note · 2026-09-16

Teams write more code and ship less of it: main branch throughput fell 7% while feature branch activity rose 15%

CircleCI analyzed 28,738,317 workflow runs. Daily runs rose 59% year over year, the top 5% of teams nearly doubled theirs and the median team gained 4%. On the main branch, where code reaches production, the median team went backwards.

For founders and CTOs of SaaS companies whose agents write more code than the release process can absorbyaab1 min read
Teams write more code and ship less of it: main branch throughput fell 7% while feature branch activity rose 15%

Writing code stopped being the constraint a year ago. Shipping it did not, and the pipeline data says that is now the general case.

CircleCI analyzed 28,738,317 workflow runs and published its 2026 State of Software Delivery on February 18, 2026. Average daily workflow runs rose 59% year over year, and almost all of it went to the top: the best 5% of teams nearly doubled their runs, up 97%, the median team rose 4% and the bottom quartile did not move. Where the work landed matters more than the total. For the median team, feature branch activity rose 15% while throughput on the main branch, where code reaches production, fell 7%. Main branch success dropped to 70.8%, the lowest in over five years against the 90% CircleCI recommends, and the typical team takes 72 minutes to get back to green, 13% longer than the year before.

Charity Majors, cofounder of Honeycomb, quoted by The Pragmatic Engineer on X on August 30, 2026: production is a stage of development.

For a SaaS company on a weekly release that is the whole business, because one merge reaches every customer at once. In the codebases we work in the fix was never more generation. It was tests on every change, releases that roll back by themselves, and integrations that fail in staging.

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