TL;DR We surveyed 219 engineering leaders. 48% of their code is now AI-generated. 55% are worried about losing shared understanding of their own codebase. Asked for three words to describe how they feel, many put contradictory emotions in the same breath: "excited, anxious, invigorated." Meanwhile, only 19 of 219 have updated their role definitions to match a job that has fundamentally changed. Read the full report →
Three months ago, we pushed hard on agent-generated code at Augment. PR volume went up. Confidence in what was shipping went down. We took two days off the roadmap to ask the team how they were feeling. The word cloud came back with frustration and uncertainty right alongside curiosity and excitement. One group named the shift directly: from "proud builder" to "proud coordinator."
It wasn't just us
Then we started talking to other engineering leaders and realized we weren't the only ones. The same stuff kept coming up. Nobody knows how to review code that agents wrote. Engineers are asking their managers whether their skills still matter, and the managers don't have an answer. People are shipping faster than ever and trusting what they ship less than ever.
We wanted to know if this was a pattern or just our circle. So we ran a survey.
What 219 leaders told us
219 engineering leaders responded, from managers to CTOs, running teams that range from 1 to 1,000+ engineers. The sample skews AI-forward. Here's what they told us.
- 48% of their code is now AI-generated.
- 55% are concerned or very concerned about losing shared understanding of the codebase.
- 63% say their engineers are raising fears about skill relevance to their managers.
- At the largest teams (201-1,000 engineers), that last number rises to 89%.
When we asked for three words to describe how they feel about AI and the future of software engineering, many put contradictory emotions in the same answer: "excited, anxious, invigorated." "Insecurity, mistrust, hope." "Optimistic, excited, threatened."
We'd expected two groups: the optimists and the worried. Instead, it's the same people, holding both feelings at once.
What the report covers
The full report maps where the strain is showing: technical debt in the code, cognitive debt in the people, and intent debt in the specs, role definitions, and onboarding processes that haven't been updated. It walks through five contradictions in the data. The sharpest one: leaders are hiring for a different job (the #1 hiring priority is now evaluating AI-generated code; traditional coding has dropped to #5), but only 19 of 219 orgs have formally changed their role definitions.
Every problem in the report traces back to the same gap: individual engineers have adopted agents, but the organization hasn't changed around them. That's what we're building Cosmos to address: an operating system for agentic software development where humans, agents, and institutional knowledge are coordinated at the org level.
Join us live on Thursday, May 14 to discuss the findings →
Listen to what Vinay has to say about the journey to becoming AI native and what we learned from talking to 200+ engineering leaders:
Written by
Vinay Perneti
VP of Engineering
As VP of Engineering, Vinay supports product, research, and engineering teams building AI agents that truly understand large, complex codebases. Before joining Augment, Vinay led product and platform organizations at Meta and Pure Storage. He’s drawn to problems that live at the intersection of technology and people, like how teams evolve, how AI reshapes the craft of software engineering, and what it takes to build things that evoke delight.
Emma Webb
Head of Communications
Emma leads communications at Augment Code, with previous stints at CircleCI and Coursera. She hosts We Built What?, Augment's podcast for engineering leaders, and is interested in how engineering organizations describe their work as the craft itself shifts.