Tech Disruptors Microsoft Killing Tech Debt with Agents
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Jan 15, 2026 In a compelling discussion, Amanda Silver, Corporate VP at Microsoft, shares her 24-year journey shaping developer tools like Visual Studio and GitHub Copilot. She highlights how AI-driven agents streamline the software lifecycle, enabling quicker transitions from ideas to implementation. Amanda emphasizes significant reductions in manual efforts for major upgrades, with SRE agents drastically cutting remediation times. The conversation also touches on evolving developer roles, the balance between human review and automation, and impressive adoption rates of Copilot across enterprises.
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AI Collapses Idea-To-Implementation Cycle
- AI and agents collapse the gap from idea to implementation by turning natural-language intent into specs and code.
- This reduces iteration cost and speeds finding product-market fit.
Developers Move From Typing To Reviewing
- Agents shift developer work from typing to reviewing and governance because they generate far more pull requests.
- Testing moves toward 'evals' to validate probabilistic agentic behavior rather than deterministic outputs.
Make Evals Your New Testing Standard
- Adopt evaluation practices tailored to probabilistic agents to ensure behavior aligns with expectations.
- Treat evals as a core new testing standard for agent-based software.