Why developers using AI are working longer hours

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-developers-using-ai-are-working-longer-hours/

Publish Date: 2026-03-03 08:00:00

Source Domain: www.scientificamerican.com

Software engineering was supposed to be artificial intelligence’s easiest win. Today companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google have all released AI products geared specifically to coding. And a survey of nearly 5,000 technology professionals released in a report last year by Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team found that 90 percent of respondents said they were using AI at work—with more than 80 percent saying the technology had boosted their productivity.

“We see a large majority of folks that are relying on AI to get their job done, at least a moderate amount, which is really fascinating,” says Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA team.

AI can generate code for everything from Web and mobile apps to data management tools. It often automates some of the tedious elements of the job, such as building testing infrastructure and updating software to run on new devices and systems. In some cases, even inexperienced developers can create working prototypes simply by describing their intentions to AI systems in a process often called “vibe coding,” a term coined by OpenAI co-founder and researcher Andrej Karpathy. But writing code is only part of the job; developers still have to verify that it does what it’s supposed to and fix it if it fails.

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Another finding from the DORA report was that while individual coder effectiveness appeared to rise with the use of AI, so, too, did “software delivery instability”—an assessment of how frequently code needed to be rolled back or patched after release to address unexpected issues.

“As you use more AI, you’re more likely to roll back changes that you’ve pushed into production,” Harvey says. “And this,…

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