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Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

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Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#121

Post by spmurrayzzz »

mr90210 wrote: post #56

> survey of 791 developers We have got to stop. In a universe of well over 25 million programmers a sample of 791 is not significant enough to justify such headlines. We’ve got to do better than this, whatever this is.

I generally agree with this just from a perspective of personal sentiment, it does feel wrong.

But statistically speaking, at a 95% confidence level you'd be within a +/- 3.5% margin of error given the 791 sample size, irrespective of whether the population is 30k or 30M.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#122

Post by marssaxman »

lpapez wrote: post #63

This article goes completely against my experience so far. I teach at an internship program and the main problem with interns since 2023 has been their over reliance on AI tools. I feel like I have to teach them to stop using AI for everything and think through the problem so that they don't get stuck. Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace…

That's funny. I remember using interactive debuggers all the time back in the '90s, but it's been a long time since I've bothered. Logging, reading, and thinking is just... easier.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#123

Post by sramam »

StrandedKitty wrote: post #110
ojosilva wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see much mention of tab-completions in the survey and comments here. To me that's the ultimate coding AI is doing at my end, even though it seems to pass unnoticed nowadays. It's massive LOC (and comments!), and that's were I find AI immensely productive.

Does it even fall into "AI-generated" category? GitHub Copilot has been around for years, I certainly remember using it long before the recent AI boom, and at that time it wasn't even thought of as any kind of a breakthrough. And at this point it's not just a productivity booster, it's as essential as using a good IDE. I feel extremely uncomfortable and slow writing any code without auto-completion.

I think there is a difference between type system or Language Server completions and AI generated completion.

When the AI tab completion fills in full functions based on the function definition you have half typed, or completes a full test case the moment you start type - mock data values and all, that just feels mind-reading magical.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#124

Post by rblatz »

verdverm wrote: post #105
ottah wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you have to keep dismissing incorrect auto-complete? For me I have a particular idea in mind, and I find auto-complete to be incredibly annoying. It breaks flow. It has no idea my intention, but very eagerly provides suggestions I have to stop and swat away.

fwiw, VS Code has a snooze auto complete button. Each press is 5m, a decently designed feature imo

Copilot replacing intellisense is a huge shame. Why get actual auto complete when you can get completely hallucinated methods and properties instead.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#125

Post by LeafItAlone »

LoganDark wrote: post #87
baq wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the split personality vibe here.

You probably jest, but I'm sure some HN users do actually have split personalities. (or dissociative identities, as they're called nowadays)

And I’m sure some HN users are autistic or have other traits that make them unable to appreciate a joke.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#126

Post by felipeerias »

svachalek wrote: post #93
dboreham wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in my experience actually no. At least not with the bleeding edge models today. I've been able to get LLMs to write whole features to the point that I'm quite surprised at the result. Perhaps I'm talking to it right (the new "holding it right"?). I tend to begin asking for an empty application with the characteristics I want (CLI, has subcommands, ...) then I ask it to add a simple feature. Get that working…

All the hype is about asking an LLM to start with an empty project with loose requirements. Asking it to work on a million lines of legacy code (inadequately tested, as all legacy code) with ancient and complex contracts is a completely different experience.

Very large projects are an area where AI tools can really empower developers without replacing them.

It is very useful to be able to ask basic questions about the code that I am working on, without having to read through dozens of other source files. It frees up a lot of time to actually get stuff done.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#127

Post by VectorLock »

mgh95 wrote: post #86
VectorLock wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parameterized tests are good, but I think he might be talking about exercising all the corner cases in the logic of your function, which to my knowledge almost no languages can auto-generate for but LLMs can sorta-ish figure it out.

We are talking about basic computing for CRUD apps. When you start needing to rely upon "sorta-ish" to describe the efficacy or a tool for such a straightforward and deterministic use case, it may be an indicator you need to rethink your approach.

If you want to discount a tool that may save you an immense amount of time because you might have to help it along the fast few feet, thats up to you.

If you can share a tool that can analyze a function and create a test for all corner cases in a popular language, I'm sure some people would be interested in that.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#129

Post by another_twist »

theonething wrote: post #112
another_twist wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to dealing with shitty platforms AI is really the best thing ever. I have had the misfortune of writing automations for Atlassian with their weird handling of refresh keys and had AI not pointed out that Atlassian had the genius idea of invalidating refresh keys after single use, I would have wasted a lot more of my time. For this sort of manual labout, AI is the best tool there is.

> invalidating refresh keys after single use That's called refresh token rotation and is a valid security practice.

I know but the RFC doesnt mandate it. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6749#section-6

Not sure why Google doesnt do this but Atlassian does.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#130

Post by LarryMade2 »

dboreham wrote: post #28
LarryMade2 wrote: post #19

I tried it - didn't like it. Had an LLM work on a backup script since I don't use Bash very often. Took a bunch of learning the quirks of bash to get the code working properly. While I'll say it got me started, it wasn't a snap of the fingers and a quick debug to get something done. Took me quite a while to figure out why something worked but really it didn't (LLM using command line commands where Bash doesn't interp…

Can I ask which agent/model you used? I'm similarly irritated with shell script coding, but find I have to make scripts fairly often. My experience using various models but latterly Claude Code has been quite different -- it churned out pretty much what I was looking for. Also old, fwiw. I'm older than all shells.

It was Gemini, I picked the point of least resistance. I've heard Claude does better but haven't looked at it.
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