Ideatives Inc. · State of software engineering
We know it's 2026.
Eight sourced briefs on building and running software this year.
Checking agent code is the slow part.
Developers say agents fully write ~47% of their code. Median time in PR review rose 441.5%.
More output, less stability.
Each 25% rise in AI adoption goes with an estimated 7.2% drop in delivery stability.
Production is the test.
36% of respondents report a high-impact outage weekly or more.
New Relic Observability Forecast, 2026 · Outage frequency data →
Cost is a design decision.
Respondents estimate 29% of their cloud spend is wasted. Architecture choices set the bill before finance sees it.
Your provider's outage is yours.
The major 2025 cloud outages came from the providers' own config changes and automation bugs. None was an attack.
Dependencies are attack surface.
A worm hit 500+ npm packages in 2025. In August 2026 a malicious version of a popular Rust crate was live for 86 minutes.
CISA, September 2025 · Rust, August 2026 · npm worm incident log →
Rented platforms change course.
Atlassian shuts Opsgenie down in April 2027; unmoved data is deleted. Heroku stopped adding features in 2026.
Usability is quality.
95.9% of the top million home pages had automatically detected WCAG 2 failures in 2026.
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