Anthropic’s new Economic Index adds survey data to usage telemetry, tying delegation patterns to work expectations. The concrete signal: Claude Code sessions show 0.37 points more autonomy on a 1-5 scale than chat or Cowork, and the linked sample includes about 9,700 respondents.
OpenAI’s new Economic Research paper frames Codex as a shift from chat to delegated work. Among organizational users, non-developer Codex adoption is up 189x since August 2025, and 70.2% of sampled individual users have assigned at least one task estimated to take a human more than an hour.
While AI tools have accelerated code production, they have simultaneously expanded engineering responsibilities and raised unspoken expectations, driving burnout and an identity crisis among developers.