Abstract
AI adoption in engineering is settled. In GitKraken’s 2026 State of AI in Engineering survey of 554 developers and engineering leaders, 96% of teams had adopted AI coding tools and 84% of developers said they feel more productive. Only about one in five can actually measure the impact. 39% of organizations have no way to measure it at all, and another third rely on developers’ self-reports.
That gap is getting harder to live with. In nine months, the share of developers who work primarily through autonomous agents roughly quadrupled, from 7.6% to 28%. A third now keep agents running the entire workday, and nearly half do in the enterprise. Agents are turning into production infrastructure that writes, reviews, and ships code all day, and AI spend has become a real line item. Boards and CFOs want to know what it returns. “It feels faster” doesn’t answer that, and neither do lines of code.
This session is for engineering leaders who are being asked to justify AI spend, and the senior engineers who end up building the dashboards to do it. It has two parts.
First, the research: how agent maturity tracks with productivity, why the teams furthest along with agents are over three times as likely to track productivity metrics, what tool choice reveals about a team’s maturity, and the four practices that separate teams who can show results from teams who can’t.
Second, a live demo of GitKraken Insights, working through the questions leaders get asked most:
Where is AI working, by team, tool, and model, and where isn’t it?
What does each tool and model cost per unit of delivered output, and how much premium-model spend is going to routine work?
Are quality and delivery (DORA, cycle time, review load) holding up as AI-assisted changes grow?
Which repositories are ready for agents, and which aren’t?
How do you give every developer their own view of the data, so measurement helps them improve instead of grading them?
Along the way, we’ll share what we learned measuring GitKraken’s own engineering org first (2.53x output in six months), and how customers apply the same approach. That includes a 600-developer health plan that rolled out in under a day, and Case IQ, whose CEO put the problem plainly: “When I sit down with our board, they don’t want to hear that developers ‘feel’ more productive. They want to see the data.”
Sponsored session
$2,995, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends November 10th. All pass options.
QCon San Francisco 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Slides & video
Video Not available
Part of the track
Sponsored Solution Track IIIFrom the same track
Tuesday 17 November
10:35 Pacific L-O Sponsored Feeling Faster Isn’t a Metric: Measuring AI’s Real Engineering Impact Jeremy Castile VP of Developer Research @GitKraken AI adoption in engineering is settled. In GitKraken’s 2026 State of AI in Engineering survey of 554 developers and engineering leaders, 96% of teams had adopted AI coding tools and 84% of developers said they feel more productive. Only about one in five can actually measure the impact. 11:45 Pacific LM Sponsored Notes From 300 Installs Inside Someone Else's Cloud Adam Hicks Senior Solutions Architect @Groundcover We run our storage and query backend inside our customers' own VPCs. They own the infrastructure. We own the pager. I'm the person who helps installs it, so I've watched this architecture meet a few hundred different production Kubernetes environments and I've kept notes on what went wrong. 13:35 Pacific LM Sponsored Why Your Document AI Fails in Production — And How to Fix the Infrastructure Underneath It Pavitter Josan Solutions Engineer @Nutrient The session explains why document AI that works in demos can fail in production: document structure can be lost during ingestion, rendering can break on edge cases, and extraction can vary across runs. When agents make routing or approval decisions, teams also need governance. 14:45 Pacific LM Sponsored Trust, but Verify: Delivering Quality with Agentic Workflows Adrian Hatch Solutions Engineer @Antithesis In spite of all the recent panic, nothing has really changed about software development. We’re worried about agents being unreliable. Newsflash: human devs are too. We’re worried about agents producing more code than we can read, but did you ever really do all your reviews within 24 hours? 15:55 Pacific LM Sponsored Your Agents Have Amnesia: Lessons from Building a Memory Layer for Multi-Agent Systems Hari Sunder Architect a@YugabyteDB Multi-agent systems have a data problem nobody warns you about. Agent B sees Agent A's final output and nothing else; the reasoning, the dead ends, and whatever Agent A figured out three steps in all get thrown away. 17:05 Pacific LM Session Sponsored Session Details coming soon!