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Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
181–190 of 388 posts
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, fo…
Also conditional breakpoints. I.e. break on this line if foo==5
I couldn't imagine going back to print statement based debugging. Would be a massive waste of time.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
AI makes so many mistakes, I cannot trust it with telling me the truth about how a large codebase works.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#184Seems 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.
100%. My instructions are often pretty exact "i want a genserver that fetches the data every X sec and updates Y if new data"
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#185This 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…
it can get even better
https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/tracing.html#i-dont-wa...
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#186This 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.
Yeah, I remember learning to use gdb when I was beginning in the early 2000s. I totally thought I was "levelling up" as a programmer and to be honest felt kinda badass with all those windows open in Emacs. But I've found that the number of times I actually resorted to using the debugger has been so small I don't remain fluent in it's use. What am I supposed to do? Write more bugs? On the other hand, I'm always ready to read, think and put in some print/log statements.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#187Jesus, that's a staggering figure to me coming from senior developers. I guess I'm the odd one out here, but ChatGPT is nothing more than an index of Stack Overflow (and friends) for me. It's essentially replaced Googling, but once I get the answer I need I'm still just slinging code like an asshole. Copying the output wholesale from any of these LLMs just seems crazy to me.
If you’re using ChatGPT directly for work then I believe that you are doing it so profoundly wrong, at this point, that you’re going to make really incorrect assumptions.
As we have all observed, the models get things wrong, and if you’re wrong 5% of the time, then ten edits in you’re at 60-40. So you need to run them in a loop where they’re constantly sanity checking themselves—-linting, styling, typing and testing. In other words; calling tools in a loop. Agents are so much better than any other approach it’s comical precisely because they’re scaffolding to let models self-correct.
This is likely somewhat domain-specific; I can’t imagine the models are that great at domains they haven’t seen much code in, so they probably suck at HFT infrastructure for example, though they are decent at reading docs by this point. There’s also a lot of skill in setting up the right documentation, testing structure, interfaces, etc etc etc to make the agents more reliable and productive (fringe benefit; your LLM-wielding colleagues actually write docs now, even if they’re full of em-dashes and emoji). You also need to be willing to let it write a bunch of code, look at it, work out why it’s structurally deficient, throw it away, and build the structure you want to guide it - but the typing is essentially free, so that’s tractable. Don’t view it as bad code, view it as a useful null result.
But if you’re not using Claude Code or Codex or Roo or relatives, you’re living in an entirely different world to the people who have gone messianic about these things.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#188I don't know about half, but I do use AI a lot these days to speed run the boilerplate to get to the good parts.
I think it's important to have a least the level of experience to be able to quickly verify that the generated code will work as expected.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And this varies widely between models based on how they are told to reason.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#190[deleted]