Adoption and Impact of Command-Line AI Coding Agents: A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI

Organizations rolling out agentic command line tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI need to know who will try them, who will keep using them, and whether the tools produce enough output to justify their cost. At organizational scale, token spend can run into millions of dollars annually, so misreading adoption, retention, or impact can make a rollout expensive without changing engineering velocity. Studying tens of thousands of engineers at Microsoft over its early-2026 rollout, we find that first use spread primarily through social networks, retention was associated more with engineers' coding activity than with demographics, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise. We use merged pull requests as our proxy for output -- acknowledging that a merged PR is not the same as the value it delivers -- and the lift persists across our four-month window. These results suggest that CLI coding agents are neither uniformly adopted nor mere novelty effects and that organizations should treat visible peer use as central to rollout strategy.

Abstractive Summarization of Spoken and Written Instructions with BERT

Summarization of speech is a difficult problem due to the spontaneity of the flow, disfluencies, and other issues that are not usually encountered in written texts. Our work presents the first application of the BERTSum model to conversational language. We generate abstractive summaries of narrated instructional videos across a wide variety of topics, from gardening and cooking to software configuration and sports. In order to enrich the vocabulary, we use transfer learning and pretrain the model on a few large cross-domain datasets in both written and spoken English. We also do preprocessing of transcripts to restore sentence segmentation and punctuation in the output of an ASR system. The results are evaluated with ROUGE and Content-F1 scoring for the How2 and WikiHow datasets. We engage human judges to score a set of summaries randomly selected from a dataset curated from HowTo100M and YouTube. Based on blind evaluation, we achieve a level of textual fluency and utility close to that of summaries written by human content creators. The model beats current SOTA when applied to WikiHow articles that vary widely in style and topic, while showing no performance regression on the canonical CNN/DailyMail dataset. Due to the high generalizability of the model across different styles and domains, it has great potential to improve accessibility and discoverability of internet content. We envision this integrated as a feature in intelligent virtual assistants, enabling them to summarize both written and spoken instructional content upon request.