Engineering managers writing code and engineers directing AI agents

For its Engineering Leadership Report 2026, LeadDev surveyed six hundred technical leaders in the software industry. Of these, 37 per cent are doing more hands-on technical work than in 2025. Among engineering managers the share rose from 20 to 35 per cent in a year. At every level, leaders spent more time coding and reviewing code themselves: 41 per cent of tech leads, 31 per cent of managers of engineers, 30 per cent of managers of managers and 44 per cent of CTOs. They also gave more time to architecture decisions and technical strategy. LeadDev sets the figures against a backdrop of organisations becoming flatter while AI changes how code is written and reviewed.

Between 27 January and 17 February 2026, The Pragmatic Engineer surveyed over nine hundred readers, both engineers and managers. Of these, 95 per cent use AI tools every week and 55 per cent use agents regularly. Use varies by role: 63.5 per cent of staff+ engineers, 49.7 per cent of other engineers, 46.1 per cent of engineering managers and 51.9 per cent of directors and VPs. In their April 2026 analysis, the authors read in the responses that engineers increasingly have to orchestrate and switch between tasks, while engineering managers are able to build more themselves. In their view, the roles of engineer and manager are starting to resemble each other.

Stack Overflow sees the shift on the engineer’s side too. In its Developer Survey 2026, with 30,903 respondents from 169 countries, the company quotes its own CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar: with AI, every individual becomes almost a manager of agents. Chandrasekar offers this as a possible explanation for the share of respondents working as a one-person business, which rose from 3.9 to 10.5 per cent in a year.

What this does to management has not yet been measured. Leaders LeadDev spoke to, such as Emma Bostian of Spotify and Paul Williams of Bloomberg, see value in staying technical, while holding on to vision, stakeholder alignment and growing the team as the core of the role. See also the briefing Span of control and how much hands-on work managers still do, in which Gallup measures the point beyond which a manager’s own hands-on work drags down team engagement.

How solid is this? Two independent publishers see the same movement in 2026, both with self-selected readers from the software industry and with no earlier series apart from LeadDev’s single comparison year. Nobody yet measures how much time managers spend on their own work and what that does to the team.