SAN FRANCISCO — In May 2026, AI research lab METR published a survey showing that technical employees self-reported that artificial intelligence made them twice as valuable to their organizations. The survey followed a February 2026 METR finding that most developers refused to work on tasks without using AI, even for research purposes.

Programmer and author James Shore wrote in a viral blog post: "You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture." Aiswarya Sankar, CEO of Entelligence AI, stated in a viral tweet that companies are spending 44% of their tokens on fixing bugs generated by AI.

Additional evidence suggests AI-generated code may carry quality risks. CodeRabbit reported that its analysis of open source pull requests found AI-generated code produced 1.7 times more problems than human-written code. A 2025 study found that while developers believed AI made them more productive, it actually slowed them down due to time spent fixing errors, steering AI, and waiting for task completion.

Researchers from Singapore Management University published a report in April 2026 warning that AI-generated code can introduce long-term maintenance costs into real software projects. They recommend that programmers understand AI’s capabilities and limitations as thoroughly as they know their preferred programming languages. The researchers also advise that developers should carefully review AI-generated code as if it were written by a junior developer and implement strong quality assurance systems designed specifically for AI-generated code.

Cognition CEO Scott Wu stated that his AI coding agent Devin currently performs at a skill level between a junior and mid-level programmer, depending on the task. Both Wu and the Singapore Management University researchers agree that humans should retain responsibility for high-level tasks such as software architecture and security design.