Coding Agents in Practice: Q3 2026

Coding Agents in Practice: Q3 2026

Over 100 engineering leaders weighed in on how their teams are putting coding agents to work, managing review demands, and sharing effective practices. Explore the findings to see how other organizations are adapting, assess your own team’s approach, and identify where to focus next.

Over 100 engineering leaders weighed in on how their teams are putting coding agents to work, managing review demands, and sharing effective practices. Explore the findings to see how other organizations are adapting, assess your own team’s approach, and identify where to focus next.

Key Findings

1. Code review remains the most acute problem

73%

73%

of engineering leaders identify review volume, senior-reviewer burden, or both as a top-two problem. As agents produce more code, teams face growing demands on human review capacity.

2. The performance gap is widening

68%

68%

say the gap between their strongest and weakest engineers has widened since adopting AI. Access to the same tools isn’t translating into the same results.

3. Effective practices rarely become team standards

19%

19%

say effective AI practices get captured and rolled out as a team or org standard. Helping those practices spread is an opportunity to make the whole team more effective.

4. Teams are rethinking human review

38%

38%

already let some agent PRs merge with sampled or no human review. Mandatory review of every change is beginning to give way to new approaches to verification.

Where does your team stand?

Quality in the Age of AI: The Engineering Leader’s Playbook

Meet with a former CTO on Span’s team to see how your organization compares. We'll help you identify opportunities to improve your software development process.