The Big Bang: A.I. Has Created a Code Overload

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The Big Bang: A.I. Has Created a Code Overload

Companies are scrambling to deal with the glut.

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Mojo Wang

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By

Mike Isaac

and

Erin Griffith

Reporting from San Francisco

April 6, 2026

When a financial services company recently began using Cursor, an artificial intelligence technology that writes computer code, the difference that it made was immediate.

The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm.

“The sheer amount of code being delivered, and the increase in vulnerabilities, is something they can’t keep up with,” she said. And as software development moved faster, that forced sales, marketing, customer support and other departments to pick up the pace, Ms. Klippert added, creating “a lot of stress.”

Since

A.I. coding tools from Anthropic

, OpenAI, Cursor and other companies took off last year, one result has now become apparent: code overload.

Aided by these tools, tech workers are producing so much code so quickly that it has become too much to handle. With anyone — not just engineers — able to spin up software ideas in a matter of hours, companies are trying to figure out how to deal with the glut.

In Silicon Valley, many tech workers see this moment as a new reality they must adapt to as companies incorporate A.I. tools into daily work. Some said the tools granted them coding superpowers, allowing them to spend more time coming up with software ideas instead of doing the arduous work of building it.

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