Anthropic claims half of its agent tool calls are to do with software engineering - so are developers letting AI take over?

By Craig Hale published 4 hours ago

Anthropic's AI agents are increasingly used by developers

Claude is used far more by developers than customer services, sales, finance or ecommerce
It's now working autonomously more than it ever did, including complex tasks
Claude clarifies details more than humans interrupt it

Anthropic has revealed around half of all Public API tool calls come from software engineering, with other sectors such as customer service, sales, finance and ecommerce only accounting for a few percentage points each.

Alongside this, Claude Code was found to be working autonomously for longer than ever before, now at over 45 minutes compared with under 25 minutes just three months ago. OpenAI says the increase in autonomy doesn't just relate to its latest, high-performance models, suggesting a broader shift to agentic AI rather than trials of its newer models.

Agentic AI is here, and it's most common in coding

In a new blog post, OpenAI outlined how users are starting to build trust with AI as tasks become more ambitious, however there's still a 'deployment overhang' whereby models are still more capable than users currently allow. External evaluations also prove that models can handle much longer tasks in ideal conditions.

Claude is also helping on the trust front, pausing to ask clarification questions more than humans interrupt it.

In terms of coding, it seems that the more complex the task, the less human oversight there is. Complex ones like exploit discovery and compiler writing see around 67% human oversight, compared with 87% oversight on simple API tasks.

Claude also asks around twice as many questions on high-complexity tasks than simple ones.

Looking ahead, Anthropic covered the importance of training models to recognize uncertainty and to proactively ask clarifying questions. The company also discourages mandating manual approval for every action, claiming that it adds friction without necessary boosting safety.


https://www.techradar.com/pro/anthropic-claims-half-of-its-ai-agent-tool-calls- are-to-do-with-software-engineering

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Re: Are developers letting AI take over?
By: Dumas Walker to All on Mon Feb 23 2026 12:56 pm

Anthropic claims half of its agent tool calls are to do with software engineering - so are developers letting AI take over?

I've noticed a lot of companies that do software engineering are pushing for their employees to be familiar with using AI coding tools to help out with their software development tasks and increase productivity. So I think it's at least partly due to company managers & executives wanting higher productivity (meaning lower development costs, since time is money).

I've been playing with some AI coding tools recently, and I do think they're good enough now where they can do some actual work for you and save time & effort. But you still need to check its output, especially for larger tasks.

I think one of the nicest things, though, is that the AI tools can help you fix build failures. It can be tedious to try to find out what could be causing errors during a build process and fix them all.

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