Instacart CTO Anirban Kundu reported at VB Transform 2026 that 97% of the company's engineers no longer read code. AI agents handle bulk code generation, including full weekly regeneration cycles on newer projects. The remaining 3% sits in legacy, compliance, and latency-sensitive systems, plus large volumes of dead or partially active code that still require human attention.
The numbers behind the shift are specific. Instacart runs roughly 7,000 automated code evaluations per month and handles over 8,000 real-time developer queries at 99.9% accuracy. Its agentic SRE system, called Blueberry, monitors 200-plus Slack channels and was trained on Instacart's own historical incidents rather than generic failure data. That specificity pushed production issue detection accuracy from 60% to over 90%. In one real incident, Blueberry identified a misbehaving database shard tied to an EBS volume hiccup and a misconfigured rollout system called 'roulette' before the human team had a working hypothesis, roughly 20 minutes in.
The full piece is worth reading for how Kundu frames the engineer's job going forward: not writing or reviewing code, but designing evaluation processes, managing concurrent experiments, and encoding domain knowledge into specs any team can access. Instacart is also mid-execution on a project called Atoms, decomposing monolithic systems into RPC-driven architectures to eliminate the remaining 3% of human-dependent code. The argument is not that AI is good enough. It is that the organizational model built around human code ownership is already obsolete.
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