The Pulse: What will the Staff Engineer role look like in 2027 and beyond?
Also: new trend of token costs becoming a worry for CTOs, 10% cuts at Atlassian, and more.
The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Hit reply and share it with me.
Before we start, I’d like to share updates about data in the two most recent articles:
Uber’s AI adoption numbers. The Dev Platform folks at Uber have been kind enough to share the latest up-to-date numbers on AI adoption, following Tuesday’s article, which reported that 31% of all code is AI-authored. It turns out this was incorrect, due to a bug with one of the tools. Here’s how things look there:
84% of devs at Uber are agentic coding users (either CLI-based agents, or making more agentic requests than tab-completion in the IDE).
65-72% of code is AI-generated inside IDE-based tools. For AI command line tools like Claude Code the figure is, naturally, 100%.
Claude Code usage almost doubled in 3 months; from 32% last December, to 63% by February. Meanwhile, IDE-based tool usage (Cursor, IntelliJ) have plateaued.
Separately, last week’s edition of The Pulse reported that Block did not make job cuts between 2022 and 2025, which was incorrect. Layoffs happened in Jan 2024 and March 2025. I have updated my analysis with these details; apologies for the error.
Today, we cover:
Staff+ engineers in 2027 and beyond. What happens to the Staff engineer role when agents write more code? Actually, they could be more in demand than ever!
New trend? AI token costs are a rising concern for CTOs. Accounts from two engineering leaders who are raising the alarm about steeply climbing AI costs and the need to slow down spending.
10% layoffs at Atlassian: is it AI’s fault? Atlassian says it wants to invest savings in AI, but is there more to it?
Industry Pulse. An AI-powered library reimplementation sparks copyleft licensing debate, Anthropic launches $15–25 per-review code reviews, Microsoft ships a Claude-powered, Copilot Cowork clone, and Apple is the lone Big Tech not ramping up AI infrastructure spending.
1. Staff+ engineers in 2027 and beyond
At a recent two-day workshop in Utah, US, named ‘The Future of Software Development’, and organized by Martin Fowler, I was among 50 attendees. We self-organized our own sessions, where everyone could suggest a topic close to their heart, which all went on an agenda: