Software developers spend only 16% of their time actually coding.
That’s one of the key takeaways from Atlassian’s “The State of Developer Experience in 2025”, based on IDC’s survey report.
How does that number land with you? Does it match your day-to-day reality as a software developer?
The Atlassian report also highlights other interesting insights—like the number of hours per week developers save on manual tasks thanks to AI tools. 46% save between 11 and 20 hours a week… not bad at all.
The report also breaks down the list of tasks—beyond writing code—for which developers use AI (in order):
Searching and finding information.
Testing.
Writing and improving documentation.
Automating workflows.
Chatting or interacting with AI.
Personally, I disagree with #2, testing. I believe code tests should be written by us developers, not by AI. That said, “testing” could also refer to scripts for proofs of concept or small experiments—and in that case, I do agree with using AI.
So far, we’ve got two key points:
We only spend 16% of our time coding.
And from that other 84%, we can cut down many hours thanks to AI.
Now, if we add the fact that—as developers—we enjoy coding, I think we can reach an interesting takeaway you can carry with you on our journey to becoming AI Native:
Use AI for all the tasks that keep you from doing what you love: coding.
I’m sure AI doesn’t mind handling for us things like:
Documentation.
Jira tickets.
Meeting notes.
Emails to management.
(say the next one).
That way, we can dedicate more than just 20% of our time to coding.
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For me the joy is the journey, sometimes that means coding, sometimes it's the thought process, nowadays those thoughts are just shared with an LLM in the moment which is reminiscent of pair programming; occasionally you swap who is doing the driving.
Re tests being written by the developer what are your reasons here? I'm of the opinion they should be defined by the dev/QA not necessarily written by them, but if your sentiment is "who tests the tests" I can see where you're coming from.
Great article thanks for sharing!