“Developers are still pretty happy, even though AI essentially takes away the writing of the code. It wasn't really about the act of typing code. It was about being able to build something that benefits somebody else. As long as they remain in the driver's seat and can choose what to build and design a solution, they are oftentimes still pretty happy about the creation part of their work.”
Engineering Enablement · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026
Context
Brian Houck asked what would change about a "good day" for developers if the Good Day study were rerun now that AI does much of the coding. André Meyer says the core findings, making progress on something meaningful with few blockers, still hold.
Transcript
Yes.
…this idea that we're all going to be managers of agents. And so we're constantly switching between tasks. I'm curious, if you were to rerun this study today, what do you think would change around how, like, what makes a developer feel like this was a good day versus this was not a good day?
So one of the core findings of the study was that developers said that on a good work, They were able to create something of value, which means they were able to make progress and work on something that is meaningful. And I think this hasn't changed. The other thing that we've also seen is that on good days, they are able to spend time efficiently. So, this means they have very few blockers and no infrastructure issues and few interruptions and things like that. Sadly, this also has not changed yet. And I would argue that AI, in some cases, even creates more interruptions. And then finally, they also said that on good days, they spend more time coding and they have more time to actually write code, which is pretty cool. On good days, this was around 30% of their time. Yet, it wasn't really about the act of typing code or like really writing it down. It was again really about being able to build something that benefits somebody else at some point. And this is also why many of the developers we are talking to today with AI are still pretty happy, even though AI essentially takes away that part of their job, which is the writing of the code. But as long as they remain in…
Now, I do think that for many developers, having a sort of deep understanding of how the system works was also like a sense of joy, and they liked to get deep into the technical details. And you say that as we move to sort of higher levels of abstraction, you're still dictating what it is we're…
I would say yes or no. So, yes, there is this switch of from writing code to orchestrating agents more or supervising agents more and then reviewing code as well. But I think it really depends on whether the developer can decide what they delegate and what they still want to keep close to their…
So, we've talked quite a bit about collaboration so far. And, you know, in your Good Day paper, you sort of like look at that tension a little bit between collaboration can be incredibly helpful, particularly around things like planning and spec generation, but it's also a source of interruptions.…
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