Microsoft Details Windows AI Plan: Agent Identity, Local Models, WSL
The Pragmatic Engineer · rss · 2026-09-23
The Pragmatic Engineer interviews Microsoft's Windows team (Pavan Davuluri, Scott Hanselman, Logan Iyer) on how the next Windows bakes AI agents into the OS, aiming to win back developers.
Developer share today: Windows remains the top desktop OS (63% per Statcounter) but is losing developers. Stack Overflow 2025 still ranks it the single most-used OS among professionals, far below its XP-era peak; a JetBrains survey shows macOS close to overtaking it, with half of devs using multiple OSes. The author's own X/LinkedIn polls (10,000 responses) put Windows third behind Linux, though the sample skews to startups and Big Tech where Macs dominate.
OS-level agent capabilities:
- Agent identity & discovery: Entra ID gives agents a local identity visible in Task Manager as another user (human kirupach alongside agent V9-G4), with the same observability as humans; Defender is becoming "agent aware" and scans for known local agent activity. The Windows On Device Agent Registry (ODR) centrally registers and discovers local MCP tools, with connectors for core OS components like File Explorer.
- Isolation: Microsoft is building an OS-agnostic isolation mechanism so developers can run agent tools safely.
- Local models: WindowsML is a hardware abstraction layer for running local models across GPU, NPU and CPU; the OS aims to ship Small Language Models without requiring an NPU, with an impressive demo of a local model on a Surface laptop using NVIDIA chips.
- Building agents on Windows: opinionated frameworks and libraries devs can assume are present.
- More dev-friendly: addressing complaints about a cluttered Start menu and search.
- WSL: the embedded Linux subsystem is popular, and embracing Linux may be how Windows wins over both native Linux and macOS users.
- Hardware: Windows on ARM finally looks viable; the piece explains why ARM support took so long and the upcoming NVIDIA collaboration.
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