Instacart AI: Engineers Now Supervise Machines

Instacart's engineering practices are undergoing a radical transformation, with AI agents now performing the bulk of development tasks. CTO Anirban Kundu stated that engineers interact with code in merely 3% of cases, as AI handles code generation and repetitive work.

This approach frees human engineers to concentrate on high-level problem-solving, requiring judgment and exception handling. The company has also implemented an agentic site reliability engineering (SRE) system, trained on its historical incident data. This system has dramatically improved production issue detection and mitigation accuracy, rising from approximately 60% to over 90%.

The AI SRE, exemplified by the tool Blueberry, monitors numerous channels and alerts, identifying subtle issues that human intuition might miss. Instacart is redefining the engineer's role, shifting the focus from writing code to supervising AI systems, managing experiments, and identifying edge cases. Domain knowledge is also being democratized, embedded into accessible definitions rather than confined to specific teams.