GoKawiilSince August 2025, more than half of the new code hitting Ashby’s production systems has been AI-generated, yet customer issues remain broadly stable. See the graph below. More customers. More AI-written code. The sky didn’t fall.
We have a blip in March / April every year; these cyclical patterns aren’t relevant to explain here. Cursor provides stats on how much of our code is generated by AI.
We’ve also not seen any regressions in code quality, velocity, or onboarding time for engineers (anecdotally, we’ve seen comprehension of the codebase increase!).
This isn’t a toy project. Ashby is a suite of talent acquisition software with over 100,000 weekly active users, millions of candidate applications per week, and features that resemble entire companies' worth of product (like Calendly and Looker).
I’m Colin, Head of EMEA Engineering at Ashby. I want to share with you how Ashby Engineering is thinking about AI and the changes it brings to how we work. I’m going to assume you’re an engineer.
Our thesis is that the cost of producing code is heading towards zero. AI isn’t coming for our jobs, it’s coming for the mechanical parts of them: syntax, glue code, and the tip-taps of keystrokes. The parts that are less interesting, less challenging.
The part that matters for engineers - your judgment, your taste, your understanding of our customers - is getting more important, not less. Your value as an engineer was always weighted in your judgment. Every efficiency gain in producing high-quality code shifted the role further in that direction. AI will be a larger shift than we’ve seen before.
That shift is already here. “Almost all my PRs are entirely AI-written now. I implemented an entire data ingestion via AI… It's ~40 PRs” - Tom, one of our engineers.
Like any emerging technology, the industry is figuring out how to use AI effectively to build software. When to trust it, when to override it, and what needs to change in our systems so that "move fast" doesn't become "move recklessly." It's a shared mental model, and I expect it to evolve as we learn.
The Ground Rules
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