Onboarding a Developer with AI: A Better First-Day Experience | DEM367
Michel Hubert demonstrates how AI can improve developer onboarding by helping a new team member understand a codebase faster, find relevant context, identify key components, and make an initial contribution with less frustration and a shorter path to impact.
Overview
The session focuses on using AI during a developer's first days on a team to reduce time spent getting oriented and to accelerate the first meaningful contribution.
Key themes covered in the demo:
- Using AI to explain an unfamiliar codebase and surface relevant context for a new developer.
- Replacing long, manual onboarding walkthroughs (for example, extended whiteboard sessions) with a faster, interactive overview.
- Having an agent distinguish between active code paths and legacy areas based on recent activity signals.
- Investigating a performance-related pain point involving PostgreSQL.
- Comparing approaches and identifying likely root causes.
- Proposing backend updates and providing code suggestions.
- Implementing the fix and updating the codebase to complete a first contribution.
Session context
- Event: Microsoft Build 2026
- Session: DEM367
- Level: Intermediate
- Track: Developer tools & frameworks