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Amid a flurry of hype, Microsoft reorganizes entire dev team around AI

agentic AI, AI, copilot, deep learning, GitHub, llm, machine learning, microsoft, Satya Nadella, software development, Tech, visual studio / Rejus Almole / January 14, 2025

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a dramatic restructuring of the company’s engineering organization, which is pivoting the company’s focus to developing the tools that will underpin agentic AI.

Dubbed “CoreAI – Platform and Tools,” the new division rolls the existing AI platform team and the previous developer division (responsible for everything from .NET to Visual Studio) along with some other teams into one big group.

As for what this group will be doing specifically, it’s basically everything that’s mission-critical to Microsoft in 2025, as Nadella tells it:

This new division will bring together Dev Div, AI Platform, and some key teams from the Office of the CTO (AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive), with the mission to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents. This group will also build out GitHub Copilot, thus having a tight feedback loop between the leading AI-first product and the AI platform to motivate the stack and its roadmap.

To accomplish all that, “Jay Parikh will lead this group as EVP.” Parikh was hired by Microsoft in October; he previously worked as the VP and global head of engineering at Meta.

The fact that the blog post doesn’t say anything about .NET or Visual Studio, instead emphasizing GitHub Copilot and anything and everything related to agentic AI, says a lot about how Nadella sees Microsoft’s future priorities.

So-called AI agents are applications that are given specified boundaries (action spaces) and a large memory capacity to independently do subsets of the kinds of work that human office workers do today. Some company leaders and AI commentators believe these agents will outright replace jobs, while others are more conservative, suggesting they’ll simply be powerful tools to streamline the jobs people already have.

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For the first time, beloved IDE Jetbrains Rider will be available for free

The integrated development environment (IDE) Rider by Jetbrains is now available for free for the first time ever.

After trialing non-commercial free licenses with other products like RustRover and Aqua, Jetbrains has introduced a similar option for Rider. It also says this is a permanent situation, not a limited-time initiative.

In a blog post announcing the change, Jetbrains’ Ekaterina Ryabukha acknowledges that there are numerous cases where people use an IDE without any commercial intent—for example, hobbyists, open source developers, and educators or students. She also cites a Stack Overflow survey that 68 percent of professional developers “code outside of work as a hobby.”

Rider has always been a bit niche, but it’s often beloved by those who use it. Making it free could greatly expand its user base, and it could also make it more popular in the long run because learners could start with it without having to pay an annual fee, and some learners go pro.

It’s also good news for some macOS developers, as Microsoft not long ago chose to end support for Visual Studio on that platform. Yes, you can use VS Code, Xcode, or other options, but there were some types of projects that were left in the lurch, especially for developers who don’t find VS Code robust enough for their purposes.

There is one drawback that might matter to some: users working in Rider on the non-commercial free license “cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics.”

There are some edge cases that are in a bit of a gray area when it comes to using a free license versus a paid one. Sometimes, projects that start without commercial intent can become commercial later on. Jetbrains simply says that “if your intentions change over time, you’ll need to reassess whether you still qualify for non-commercial use.”