Google's senior director of product explains how software engineering jobs are changing in the AI era (www.businessinsider.com)

Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment team published a report showing AI-assisted development is now nearly universal: 90% of surveyed software professionals (up 14% year-over-year) use AI, based on a survey of 5,000 global tech workers and 100+ hours of interviews. Developers report a median of two hours per day using AI to generate and review code, write documentation, create test cases, and analyze data. The study signals that AI has moved from niche tooling to core workflow, reshaping how day-to-day engineering work gets done. That shift is changing job boundaries and skill priorities. Google product leaders say AI is expanding the pool of “builders” — product managers can rapidly prototype and engineers spend less time typing syntax and more time on architecture, deployment decisions and defining product capabilities. Sundar Pichai cites a ~10% lift in engineering velocity and Google plans to hire more engineers as opportunity grows. Still, the report stresses that programming fluency remains essential: surprisingly, knowing language syntax rose in perceived importance, and about 30% of respondents distrust AI’s outputs. In short, AI lowers barriers to participation but increases the premium on reading, validating, and architecting code rather than just writing it.