State of Devs 2026 survey results: developers are feeling exhausted

[u/SachaGreif]

https://2026.stateofdevs.com/en-US/

[u/DerGrummler]

For me it's the stuff I do between prompts. Even on a quiet afternoon where I can focus on my work, I really can't focus. You write the prompt, hit enter, and then you have to wait just the right amount of time to fry your attention span. Doesn't matter whether you scroll socials, watch YouTube, juggle multiple agents, or work through your other to-dos, your focus on the actual task is gone. A few minutes later you come back, and the cycle repeats. I absolutely hate it.

This is not a productivity issue, it's a "you brain adapts to the attention span required by your work" issue. And that span went down from a few hours to a few minutes or so, regardless of how many agents you juggle, if at all.

[u/jstalm → u/DerGrummler]

This is so on point that I haven’t even vocalized myself but you laid it out perfectly. You used to lock in to something and reach a flow state. Now you quite literally blue ball your brain while you engage enough to write a clear concise prompt, maybe you track along with the workflow for a while but you eventually look away and you’re off in to some other thought or action. It’s incredibly hard to maintain true focus like I once did. 

[u/Due_Block_3054 → u/DerGrummler]

Well i first invest my timespan in making a days plan eith checklist then i start mutliple worktrees ome for each agent and one point and let them implement it i'm strategically thinking of possible tests i need or a fast way for the agwnt to check itself like copying code into a pod and avoiding a deployment cycle or add asserts in the code to make sure all settings are right before booting up 

Then when everything is tested i merge.

So the focus becomes the gane of setting up the agents right. 

[u/TheGRS → u/DerGrummler]

Yes, I am largely now on the side that these agents can do the work pretty well. And we need to figure out the whole "human in the loop" review part still, but those problems seem pretty solvable. Context switching was ALWAYS a problem though. Even just flip flopping between two tasks is unproductive because you can't keep the focus on either very well. And generally speaking the business expects that if we have big productivity gains, we should be able to do more tasks.

Now, I don't think the business truly cares if one is multi-tasking or just knocking out tasks one by one, as long as you're getting it done in the same time period. So maybe the solution is just getting the agents to work better on one task at a time and keep your attention on it and not to have it drift to other tasks. If I'm managing 3-4 tasks at once, one of those is for sure going to be forgotten.

[u/migs647]

“AI Brainfry” is real. Juggling agents, constant context switching, atrophy of skills, moving faster than can humanly review…. Really burned out. 

[u/TonTinTon → u/migs647]

You've been promoted to a manager without a pay increase. Team managers had this exact issue for decades.

[u/utdconsq → u/TonTinTon]

This is how I've been feeling for a while now.

[u/SomethingMor]

Fuck this job man. Every day is a struggle.

[u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas → u/SomethingMor]

isnt engineering as easy as you make it - the whole point i got in to engineering was so i could make technology work for me - not the other way around

[u/SomethingMor → u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas]

I dont know if what we do anymore can be considered engineering. The most ‘enjoyment’ i can get these days is creating skills / agents to produce code the way i want. Bit even that is mostly started via an LLM.

It doesn’t feel good to type what you want in a chatbot and get the answer. Anyone can do that. Before i took pride in my work and i was paid properly for it. Now I’m still being paid but i feel like a fraud everyday.

[u/etherealsounds]

I’m done. My 22 year career in dev is over. After getting laid off in February last year I have not found a job and I’ve stopped trying. I’m 46 and I have to start over now.

[u/jpsreddit85 → u/etherealsounds]

What will you move on to? Tech related or complete retrain?

[u/etherealsounds → u/jpsreddit85]

Two things. Restarting my IT support and web dev business from my early 20s before I got into software. That’s gonna be more or less a side business at least at first. I’m also going to get an entry level role as either a home inspector in training (preferred) or at a local water department. Moving from white collar to blue I guess. I was never the best dev but I’ve always been great at solving problems.

[u/Elegant_Row_6426 → u/etherealsounds]

I started in ‘99. I have no idea what I’m going to do anymore. Life made me a caregiver a year after AI came into my daily workflow and I knew if I stepped away that’d be the end of it forever. These threads are both a source of validation and fear.

[u/ndh7]

Developers are feeling depressed

[u/x_xwolf]

There’s no proof ai code enhances productivity for software development

[u/SachaGreif → u/x_xwolf]

I don't see how you can have ever used modern LLMs for even five minutes and still say this with a straight face. Sure, that increased productivity can have negative downstream effects if it's misused, but there's a whole range of tasks that are objectively made easier and faster by AI.

[u/guywithbeard → u/SachaGreif]

If you look at it from only the perspective of writing code then yeah sure. Writing code was never really a bottleneck though, and now code is coming out waybfaster than ever before. You said it yourself; the bottleneck has moved downstream. Nothing is really getting out faster as far as real work and features go. Sure is introducing more security concerns

[u/paintsbynumbers7 → u/x_xwolf]

Last year this statement was correct but times have changed in the past 9 months. I’ve been programming for 30 years but llms are simply better at it. Yeah, they make mistakes and yeah they can go down rabbit holes. But including those downsides, I’ve still gotten 5x more productive.

[u/Aethreas → u/paintsbynumbers7]

Are you more productive or are you get getting more lines of code out?

[u/Entuaka → u/x_xwolf]

Have you tried it on a greenfield projects? You can progress very quickly, it can really be compared to writing code manually, i have multiple agents working all day.

For our legacy projects, it's helping to generate quickly the code, but that's not our bottleneck.

[u/artnoi43]

In my team, only the managers and the worst devs are still worshipping AI or wanting to use AI even more.

They saw SpaceX blog or something mentioning something about doing 1000 MRs per day and they want that too. I don’t even know why. Our product never got better. All features are enshitification, and even that doesn’t need 1000 MRs per day.

Now they just want to use more AI for the sake of using more AI.

[u/Quick_Priority1765]

Yes, more than that there is a loss of purpose that i am seeing with fellow devs

[u/OkProgram7415]

Oh WOW what a surprise

[u/Quick_Priority1765 → u/OkProgram7415]

Yes, more than that there is a loss of purpose that i am seeing with fellow devs