I’m glad to see people still employed… I remember what that was like.
Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
151–160 of 388 posts
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#152Naive question but wouldn't it could as having AI write 50%+ of your code if you just use an unintelligent complete-the-line AI tool? In this case the AI is hardly doing anything intelligent, but is still getting credit for doing most of the work.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#153I can be massively more ambitious when coding with AI, but most importantly I have zero emotional investment in the code so I can throw it away and start again whenever I want.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#154It's 80% at least for me. I've hit a groove for sure. It's not only 80% is very well tested, and almost exactly how I would have preferred. Big tips are to design your CLAUDE.md files how you would actually code from a high level perspective, and not try the usual "You are an expert Google Distributed Engineer" and all that embarassing AI hype bro crap.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#155Naive question but wouldn't it could as having AI write 50%+ of your code if you just use an unintelligent complete-the-line AI tool? In this case the AI is hardly doing anything intelligent, but is still getting credit for doing most of the work.
Yes there is even a small business that champions an small LLM that is trained on the language Lsp, your code base, and your recent coding history (not necessarily commit, but any time one presses ctrl + s). How it works is essentially autocomplete. This functionality is packaged as an IDE plugin: TabNine
However now they try to sell subscriptions to LLMs.
Tabnine has been in the scene since at least 2018.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#156This 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…
> Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace their printf() debug habits, let alone AI tooling... When I was new to the business, I used interactive debugging a lot. The more experienced I got, the less I used it. printf() is surprisingly useful, especially if you upgrade it a little bit to a log-level aware framework. Then you can leave your de…
I kind of had the opposite experience. I used to rely mostly on printfs and etc. but started using debugger more.
printf doesn't improve going up and down the call stacks in the debugger to analyze their chain (you'd have to spam debug printfs all around you expect this chain to happen to replace the debugger which would waste time). debugger is really powerful if you use it more than superficially.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, [autocomplete: I totally agree] it's so [great to have auto-complete] annoying to constantly [have to type] have tons of text dumped into your text area. Sometimes it looks plausibly right, but with subtle little issues. And you have to carefully analyze whatever it output for correctness (like constant code review).
That we're trying to replace entry/mediocre/expert level code writing with entry/mediocre/expert level code reading is one of the strangest aspects of this whole AI paradigm. There's literally no way I can see that resulting in better quality, so either that is not what is happening or we're in for a rude awakening at some point.
This is how you know the "AI" proselytizers are completely full of shit. They're trying to bend the narrative with a totally unrealistic scenario where reading and reviewing code is somehow "more efficient" than writing it. This is only true if you
(a) don't know what you're doing and just approve everything you see or
(b) don't care how bad things get
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#158Earlier 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.
Strangely I've found myself more exhausted at the end of the week and I think it's because of the constant supervision necessary to stop Claude from colouring outside the lines when I don't watch it like a hawk. Also I tend to get more done at a time, it makes it easier to get started on "gruntwork" tasks that I would have procrastinated on. Which in turn can lead to burnout quite quickly. I think in the end it's jus…
Now we just need an AI that helps with more quality.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#159Seems 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.
Is the alleviating of the mental energy going to make you a worst programmer in the long run? Is this like skipping mental workouts that were ultimately keeping you sharp?
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#160This 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…
> Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace their printf() debug habits, let alone AI tooling... When I was new to the business, I used interactive debugging a lot. The more experienced I got, the less I used it. printf() is surprisingly useful, especially if you upgrade it a little bit to a log-level aware framework. Then you can leave your de…
> printf() is surprisingly useful, especially if you upgrade it a little bit to a log-level aware framework.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean using a logging framework instead of printf()?