Will AI Agents Upend The Software Development Life Cycle?
Engaging Agent Mode on active code in GitHub
May 2025 will go down in history as the month when agentic software development was truly unleashed upon the world. A significant step up from chat-based code assistants, agentic software tools have been positioned as a revolutionary change in the software development life cycle. Announcements from Microsoft (GitHub Copilot Agent Mode), Google (Jules), OpenAI (Codex) and Anthropic (Claude Agents) are all very promising. However, my conclusion is that we are not witnessing a revolution, but are simply seeing a further evolution of AI automation. And to be honest, I think that is good news.
First, let's discuss what has driven this leap forward from coding assistants. A coding assistant is essentially a bot interface to a large language model, and this mechanism has been quite beneficial to many developers. As one proof point for this, at its Build conference in May, Microsoft said that the GitHub Copilot assistant has been used by 15 million developers. (Note: Microsoft is a client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.)
But three fundamental AI shifts have led to the creation of these new agentic development tools, which significantly expand the AI benefit to developers.
At the Build conference, Agent Mode in GitHub Copilot was the cornerstone of Microsoft's vision of a new SDLC. The company's demonstrations of how much more quickly work can be completed and the seamless integration between VSCode and GitHub were quite impressive — and were always likely to get the lion's share of media coverage. But what's most impressive is the overall breadth of Microsoft's announcements and the fact that Microsoft may be the only company able to execute such a vision. Here are three non-Copilot things from Microsoft that also improve the SDLC.
I applaud Microsoft for creating innovations across the whole SDLC. And I know that there are other improvements in security and software updates that I did not include. I do believe that Microsoft is likely the only company that can execute a broad vision for the SDLC since it owns some of the biggest pieces (tooling, repositories, security, collaboration) that a developer needs. That said, I'd like to offer up a couple of areas where Microsoft could look next.
I walked away from Build impressed with the technology Microsoft has available and also what is in preview. A great deal of my research over the past 12 months has been around the impact and possibilities of AI agents and agentic workflows. However, I also am not sure we have seen something revolutionary in the SDLC — at least not yet. To me, revolutionary means that it changes the game and how it's played. Evolutionary is introducing new efficiencies to the existing game, which is what I see happening so far in this space. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean.
So far, agent-based tools are more like the outsourcing trend — but that's not necessarily bad. AI is still very new and moving very fast. Revolutionizing everything would likely overwhelm many enterprises, so embracing new tools to do existing work may just be the first step in what could ultimately be a revolutionary movement.
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