agent HQ is meant to let a developer or team lead assign tasks to multiple AI agents, track what each agent is doing and decide what to accept, all in one place.
GitHub said it will support agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition and xAI, and will allow them to run in parallel so teams can compare proposed fixes or features before choosing what to move forward.
“Agent HQ isn’t about the hype of AI. It’s about the reality of shipping code. It’s about bringing order and governance to this new era without compromising choice. It’s about giving you the power to build faster, with more confidence, and on your terms,” said Kyle Daigle, chief operating officer, GitHub, in the official blog.
The company also said Agent HQ is not limited to the GitHub website but is also being integrated into Visual Studio Code and tied to a workflow where a developer can break a task into steps, ask AI agents to work on those steps, and bring the result back as a pull request with built-in security and quality checks, including CodeQL-style scanning.
The intention, GitHub said, is that work moves from request to review without forcing the developer to jump between tools.
Nadella compared this moment to earlier shifts in programming practice.
Having begun coding when writing assembly code as input and machine as the output, Nadella said, “the cognition and the metacognition for the first time was happening in code. But the execution was all machine.”
The next big thing came in compilers, where “suddenly you’re coding in higher-level languages.” With a shift in where cognition and metacognition took place, one was compelled to think of code as both input and output.
Reminiscing on his first compiler experience and usage of Lex and Yacc, he said, “Those were the most unbelievable tools that I’ve ever used, as they let anyone create their own language with its syntax.”
“Whenever there has been a shift in the frontier of tools, there are more codes that are being created.”
The change now, Nadella said, is that AI agents can generate functional code, but engineers decide what problem is being solved, what “good” looks like and what is allowed into production.
He said the core goal of software development, to deliver products, fix issues, and keep systems reliable, is the same, but the method is different, and developers will have to learn this new toolchain the way earlier generations learned compilers and build systems.
GitHub backed that argument with growth data. The company said it is adding roughly one developer every second and now has more than 180 million developers on the platform worldwide, with growing activity in markets such as India, Brazil and Indonesia.
GitHub also said TypeScript has now passed Python and JavaScript to become the most used language on the service, and linked that shift to teams preferring strongly typed code that is easier for both humans and AI agents to reason about and review safely.
So, what skills will be critical for the new-age developers?
“I don’t think anything changes about us thinking about the outcome we desire through code. If code is input, what is the thing we’ll create as the output?” Nadella said.
Nadella said the shift of not just the what but the how is an interesting thing to look out for.
“I have to learn this new toolchain, it’s all fresh. I didn’t grow up learning these tools. I know the what, but the how has changed. You’ve done a good job of giving me these tools (like mission control), but I have to use them like I used Lex and Yacc.”
“That’s where we need to focus on.”
Microsoft will release its Q1FY26 earnings shortly.
