The fundamentals of agent-driven software workflows

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:09)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
This week, we're talking about Lead Dev's Engineering Leadership Report, the list of most desirable AI scientists that meta and open AI are fighting over right now, and the day my toaster started taking phone calls. Ben, what catches your interest?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:27)
I mean, as much as I want to learn about a toaster making phone calls, I did get a chance to read Lead Dev's Leadership Report, so maybe we can start with that and we'll get to the toaster a little bit later.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:37)
So Lead Dev, they released their recent Engineering Leadership Report. This is something they do yearly, where they survey 600 plus engineering leaders and ask them about how their roles are changing in response to things in the economic and industry environment, things that are changing all around us. What's the sentiment of leaders and developers in this space right now? There were a lot of interesting findings in the report. Ben, what stood out to you?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:02)
Yes. I mean, the first one that I think everyone's always looking at these kind of data sets, but the effects of AI on productivity. So in this report, they mentioned that 19 percent of survey participants said they saw no impact from AI, and then a further 62 percent were somewhere in the range of 1-30 percent improvements. I think about 20 or so percent or 25 percent were in the 11-30 percent range, and then the rest were below that. And it's interesting because that really does align with a lot of the research, including our own research that we've done around productivity improvements from coding assistants primarily. I think that's the primary way that most engineering teams have adopted AI at this point. And you see usually around 10-30 percent improvement, if you're using it regularly. So definitely just aligning with stuff we've seen already in the past. One thing that was really interesting though, is 65 percent of the people that were surveyed were worried about a recession. And I do understand that people's sentiment around the economy and around the future of their own financial prosperity can often be a pretty good indicator for how things are actually looking in the real world. So that's kind of concerning. Something that counters this is they had lots of charts in this report comparing responses this year to various questions versus responses last year. One of them asked about things that your company has done over the last 12 months. And a promising sign was that both hiring freezes and layoffs dropped quite a bit this year versus the year prior. So, you know, I think kind of goes counter a little bit to the narrative of like AI is either causing people to rethink hiring plans or maybe put off hiring. But there was also some mixed bag responses, particularly around AI. A lot of companies are out there shipping AI in their products, like 63% of respondents said that their company has shipped an AI capability in the last year. In terms of biggest concerns, the people they surveyed were a little more concerned this year about things like upskilling junior developers for AI as well as code maintainability. Some of the issues that we've been seeing around, call it vibe coding or what have you, but people using AI in ways that aren't as productive, particularly junior developers.
But there's also been concerns around data privacy, intellectual property, the learning curve around this stuff. Those have actually been reduced. So it's not all a bad picture for AI adoption, but it's all over the place. I did want to mention we had Scott Carey from Lead Dev on the show a while back where we talked about where all the laid off engineers were going back during one of the last many rounds of layoffs. It'd be great to have him or someone else from Lead Dev come back on and talk about this discrepancy between the hype around AI and replacing software developers and the reality that it seems like teams still need to hire plenty of software developers.

**Andrew Zigler** (4:05)
Yeah. I think there's a lot to learn from this report. Something that really stood out to me as I was reading the results is the verb used in measuring. It's listening to what do engineers right now believe and what do they worry about. Those are really interesting indicators about the environment that people work in. And for me, that really hints at larger issues that obviously not just throwing tools that things can fix. These are communication, team, structural issues being on the same page, right? So I think there's a really big opportunity to really crack open this report and talk about that and maybe even identify some strategies for teams that do find themselves with like a lot of worry or anxiety or they have beliefs that don't match up on both sides of leadership and IC. I think there's a lot to learn from this report. So it's a great kind of start to figuring that out.