Jack Dorsey’s financial services firm Block rolled out a new suite of AI-native tools on Wednesday. The company said these tools can now handle about 15% of all production code changes across the company.
The new AI tooling, called Builderbot, executes over 200,000 operations per day. It also merges roughly 1,500 pull requests per week. Block shared these figures to show how autonomous AI agents are taking on a measurable share of the work that actually gets shipped to production.
How Builderbot Works
Builderbot is essentially an orchestration layer. It coordinates multiple AI agents across Block’s entire codebase. Unlike typical coding assistants that work on a single repository, Builderbot understands the full codebase — every service, API, and convention. This means any engineer at Block can make changes anywhere in the company’s systems, even if they’ve never worked on that part before.
“An engineer working on Cash App can use it to make a change in a Square service they’ve never touched, because the system already knows how that service works,” the company explained.
Brad Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, described Builderbot as “the missing layer between AI coding tools and how engineering actually works at scale.” He added that what once took months now takes days.
The tool also sheds light on Block’s earlier decision to lay off 40% of its staff in February. Dorsey attributed that move partly to the rapid acceleration of AI at the company.
The Shift to AI-Native Engineering
Block believes the transition from AI-assisted coding to AI-native engineering is one of the most important conversations in tech right now. “The problems we’re solving aren’t unique to Block: orchestrating AI agents across a massive codebase, maintaining quality at speed, keeping humans focused on judgment and taste rather than scaffolding,” the company noted.
Block isn’t alone in this trend. Engineers at Spotify have been using a background coding agent called Honk, which runs a version of Claude via Anthropic’s Agent SDK. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström said in a February earnings call that Spotify’s best developers “have not written a single line of code since December.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed in April that three-quarters of the company’s new code is AI-generated. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that Microsoft now uses AI to write between 20% and 30% of the code powering its software.
These examples suggest that AI agents are moving beyond simple code generation. They are now capable of understanding large codebases, executing complex tasks, and handling a significant portion of production work. For many companies, this means engineers can focus more on decision-making and product design, leaving repetitive coding tasks to the machines.
