Instacart's AI Agents Write 97% of Code Unseen

Instacart's engineers have stopped reading most of their own code. CTO Anirban Kundu told the audience at VB Transform 2026 that in 97% of cases, the company's builders no longer look at what AI agents generate. That's not a productivity stat pulled from a slide deck. It's a description of how Instacart now writes software.

Kundu's argument runs deeper than the usual AI-coding-assistant pitch. He says the repetitive, high-volume work that eats up engineering hours, boilerplate, regeneration, routine maintenance, should belong to machines, freeing humans for the calls that actually need judgment. Instacart has built its own AI system for this, trained on years of internal incident data, and it's already changing how the company thinks about problems like tech debt. Code that isn't active gets dropped and rebuilt rather than patched, an approach Kundu compares to how engineers once treated assembly or object code: disposable, regenerable, not precious.

The remaining 3%, legacy systems, compliance-heavy workflows, anything latency-sensitive, still needs a human eye. But Kundu's framing raises a bigger question for engineering teams everywhere: how much of what developers do today is actually necessary, and how much is just habit.