Good vibes, happy coding: Making life better for developers in the age of AI

Developers all know the feeling of flow - when you’re deep in the zone, building something you love, with no distractions, just you and the problem that you are solving. That’s ‘developer joy’: the pure satisfaction of creating, coding and making progress. 

But too often, that joy is interrupted. Every day, developers lose time because of inefficiencies in their organisation - they get bogged down in repetitive tasks and waste time navigating between different tools.

They also end up losing time trying to locate pertinent information – like that one piece of documentation that explains an architectural decision from a previous team member. Our latest State of DevEx report revealed that in 2025, half (50%) of developers reported losing more than 10 hours every week due to organisational inefficiencies and non-coding tasks. 

If software development were an F1 race, these inefficiencies are the pit stops that eat into lap time. Every unnecessary context switch or repetitive task equals more time lost when trying to reach the finish line.

To keep developers moving - and enjoying the ride - companies need to prioritise identifying what holds back developer productivity and joy, while introducing context-rich AI that can work with developers on these time-stealing tasks.

Measuring impact on flow

 As companies introduce agentic AI into work, measurement becomes critical. Without understanding what is truly slowing teams down, it’s easy to automate the wrong problems. AI’s successful adoption shouldn’t be measured by lines of code generated or tickets closed, but by its impact on flow. This means fewer interruptions, faster resolutions, and more time spent on meaningful work.

At the same time, we are seeing a gap between what leaders think frustrates developers and what is actually causing grievances. In fact, the majority (68%) of developers think that leadership does not fully understand their challenges. For example, leaders might think that the most valuable use case for AI is assisting with coding. But in actual fact, coding itself only accounts for a fraction - 16% - of developers’ time – so AI may be better applied in other ways.

When teams measure the right signals and close the communication gap between developers and leadership, they can deploy AI where it matters most - restoring developer joy.

Fixing the flow with AI

 AI is already being deployed in the development process, and 68% of developers use AI to save more than 10 hours per week in 2025.

But while AI is helping developers write code, it’s not yet helping with the rest of the time-consuming work - documentation, reviews, coordination and incident response. Agentic AI is the perfect programming partner; it can plan, code, review and automate repetitive work at scale, freeing developers to focus on solving meaningful problems. 

One of the biggest flow killers for developers is pausing coding to look things up. An AI assistant embedded in the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can observe developers and provide guidance proactively. This prevents flicking between documentation, code files, or browser tabs, letting developers stay immersed in their tasks.

AI needs context

 To truly deliver value, AI needs more than code-level understanding; it needs deep contextual understanding. Almost all of the world is running on Brownfield software, built over years by evolving teams. The knowledge behind that code, meaning the why it has been created, not just the what, lives in specs, user stories, requirements, documentation and past decisions.

Training AI on this enterprise context means that when a developer receives a task, their AI agent already knows the related documentation, dependencies, and acceptance criteria. It can act as a true teammate, surfacing insights, understanding architectural trade-offs and suggesting changes that fit your standards. 

Without that context, AI becomes an expensive autocomplete, constantly prompting for more input. With proper context, you get smarter, faster suggestions, often with less tokens and effort.

Enabling a seamless flow

 Developers don’t want to get stuck on repetitive tasks; they want to focus on thoughtful and innovative work. With context-aware, agentic AI teammates working alongside them, developers can remove friction points and stay in the flow. This means developers can focus on creating great software and bring joy back to their day-to-day.

Sven Peters is AI Evangelist at Atlassian