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Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

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Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#111

Post by ath3nd »

revskill wrote: post #96
sublinear wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying everyone who isn't barely starting their career is a genius? In the current state of things I'd gladly take mediocre work from a human over slop from an AI.

You have prompt skill issue.

The only study currently trying to measure productivity of experienced devs using LLMs showed they suffer a 19% decline in productivity.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Since that study demonstrated that experienced developers currently suffer a decline in their productivity when using LLMs, it's perfectly likely that less experienced/junior developers who normally will struggle with syntax or simple tasks like organizing their code are the ones experiencing the boost of productivity from LLMs.

Thus, it seems the devs benefitting the most from LLMs are the ones with the skill issue/more junior/early in their career.

Which group do you belong to?

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#112

Post by jckahn »

ponector wrote: post #103
beambot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work". If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.

How can AI search into documentation, if the documentation is a thousands of obsolete and contradicting Jira tickets, few outdated Confluence pages with mail attachments and handful of excel files on SharePoint?

With the necessary MCP servers.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#113

Post by dns_snek »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #62
exfalso wrote: post #38

Mostly feeling like a caveman. I've been trying and failing to use it productively since the start of the hype. The amount of time wasted could've been used for actual development. I just simply don't get it. Productivity delta is literally negative. I've been asking to do projects where I thought "oh, maybe this project has a chance of getting an AI productivity boost". Nope. Personal projects all failed as well. I…

No, you're not alone I find it wastes my time more than it helps Everyone insists I must be using it wrong I was never arrogant enough to think I'm a superior coder to many people, but AI code is so bad and the experience using it is so tedious that I'm starting to seriously question the skills of anyone who finds themselves more productive using AI for code instead of writing it themselves

Agreed, but I'm also open to the likely possibility that LLMs genuinely work quite well in a few niches that I don't happen to work in, like writing run-of-the-mill React components where open source training data is truly abundant.

In day to day work I could only trust it to help me with the most conventional problems that the average developer experiences in the "top N" most popular programming languages and frameworks, but I don't need help with that because search engines are faster and lead to more trustworthy results.

I turn to LLMs when I have a problem that I can't solve after at least 10 minutes of my own research, which probably means I've strayed off the beaten path a bit. This is where response quality goes down the drain. The LLM now succumbs to hallucinations and bad pattern-matching like disregarding important details, suggesting solutions to superficially similar problems, parroting inapplicable conventional wisdoms, and summarizing the top 5 google search results and calling it "deep research".

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#114

Post by kldg »

torginus wrote: post #92
piva00 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using SO since it first launched, and through time it has changed a lot already. It used to be simple to ask questions and get answers, when it grew and the huge influx of questions required moderation it was a nice smooth change but over time the pearl clutching of mods to mark many reasonable questions as irrelevant started to grip the usefulness. I used to answer a lot of the basic questions just to help…

Yeah, SO had many problems, I'd argue most stemming from the points system that: - Made people treat it like a contest and tried to game it - Obscure, difficult questions, with obscure, difficult answers barely being valued, while 'How do I make a GET request in node' going gangbusters.

as an aside, the ranking/rating systems are largely why I quit using social media a long time ago and stick to a small chatroom of people I know. it's relatively tolerable here where scores aren't next to posts (and the user base generally tolerant, lets whoever say their piece and move on), but I use following ublock filter to hide the score stuff:

news.ycombinator.com###karma

news.ycombinator.com##.score

news.ycombinator.com##td:has-text(/^karma:$/):upward(tr)

I've thought about removing the graying feature and maybe doing a random sort of replies, but haven't accumulated enough spite yet.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#115

Post by ishita159 »

Most engineers on my team are feeling let down with the AI hype. Vibe coding makes some mistakes and does a good job of hiding the things it gets wrong.

They spend more time spotting and fixing bugs and basically have been feeling frustrated.

It's also annoying for the team in general. Projects that would otherwise take a couple of days have sometimes taken over 2 weeks, and it is hard to predict how long something will take. That adds a lot of pressure for everyone.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#116

Post by ath3nd »

exfalso wrote: post #38

Mostly feeling like a caveman. I've been trying and failing to use it productively since the start of the hype. The amount of time wasted could've been used for actual development. I just simply don't get it. Productivity delta is literally negative. I've been asking to do projects where I thought "oh, maybe this project has a chance of getting an AI productivity boost". Nope. Personal projects all failed as well. I…

> I don't get it. I guess I'm getting old. "Grandpa let me write the prompt, you write it like this".

It's not you getting old (although we all are), it's that you are probably already experienced and can produce better and more relevant code than the mid-to-low quality code produced by any LLM even with the best prompting.

Just so we are clear, in the only current actual study measuring productivity of experienced developers using an LLM so far, it actually led to a 19% decline in productivity. So there is a big chance that you are an experienced dev, and the ones that do experience a bump in productivity are the less experienced devs.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

I also want to mention that you are not alone. There are plenty of us, see here:

- Claude Code is a Slot Machine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702046

- GPTs and Feeling Left Behind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44851214

- I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44858641

The current LLM hype reminds me of the Scrum/Agile hype where people could swear that it works for them and it if didn't for you, you were not following some scrum ritual right. It's the same with LLMs, apparently you are not asking nicely enough and giving writing 4000 lines of pseudocode and specs to produce 1 line of well written code. LLM coding is the new Scrum: useful to an extent and in moderation, but once they become a cult, you better not engage and let it die out on its own.

There will be a whole industry of prompting "experts", prompting books, the same as there were different crops of SCRUM, SAFe, and who knows what else. All we can do is sit on the sidelines and laugh.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#117

Post by revskill »

ath3nd wrote: post #111
revskill wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have prompt skill issue.

The only study currently trying to measure productivity of experienced devs using LLMs showed they suffer a 19% decline in productivity . https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Since that study demonstrated that experienced developers currently suffer a decline in their productivity when using LLMs, it's perfectly likely that less experienced/junior developers who normally will struggle with…

No, it's just logical, LLM is a useful tool, those experienced are just code monkeys that whey they got stuck.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#119

Post by ath3nd »

revskill wrote: post #117
ath3nd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only study currently trying to measure productivity of experienced devs using LLMs showed they suffer a 19% decline in productivity . https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Since that study demonstrated that experienced developers currently suffer a decline in their productivity when using LLMs, it's perfectly likely that less experienced/junior developers who normally will struggle with…

No, it's just logical, LLM is a useful tool, those experienced are just code monkeys that whey they got stuck.

> No, it's just logical, LLM is a useful tool

How open are you to the possibility that it's the other way around? Because the study suggests that it's actually junior code monkeys that benefit from LLMs, and experienced software engineers don't instead get a decline of their productivity.

At least that's what the only available study so far shows.

That's corroborated with my experience mentoring juniors, the more they struggle with basic things like syntax or expressing their thoughts clearly in code, the more benefit they got from using LLM tools like Claude.

Once they go mid-level and above, the LLMs are a detriment to them. Do you currently get big benefit from LLMs? Maybe you are more early in your career?

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#120

Post by ath3nd »

hoherd wrote: post #73
sublinear wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying everyone who isn't barely starting their career is a genius? In the current state of things I'd gladly take mediocre work from a human over slop from an AI.

Seriously this. Doing code reviews on LLM created code is so frustrating. If the code was submitted by a junior engineer I could get on zoom with them and educate them, which would make them a better team mate, advance their career goals, and make the world slightly better. With AI created code the review process is a series of tiny struggles to dig up out of the hole the LLM created and get back to baseline code qua…

There is a reason why maintainers of OSS tools reject AI slop PRs: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/15/curl_creator_mulls_ni...
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