Over eight in 10 developers expect AI agents to take on most work

However, only 37% described their codebase as ready for a fully autonomous agent.

The majority of Singapore developers, or 83%, expect artificial intelligence (AI) agents to handle most development work within three years, a report by Agoda showed.

However, only 37% described their codebase as mostly or fully ready for a fully autonomous agent.

More than half, or 58%, said AI agents are already being used in selected production workflows, whilst 45% said agents are used broadly across teams, the highest share of any market surveyed and well above the regional figure of 31%.

Meanwhile, 79% across the region said they still require human approval for production deployment.

The report found that AI costs extend beyond model calls to include the work needed to design, integrate, review, and validate agents.

“The real cost is not simply the model call. It is the work required to make AI trustworthy in production,” Idan Zalzberg, chief technology officer at Agoda, said.

Amongst the markets surveyed, 28% cited cost as the primary barrier to wider adoption, followed by integration complexity at 24% and lack of governance at 19%.

About 90% of Singaporean respondents reported working under AI usage limits, such as token quotas, usage caps, or budget restrictions, compared with 81% regionally.

Amidst the broader AI adoption, system architecture and design, AI literacy, and agent
orchestration are emerging as future skills, the report showed.

Nearly half, or 49%, of junior developers reported feeling less secure about their future career prospects, compared with 17% of CTO and VP Engineering respondents.

Some 42% of Singapore developers identified managing AI risk as engineering leadership’s biggest near-term challenge.

The report was based on over 800 actively employed software developers and
engineering leaders from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.