Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys revealed that engineering teams draft instructions for AI agents to execute code-writing tasks overnight while engineers sleep. Humphreys stated that senior engineers’ jobs have become “largely review”—checking AI output and steering agents rather than writing code themselves.
Engineers still spend significant time defining problems and translating vague, conflicting requirements into production-ready specifications. Humphreys stressed that effective AI agent use requires “precision of articulation” in requirements and “mastery of the domain” to verify correctness across Canva’s approximately 70 million lines of code.
Spotify CEO Gustav Söderström reported that the company’s most senior developers have not written a single line of code since December, instead supervising an internal AI system. A January Anthropic report found AI appears in roughly 60% of developers’ work, but engineers can fully delegate only 0–20% of tasks, with the rest requiring human supervision.
Sonar’s 2026 State of Code survey found 96% of developers do not fully trust AI-generated code, yet only 48% say they always verify it before committing. AWS CTO Werner Vogels termed this gap “verification debt”—developers spending significant time reviewing AI output rather than creating it.
Research indicates AI-generated code shows higher cyclomatic complexity and can introduce duplicated logic and inconsistent patterns, creating technical debt visible only at scale. Senior engineers are becoming increasingly valuable for spotting architectural problems and maintaining system integrity, not for coding speed. Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat stated the burden of work has shifted from creation to verification and debugging.
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