Survey Surfaces Sharp Increase in Amount of Code Written by AI

A global survey of 705 developers and IT leaders reveals a significant shift in the software development industry. An astounding 42% of respondents now report that AI writes at least half of their code, while only 21% spend more than half their week writing new code from scratch. Conducted by BairesDev, a software development services provider, the survey also shows that nearly 80% of developers now spend less than half their week on coding.

This change has resulted in developers saving an average of 13 hours per week, enabling them to focus more on reviewing AI-generated code (67%) and debugging it (52%). Additionally, developers are dedicating an extra nine hours each week to learning AI tools and new technologies, which has led to a pay increase linked to expertise in AI tool fluency (29%), system architecture (20%), and human skills (15%).

The survey also reveals that 86% of developers find their role in their organization more fulfilling, and 51% of respondents believe accountability for AI-generated code lies with them personally. While AI has transformed coding, the software development lifecycle still requires human oversight. Only 7% of developers have fully delegated the ship decision to AI without any human input, while 32% have delegated it with a developer's involvement.

DevOps teams are still in the process of re-engineering workflows for the AI era, but the volume of code being generated is already overwhelming existing pipelines. At this point, humans will more likely observe and supervise AI agents rather than being in the middle of the DevOps loop. However, poorly governed AI agents could cause issues that DevOps teams might struggle to manage on their own.

To ensure safe deployment at scale, organizations must re-evaluate their continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms, which were not designed for the agentic AI era. The challenge now is to determine the best ways to employ AI agents for safe and effective software deployment.