Fowler made the comment on X as GitHub Copilot’s coding agent expands beyond code completion. The agent can now set up development environments, make changes in a repository, run tests and open a pull request for a developer to review.

GitHub has also added Windows development environments for its coding agent. This allows the agent to build and test Windows-targeted projects, run linters and check whether builds succeed before returning the work to a human developer.

Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Aspire, its toolchain for distributed applications. Aspire gives AI agents more context about services, containers and databases, while allowing them to inspect logs and telemetry, identify errors, restart components and test changes.

Fowler’s statement does not mean software engineers are becoming unnecessary. Instead, the role could shift from manually writing every line toward system design, requirements, architecture, testing and reviewing AI-generated changes.

Microsoft is also using AI for security. Its MDASH system is an agentic vulnerability scanner used across Windows, Azure and identity systems to help engineers investigate large codebases.

For businesses, the shift could change how software teams measure productivity and allocate engineering time as AI coding agents move from assistants to increasingly autonomous development tools.

The question now is how much of the software development lifecycle AI agents will eventually handle.

David Fowler, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer who leads work on Aspire, says AI is changing software development by taking over more of the work traditionally done by developers line by line.