Ideatives Inc. · State of software engineering

We know it's 2026.

Building and operating software isn't the same anymore. Eight sourced briefs on what changed.

  1. Checking agent code is the slow part.

    Developers say agents fully write ~47% of their code. Median time in PR review was 441.5% higher in teams' highest-AI quarters (vendor telemetry).

    JetBrains, 2026 · Faros, 2026

  2. Stability drops as AI use rises.

    In DORA's model, each 25% rise in AI adoption goes with an estimated 7.2% drop in delivery stability.

    DORA, 2024

  3. Production is the test.

    36% of 2,575 respondents report a high-impact outage weekly or more.

    New Relic Observability Forecast, 2026

  4. Cost is a design decision.

    Respondents estimate 29% of their cloud spend is wasted, about the same as in 2020.

    Flexera State of the Cloud, 2026

  5. Your provider's outage is yours.

    Lightning-related power disturbances impaired Azure West US 2 for 22 hours in May 2026. One of 19 provider incidents from 2026 reviewed.

    Microsoft, May 2026 · Railway, May 2026 · Google Cloud, Sep 2026

  6. Dependencies are attack surface.

    A worm compromised 500+ npm packages in September 2025. In August 2026 a malicious version of a popular Rust crate was live for 86 minutes.

    CISA, Sep 2025 · Rust, Aug 2026

  7. Rented platforms change course.

    Atlassian shuts down Opsgenie on April 5, 2027 and deletes data not migrated. Heroku stopped adding features in February 2026.

    Atlassian · Heroku, 2026

  8. Usability is quality.

    95.9% of the top million home pages had automatically detected WCAG 2 failures in 2026.

    WebAIM Million, 2026

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