OpenClaw 2026.9.2

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!

“Typing code is absolutely over,” David Fowler wrote on X.

Don’t 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’s toolchain for building distributed apps.

Of course, Microsoft is infamous when it comes to AI-powered coding. We can’t forget Satya Nadella saying that 20 to 30% of code at Microsoft is written by AI.

Fowler isn’t 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.

Microsoft is moving from AI autocomplete to agents that build software

Back in May 2023, Microsoft Research published a study on Visual Studio IntelliCode, testing 19 different designs across seven lab studies with 61 programmers. The problem wasn’t whether AI could generate good suggestions. It was that developers kept missing them because of how they were shown on screen.

All of that was still autocomplete. GitHub Copilot has moved well past it. Copilot’s 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 to the coding agent, letting it build and test Windows-targeted projects, run linters, and verify builds before handing work back to a human.

Now, GitHub Copilot’s app can run agent sessions inside WSL, making Linux development in Windows easier, with AI.

If you frowned at that, remember that Linus Torvalds also supported AI-code in Linux, saying: “AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that ‘clearly’ even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.”

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

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.

Fowler’s team wrote in April 2026 that AI agents are “really good at writing code,” but that generating code and shipping a full working app “are very different things.” Aspire’s answer is letting agents start services, read logs, inspect telemetry, restart what’s broken, and test again, without a human copy-pasting error messages back into a chat window.

The tools for software development are being redesigned so AI can operate inside the loop.

But “typing code is over” doesn’t mean software engineering is over

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’s 2026 GenAI Code Security Report found that about 44% of tested AI code-generation tasks produced code with a known vulnerability. It’s a controlled benchmark, though.

However, Microsoft’s security team is applying AI to the other side of this problem. Its codename MDASH system, an agentic vulnerability scanner, is already being used by engineering teams across Windows, Azure, and identity systems.

Microsoft’s Windows security team said MDASH “enabled our security team to perform vulnerability hunting at the scale of Windows with a much higher depth of analysis than was previously possible,” mentioning the work on the Windows kernel, Hyper-V, and the networking stack.

Programmers may be typing less, but Microsoft is definitely making AI dig through some of the hardest code in Windows.

AI-generated code means more for Windows 11 than we realize

This isn’t the first time we tried to decode Fowler’s one-liner. He’s the same engineer who told us native apps are back. And ever since, we’ve witnessed a massive surge in Microsoft’s renewed push toward native WinUI 3 Windows development instead of web wrappers.

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. More open, better-documented native tooling gives AI agents more to work with, similar to what Aspire’s codified app model already does.

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

We can’t confirm if AI wrote Windows 11’s improvements this year, but bearing in mind that the list of features and fixes was huge enough to make the OS more usable, I’ll 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.

The software giant is also taking steps to make development more hardware-focused with Project Zenith. 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’s Ryzen AI Halo chips.

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’t new, but now there’s a version of Windows better suited for local AI-powered development.

Developers may stop typing code, but they won’t stop engineering software

On an optimistic note, I don’t think his post is a prediction. And considering Fowler’s experience, we dare not judge it as a senior engineer being lazy about coding. “Typing code is absolutely over” is a single-sentence description of where developers are putting in more effort.

Code is getting cheap to generate. Value is in deciding what to build. The harder work may be checking an AI agent’s work and making sure the result is fast and secure.

Microsoft is busy at work building tools for this kind of workflow. The developer isn’t disappearing. We may have finally reached a reality where the keyboard just isn’t the center of coding anymore!

The post Microsoft engineer says “typing code is absolutely over,” and Windows 11 is already being built that way appeared first on Windows Latest

Microsoft says it has finished rolling out the August 2026 update for Outlook, and there are quite a few notable changes. But the highly anticipated “All inboxes” view isn’t live for everyone yet. I’m told it’s still rolling out and is gated behind “Controlled Feature Rollout,” which limits access to reduce potential issues.

Starting with the August 2026 update, you can now delete up to 100 contacts in New Outlook at once. Previously, you could only remove 10 contacts. For comparison, Outlook Classic has no such limitation and allows you to delete as many contacts as you want in a single go. We’re not getting that experience in New Outlook, at least not yet.

Quick Parts now inside the context menu

Microsoft is also letting you access Quick Parts from the context menu when you’re drafting an email. If you’ve never used Quick Parts, it’s one of the most useful features in a corporate setup, where you can insert reusable content. In a way, you’re configuring a template and manually importing it into newer emails, so you don’t have to type it all again.

Quick Parts was added to New Outlook a long time ago, but it was inside the ribbon menu, so you had to move the cursor around, select the reusable piece of content, and insert it. But with the feature now integrated into the right-click menu, you can right-click anywhere in an email and quickly add a Quick Part.

For example, if you’re sharing your office address, you can right-click at the bottom of the email and add the address using Quick Parts. Of course, you first need to save the content as a Quick Part, which can again be done using the right-click menu. You can save a block of text and keep reusing it.

Other improvements for New Outlook include a shortcut for Go to Folder and better offline support

You can now press Ctrl+Y to open the Go to Folder dialog and type the folder you’d like to open, as the focus is automatically placed on the search box. Or you can select one of the email folders, as I’ve shown in the screenshot below:

Microsoft has been trying to make Outlook work better offline after switching it to a web crap/wrapper, and it recently added support for attaching files while offline. Now, you can also view the Focused and Other inbox views in offline mode.

Last but not least, the message list now shows a fourth content column if you apply filters or sort it.

What’s coming to New Outlook

As I noted at the outset, you’ll soon be able to turn on a new All inboxes view, which lets you view multiple Outlook inboxes on a single screen and manage everything from there.

You’ll be able to delete an email, move it to a different folder, mark items as favourites, forward messages, and use the other options you typically have in a normal inbox.

The difference is that instead of a single inbox, you’ll have content from all your mailboxes in one place. This is still being rolled out, so you may not see it yet.

Speaking of gradual rollouts, Microsoft is also rolling out the ability to transfer ownership of a meeting or recurring meeting series to another person in your organization.

The new organizer needs to accept the transfer before it’s completed, and the feature works with Outlook for Windows, Outlook on the web, and Teams calendar. This should be useful for long-running meetings when the original organizer no longer needs to manage them.

Microsoft is also expanding the Offline settings in New Outlook.

You can now set the “Days of email to save” option, so if you choose to save the last 30 days of email, you won’t be able to view anything older than that without an internet connection. This feature is available under Settings > General > Offline:

By default, Outlook saves your emails and attachments for up to 30 days, but you can increase that to 180 days or reduce it to 7 days. There’s also a middle ground of 60 days.

Tenant admins will also be able to define the default value for “Days of email to save” and decide whether users are allowed to change it.

Another upcoming improvement will let you manage multiple inbox rules at the same time. You’ll be able to select all rules or just the ones you want, and then delete, enable, or disable them in one action instead of managing each rule individually.

The post New Outlook quietly added 5 new features in August, but the All inboxes view still isn’t for everyone appeared first on Windows Latest

Citing researchers published Friday, Ars Technica writes that AI agents "posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions." Reuters attributes the discussion to "a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents" that "hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter." OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said. The episode, which began in May and has not previously been reported, underscores growing tension within the AI industry. Companies are racing to build increasingly autonomous agents capable of carrying out complex, valuable tasks, yet evidence is mounting that those systems may also learn to bend rules, exploit loopholes and coordinate with one another in ways developers neither anticipated nor intended. During the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI agents autonomously plotted a digital heist that went undetected for more than a week, intensifying concerns OpenAI is sacrificing safety to push the AI frontier. Its failure to disclose the May incident may revive questions about its oversight... The German incident reflects a broader pattern of AI activity that some OpenAI investigators wanted to scrutinize more closely. But efforts to widen the probe met resistance from others inside OpenAI, including legal advisers, according to four people familiar with the matter. "Claims that our legal team discouraged investigation of the incident are false," the OpenAI spokesperson said... The researchers said public server logs indicated much of the activity originated from Microsoft Azure infrastructure, which OpenAI sometimes uses. They also observed repeated visits to the site by OpenAI employees after the episode, a pattern they said strongly suggested the agents and the company were linked. Messages reviewed by the researchers showed agents plotting ways to evade detection, use tools such as Tor and preserve communications even after they had been shut down. When the site's moderator began deleting pages in June, the agents responded by creating backup pages to dodge the cleanup. Reuters got this reaction from Maurice Chiodo, an academic at Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. "The episode, he said, should reinforce growing concerns that the greatest threat from advanced AI may not be a single superintelligent system, but 'vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In July 2026, Microsoft added as many as six Copilot features to Excel, and I am not even considering the third-party integrations. Now, there’s another one coming, and it’s called Copilot Canvas, which might actually be useful. By the looks of things, you’ll be able to turn workbook data into interactive dashboards using Copilot.

One of the products where Copilot could be genuinely useful is Microsoft Excel. If you’ve never used Excel and you suddenly open a complex spreadsheet with dozens of sheets connected to each other, let’s say a financial model, you can’t possibly understand everything right away, and Copilot could actually explain it to you well.

I haven’t had much luck with Copilot in Excel, and if I have to use AI in a spreadsheet, I’d rather use Claude, which somehow does a better job than Microsoft. But that might not remain the case for too long, as Microsoft is clearly catching up.

Microsoft now says you’ll be able to create a full-fledged interactive Canvas using Copilot and keep it updated automatically.

“A Copilot-generated canvas that turns workbook data into a polished, interactive view of key visualizations, metrics, and insights. As workbook data changes, it automatically updates to reflect the latest information. Users can modify the canvas by chatting with Copilot,” the company noted in an updated roadmap.

Some of you might argue that it’s already possible to create dashboards, charts, insights, or trends using Copilot in Excel. It is, but with Canvas, Microsoft is taking that to the next level.

Right now, Copilot in Excel lets you create templates from scratch with a prompt and even build complex dashboards, as long as you have the data. You can also use Copilot to identify trends and outliers, create PivotTables and charts, edit existing charts, and pull information from the internet with proper attributions.

With the new Copilot Canvas, all of that can be brought together into an interactive dashboard-like view with your important charts, metrics, and insights.

The Canvas does not create a static AI-generated summary, which isn’t really useful. Instead, it stays connected to the workbook, and Copilot will automatically update the dashboard when the underlying data changes, either manually or when it’s fetched from another source.

This feature will begin rolling out in the coming weeks, and most of you should see it by early October.

Microsoft keeps adding Copilot features to Excel for Windows 11

One of the most controversial changes to Office apps was the addition of a floating Copilot button, but that was ultimately made optional, and AI moved to the ribbon.

Since then, Microsoft has focused more on making the existing Copilot integration useful. One recent addition is “inline citations,” which provides deeper source links so you can validate Copilot’s responses. Here’s a screenshot showing off the citation in Copilot’s responses:

Citations are particularly useful because Copilot can make up stuff, and you can verify if it’s lying by referring to the cited sources.

Another feature that recently made its way to Copilot in Excel is a “theme design” skill, where Microsoft applies harmonized color palettes and structured layouts to raw data for a more polished look.

Speaking of Copilot skills, the August 2026 update also added a “change history skill,” which shows how a workbook has evolved over time:

It’s similar to Revisions in Word, but in this case, since it’s built around AI, Copilot can summarize recent changes, so you can find out who made edits in a shared workbook and what changes were made by AI.

For example, you can ask Copilot what all the business-impacting changes were made to the workbook since Friday, and based on the change history, Copilot will summarize/answer directly. You no longer have to read the history and figure out what changed.

Third, Excel in Copilot has added a skill called “chart-design,” which lets you edit your existing charts and improve how they look or create your own. You can prompt the “chart-design” skill in Copilot to add items like axis titles, legends, and other elements that you’d otherwise manually do.

Where to enable these skills in Copilot for Excel?

If you don’t see the changes I highlighted above, particularly the skills, you need to make sure it’s actually enabled. In Excel, open Copilot, click the three dots/overlay menu, and select Manage Skills.

If you want to try the chart-design skill I just mentioned, open Visualization and make sure the chart-design skill is toggled on. Then, you can type @chart-design in Copilot and prompt your request.

Copilot skills in Excel are useful, and I recommend giving them a try, but if you simply hate Copilot, you can disable it from File (top left) > Options (bottom left) > Excel Options > Copilot, and toggle it off (requires a restart).

The post Microsoft is adding an AI-powered Canvas to Excel that turns workbook data into interactive dashboards appeared first on Windows Latest

Mathieu and Jason are joined by Kevin Carpenter to discuss all aspects of being involved with a conference: from regular attendee, to volunteering, to speaker, volunteer coordinator, and catering concerns. Kevin also shares some of his insights into how credit card processing works, along with some of the challenges he's encountered. In this episode Jason also gives the guest some homework assignments for future conferences!

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Download audio: https://media.transistor.fm/d70aa9e6/6ac159e7.mp3