AI automated what developers love most: coding. Yet collaboration and communication, the parts that consume most of a senior developer’s day, remain largely under supported.
A few months ago, Caleb Mellas posted a question on LinkedIn that stuck with me: “Why did we build AI to do coding, when most of our time as Senior+ engineers is actually spent talking in meetings?”
Our own pre-AI research confirmed this repeatedly: how developers actually spend their time differs from what they wish they could spend it on: What makes a good workday is more coding time and more agency, while meetings, interruptions, and coordination consistently appear as the key sources of friction. So the question Caleb was really asking is not just about time allocation. It is about what developers value in their work.
And yet those are the parts AI has left largely untouched. Developers now report using AI more while simultaneously spending less time on work they find meaningful. A recent article from Brian Houck picked up on this observation: of all the key dimensions of developer experience (and SPACE), collaboration and communication is the one least impacted by AI (and also the least studied one). That made me wonder more broadly: how has AI actually changed the way developers spend their days?
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