From code-first to intent-first: Microsoft Build 2026 could be the end of programming as we know it

Redefining what it means to be a developer with agentic AI

Features By Ritoban Mukherjee published 2 June 2026

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• AI-native programming at Build
• What is intent-first programming?
• Code-first vs. intent-first
• Microsoft's AI plans
• What this means for devs

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Microsoft Build is the company's annual developer conference, running every year since 2011. This year, it has a clear organizing theme: AI agents. Scheduled for June 2 and 3 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, it's the first time Build has left Seattle since 2016.

Microsoft has kept in-person attendance to around 2,500 developers, with Satya Nadella delivering an opening keynote framed around "creating new opportunities for developers across our platforms in this era of AI." With a smaller attendance capacity and tight event schedule, Microsoft is hoping to make this the defining event for its AI-native products.

Last year, Microsoft Build produced more than 50 announcements across GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), establishing autonomous coding agents and multi-agent orchestration as the central developer story. A year on, much of that tooling has graduated from preview to production. Build 2026 is expected to show where it goes next.

• Register for Microsoft Build here

AI-native programming at Build 2026: What to expect

Microsoft has organized the Build 2026 session catalog across seven tracks, with Agents & Apps, GitHub, and developer productivity at the top of the agenda. Developer tooling announcements are expected to reflect the company's central framing for the event: 'agents.'

GitHub Copilot's autonomous coding agent, first announced at Build 2025, has had a year in real-world deployments. The agent can pick up a GitHub Issue, spin up an isolated environment through GitHub Actions, work through the task, and open a pull request for human review. Build 2026 is expected to show the next generation of that capability, including multi-agent coding workflows and deeper integration between GitHub and Azure services.

On the platform side, Azure AI Foundry is likely to receive significant additions. Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 reached general availability in April 2026, giving .NET and Python developers a production-ready SDK for multi-agent orchestration. Sessions at Build are expected to show how that framework connects to Foundry's agent runtime, managed memory, and observability tooling at scale.

Microsoft has also been pushing AI capabilities to the device layer. Windows AI PCs carrying Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen AI processors have been on the market for two years. The developer tooling is finally matching the hardware. Build sessions are expected to cover Windows Copilot Runtime APIs that target on-device NPUs, enabling a hybrid architecture where simpler inference tasks run locally and complex ones go to the cloud.

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