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RS Randy Shoup On Refactoring

“What we're immediately seeing with AI is that the gains are very much not evenly distributed. … The best teams are getting better very fast, quarter over quarter. … And the throughput of the bottom 75% has not changed at all, whereas the top 25% have bent the curve in this exponential way up.”

Refactoring · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026

“What we're immediately seeing with AI is that the gains are very much not evenly distributed. … The best teams are getting better very fast, quarter over quarter. … And the throughput of the bottom 75% has not changed at all, whereas the top 25% have bent the curve in this exponential way up.” — Randy Shoup, Refactoring

Context

Shoup is relaying CircleCI's quarterly software delivery data, drawn from pipelines across a very large number of organizations, in answer to what AI adoption is doing to engineering teams.

Transcript

Refactoring
Randy Shoup

we get to see hundreds of thousands of organizations

Speaker 4

yes and and and you publish great research every quarter about uh i mean the number literally the numbers that you look from your customers from the organizations that yeah that work with you and uh so what are you seeing recently yeah great thank you

Randy Shoup

so i didn't personally contribute to any of this research which is why i can be so proud about it uh so circle ci until this year published yearly yes state of software delivery reports so very similar to state of devops reports and inspired by that very directly circle ci publishes state of software delivery report and again we're not the only ci provider in the world but we're a big one and so we as a consequence we get to see millions upon millions of pipelines get executed from hundreds of thousands of different organizations and so we see a pretty broad cross-section yes of the industry and so uh things are changing so fast that we're no longer doing yearly state of software delivery reports we're now doing quarterly ones so there was one in q2 um which is already amazing and evocative and we just had one in our q3 one come out like a week or two ago uh so they're both free to download please go check them out read them at your leisure it's actually extremely well written and extremely helpful what do we see in q1 we were seeing that the uh the very best five percent of…

Speaker 4

and sorry before we do that and and that's i

Luca Rossi

mean that's not because the median teams are not trying

Randy Shoup

no i mean

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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