What a Staff Engineer Does When AI Writes Most of the Code

In April 2026, Sundar Pichai said that 75% of new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from about 50% the previous fall.

Whatever the exact share at your company, the direction is the same. More and more code is written by tools, and engineers spend more time deciding, reviewing, and owning.

That raises an uncomfortable question for senior engineers: if the code writes itself, what are we for?

My answer: the Staff engineer role doesn’t shrink. It gets more concentrated on the parts that were always the real job.

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First, a reality check on speed

It’s easy to assume AI makes everyone dramatically faster. The evidence is more mixed.

In a 2025 randomized study by METR, 16 experienced open-source developers worked on real issues in codebases they knew well. With AI tools, they took 19% longer on average. The striking part: they expected to be 24% faster, and…