Corporations are rapidly embracing AI to churn out mountains of code.
Outwardly, this is presented as a revolution in productivity. But a behind the scenes look in The New York Times paints a slightly different, and somewhat comic, picture. Beleaguered programmers are being saddled with more code than what they know what to do with, while their employers struggle to find the best way to get them to check all the AI’s hastily written work.
One financial services company, for example, saw its coding output increase tenfold after embracing the popular AI tool Cursor — creating an epic backlog of one million lines of code that needs to be reviewed, according to Joni Klippert, CEO of the security startup StackHawk, which works with the financial firm.
And the code glut isn’t something that can be ignored. Left unchecked, bad code — regardless of whether it’s AI-generated or human-written — can gum up software and cause security flaws. Amazon and Meta both recently experienced disruptions after AI tools took unauthorized actions, and those are just the ones we’ve heard about.
“The sheer amount of code being delivered, and the increase in vulnerabilities, is something they can’t keep up with,” Klippert told the NYT. The accelerated output created a “lot of stress” in other departments, like sales and marketing support, she added.
We’re now at an interesting inflection point of AI’s impact in the workplace. It’s been used to justify whittling down workforces across the globe, with one report finding that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. This year included major names in tech: Jack Dorsey’s fintech firm Block and software giant Atlassian laid off thousands of employees while touting pivots to AI.
Yet, at the same time that jobs are being eliminated, AI is also creating more work that would be best done by another human. Someone has to test the AI code, and traditionally it’d be the guy who wrote it — but nowadays they’re too busy prompting an AI agent. Who’s supposed to pick up the slack is unclear.
“There are not enough application security engineers on the planet to satisfy what just American companies need,” Joe Sullivan, an adviser to Costanoa Ventures, told the NYT.
Moreover, AI may actually be making programmers’ jobs harder. Software engineers have admitted that being expected to produce more code while having to constantly supervise their AI tools is accelerating them towards burnout — a phenomenon that’s been documented in emerging research into the topic. One ongoing study dubbed this mental health toll AI “brain fry.”
Companies are still grappling with how to address the code glut. “The blessing and the curse is that now everyone inside your company becomes a coder,” Michele Catasta, the president and head of AI at the startup Replit, told the NYT.
Sachin Kamdar of the AI agent startup Elvix took a hardline approach: all code must be reviewed by a human, because it’d be harder to fix down the line if no one understood what the AI cooked up in the first place.
“It’s just going to break something, and they’re not going to know why it broke,” he told the NYT.
Another solution is throwing more AI at the problem. Anthropic and OpenAI have released AI agents designed to review code. And in December, Cursor, the provider of the much hyped AI coding tool, bought the startup Graphite, which builds an AI code reviewing platform.
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