AI-Assisted Development at Block | Block Engineering Blog
January 19, 2026
About 95% of our engineers are regularly using AI to assist with their development efforts. The largest population is at Stage 5, running a single agent mostly outside of an IDE. The second largest population is at Stage 6 and is running 3-5 agent instances in parallel. Then there’s a small population that is actively building our internal agent orchestrator in preparation for the inevitable.
So how does an engineering organization move from Stage 1, where engineers are just starting their AI-assisted coding journey, to an advanced stage where they are managing so many parallel agents that they now need an orchestrator? Here’s how we’re doing it at Block.
I think it’s very valuable to read about the experiences of not just individual software engineers but larger organisations in their adoption of machine learning and generative AI in their software engineering practises. Here Angie Jones from Block’s open source team talks about how Block is adopting these technologies. This is a large organisation doing serious work in the financial technology space, and so I think it’s very valuable to pay attention to what teams like this are doing.
