How are coding agents changing software engineering?
Summary
Coding speed is doubling year-over-year as AI agents improve, but developers are shipping larger PRs with more code—creating a maintenance liability. The real skill now is wielding agents with discipline: quality control and thoughtful code minimization matter more than raw generation speed.
Key Takeaways
- Lines of code added per PR have grown 2.5x year-over-year, with 'mega PRs' (1,000+ line changes) becoming common. This creates maintenance risk—agents generate defensive, overly compatible code you may not need.
- AI-generated code is sticky: accepted code remains in codebases 60+ minutes later. Treat code generation as a liability requiring senior review and architectural oversight, not just a speed tool.
- Tool calls (file edits, shell commands, web searches) are rising ~30% monthly and serve as a proxy for agent usefulness. Better agents aren't just faster—they're more thoughtful about when and what to change.
- A stark 1% power user separation exists: top users are far more productive with agents than the rest. The gap suggests mastery involves systematic workflows and prompt engineering, not just access to better models.
- Context is growing dramatically with increased input tokens. Smart builders are shifting toward caching strategies and building 'factories'—repeatable systems that produce high-quality code, not one-off prompts.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
I've been writing code for the last 15 years and working as a software engineer for the last 10 and yet it feels like software engineering as a whole is changing so fast every couple months as new models come out or as coding agents get better and it can be kind of hard to understand these trends. So cursor we just released a bunch of data on how AI assisted development and coding agents have been changing the field of software engineering. So I want to read through it live and give some of my commentary on how I think about this and how it's affected my own work as an engineer. This developer habits report is going to talk about five things. So coding speed is doubling year-over-year. We're seeing larger PRs. We'll talk more about that. Agent generated code is sticking around. Uh we've be…