08/30/2026
Daily AI agent use is up 70.8%. Stress levels are down 44.6%. Do we sense a connection?
Our latest survey of 554 engineering teams is a lot to unpack but here’s the brief: We expected to find at least some panic, but instead we found calm. A majority of respondents are more optimistic about their job prospects than a year ago (77.5%), and only about a quarter of their companies (27%) are pausing or stopping hiring.
In the write-in responses, a significant number of engineers rejected the idea that AI agents even factor into their stress levels. There are plenty of other things to stress about.
We asked them to complete this sentence: “From what I’m seeing, everyone just needs to __.”
Top answer: “Chill.”
Read the report:
We surveyed 550 engineers about how often they use AI agents, what they use them for, where deployments break down, and how the shift affects their work.