The OverheardMarch 17, 2026via Pragmatic Engineer
Are AI agents actually slowing us down?
Why it matters
As AI agent adoption accelerates in software development, early evidence suggests they may be creating more problems than they solve - forcing leaders to rethink their AI-first development strategies.
Key signals
- Increased software quality issues with AI agent usage
- Shipping velocity slowdown correlated with AI agent adoption
- Rising outage frequency in teams using AI agents
The hook
Everyone is focused on AI agents boosting productivity. Nobody is talking about them slowing down software teams.
As more software engineers use AI agents daily, there’s also more sloppy software, outages, quality issues, and even a slowdown in shipping velocity. What’s happening, and how do we solve it?
Relevance score:85/100