Engineers lose 17+ days a year to AI rework

A vendor survey reported by LeadDev finds engineers lose at least 17 working days a year fixing AI-assisted code, while outside code reaches production unreviewed.

Michael Hill reports for LeadDev, a publication for engineering leaders, on a survey by ActiveState, a company that sells tools for managing open-source code. ActiveState polled more than 300 security, platform and engineering leaders at organisations with over 1,000 employees in North America and Western Europe. Their answers suggest that the speed gained from AI coding tools is offset by rework, delayed releases and outside code that nobody checked.

• Almost half of respondents say at least a tenth of an engineer's time goes on fixing AI-assisted code, a floor of 139 hours a year for each engineer.
• Nearly all say AI has increased their use of open-source code, and half say new dependencies can reach production with no prior review.
• Only 26% of the effort spent on open-source risk goes into prevention before code ships, and respondents think it should be closer to 37%.
• The article recommends treating dependency review as part of code review, including for pull requests written by AI.

The figures come from a vendor that sells dependency controls, so they show a direction rather than a precise cost. A team can test the claim against its own sprint records before acting on it, which is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Track rework on AI-assisted work as its own category, so the 139 hours stops hiding in sprint carryover.

21 October 2026: as AI tools multiply code, documents and prototypes, the work that counts moves to judging, reviewing and keeping track of what they produce.