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

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

#141

Post by krainboltgreene » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:04 AM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #80

PhantomHour wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind those are revenue figures, they're costing claude hundreds a day. One imagines Leadership won't be so pleased after the inevitably price hike (which, given the margins software uses, is going to be in the 1-3 thousands a day) and the hype wears off enough for them to realize they're spending a full salary automating a partial FTE.

But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output. At least that's how it's been with OSS models, or with the Openai api model. So maybe the inevitable price hike (or rate limiting) may lead to switching models / providers and the results being just as good.

> But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output

So far there's negative evidence of this. Things are getting more expensive for similar outputs.

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

#142

Post by nicodjimenez » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:05 AM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #79

yodsanklai wrote: post #65

Seems about right for me (older developer at a big tech company). But we need to define what it means that the code is AI-generated. In my case, I typically know how I want the code to look like, and I'm writing a prompt to tell the agent to do it. The AI doesn't solve any problem, it just does the typing and helps with syntax. I'm not even sure I'm ultimately more productive.

Yeah I’m still not more productive. Maybe 10% more. But it alleviates a lot of mental energy, which is very nice at the age of 40.

What kind of codebases do you work on if you don't mind me asking?

I've found a huge boost from using AI to deal with APIs (databases, k8s, aws, ...) but less so on large codebases that needed conceptual improvements. But at worst, i'm getting more than 10% benefit, just cause the AI's can read files so quickly and answer questions and propose reasonable ideas.

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

#143

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:09 AM UTC

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…

The right tool for the right job. If someone gets the job done with printf() then that would be good enough for me.

Interactive debuggers are a great way to waste a ton of time and get absolutely nowhere. They do have their uses but those are not all that common. The biggest usecase for me for GDB has been to inspect stacktraces, having a good mental model of the software you are working on is usually enough to tell you exactly what went wrong if you know where it went wrong.

Lots of people spend way too much time debugging code instead of thinking about it before writing.

Oh, and testing >> debugging.

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

#144

Post by gdubs » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #95

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…

I've tried the interactive debuggers but I'm yet to find a situation where they worked better than just printing. I use an interactive console to test what stuff does, but inline in the app I've never had anything that printing wasn't the straightforward fast solution.

I'm not above the old print here or there but the value of an interactive debugger is being able to step and inspect the state of variables at all the different call sites, for instance.

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

#145

Post by Sl1mb0 » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

nicodjimenez wrote: post #142

danielvaughn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m still not more productive. Maybe 10% more. But it alleviates a lot of mental energy, which is very nice at the age of 40.

What kind of codebases do you work on if you don't mind me asking? I've found a huge boost from using AI to deal with APIs (databases, k8s, aws, ...) but less so on large codebases that needed conceptual improvements. But at worst, i'm getting more than 10% benefit, just cause the AI's can read files so quickly and answer questions and propose reasonable ideas.

How are you quantifying that 10% ?

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

#146

Post by gdubs » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:25 AM UTC

One thing I don't hear a lot of people talk about is building prototypes. That's where I see a gigantic time savings. It doesn't have to be beautiful code, it just has to help me answer a question so I can make a decision about where to go next. That and tools. There have been many times where I've wanted to build a task-specific tool but justifying the time would be hard. Now I can create little tools like that, and it's a huge productivity boost.

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

#147

Post by TheRoque » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:30 AM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #122

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.

Really ? I find myself thinking the opposite. My program always runs in debug mode, and when there's some issue I put a breakpoint, trigger it, and boom I can check what is wrong. I don't need to stop the program, insert a new line to print what i _guess_ is wrong, restart the program from scratch etc.

Properly debugging my stack is probably one of the first things I setup because I find it way less tedious. Like, for example, if you have an issue in a huge Object or Array, will you actually print all the content, paste it somewhere else and search through the logs ? And by the way, most debuggers also have ability to setup a log points anyways, without having to restart your program. Genuinely curious to know how writing extra lines and having to restart makes things easier.

Of course I'm not saying that I never débug with logs, sometimes it's require or even more efficient, but it's often my second choice.

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

#148

Post by protocolture » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:56 AM UTC

philip1209 wrote: post #15

I looked at our anthropic bill this week. Saw that one of our best engineers was spending $300/day on Claude. Leadership was psyched about it.

Is he using it to code or just chatting up his AI girlfriend.

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

#149

Post by devmor » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 2:58 AM UTC

I’m still yet to find a use-case for AI-generated code in my workflow.

Even when I am building tools that heavily utilize modern AI, I haven’t found it. Recently, I disabled the AI-powered code completion in my IDE because I found that the cognitive load required to evaluate the suggestions it provided was greater and more time consuming than just writing the code I was already going to write anyways.

I don’t know if this is an experience thing or not - I mainly work on a tech stack I have over a decade of experience in - but I just don’t see it.

Others have suggested generating tests with AI but I find that horrifying. Tests are the one thing you should be the most anal about accuracy on compared to anything else in your codebase.

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

#150

Post by uludag » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 3:04 AM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #2

I guess I’m an older developer. But I’ve come full circle and have gone back to hand coding after a couple years of fighting LLMs. I’m tired of coaxing their style and fixing their bugs - some of which are just really dumb and some are devious. Artisanal hand craft for me!

I'm in the same exact boat. I started with a lot of different tools but eventually went back to hand coding everything. When using tools like co-pilot I noticed I would ship a lot mode dumb mistakes. I even experimented with not even using a chat interface and it turns out that a lot of answers to problems are indeed found with a web search.