Kilo Code Co-Founder: Our Engineers Now Read or Write Code Themselves About 1% of the Time
In a VentureBeat panel published August 4, Kilo Code co-founder Emilie Schario put a hard number on agentic displacement inside her own company — roughly 1% of engineering time is spent with humans touching code directly. Replit's head of product engineering Amol Jain described a deliberately more conservative posture he framed as 'human on the loop, not human in the loop,' where an agent risk-scores every PR and only low-risk ones self-merge, and recounted a gnarly bug where a manager agent spun up sub-agents that produced a working PR in six hours after humans failed to reproduce it. Schario's cost playbook is the transferable part: frontier models for architecture, open-weight models for the rest, after customers told her 'I accidentally spent my whole AI budget for the year.'
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