Senior engineers are spending their week cleaning up AI-generated code
New Relic study finds AI-generated code doubles critical runtime issues, with senior engineers losing a third of their week to fixes.
A New Relic survey of U.S. technology leaders reports AI now writes the majority of shipped code, with senior SRE and DevOps engineers spending up to a third of their week triaging and refactoring it. A large majority of organizations had at least one AI-related production failure in the past six months, and roughly three in ten saw newly introduced security vulnerabilities. AI-generated code showed nearly twice as many critical runtime issues as peer-reviewed human-authored code, with gaps concentrated in edge cases, concurrency, deprecated APIs, and complex state changes. Most teams now prompt AI tools to embed logs and traces directly into generated code.