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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

#191

Post by lenkite »

cbanek wrote: post #77
lordnacho wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is absolutely true. If anything, interactive debuggers are a crutch and actual logging is the real way of debugging. You really can't debug all sorts of things in an interactive debugger, things like timing issues, thread problems, and you certainly can't find the actual hard bugs that are in running services in production, you know, where the bugs actually happen and are found. Or on other people's machines tha…

Timing and concurrency issues are actually easier to discover in a debugger than using printf logging.

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

#196

Post by dns_snek »

ambicapter wrote: post #159
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.

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?

I know a couple of people whose mental faculties took a sharp nosedive after they started relying on LLMs too much. They might be outliers but just a few years ago I considered them to be really sharp and these days they often struggle with pretty basic reasoning and problem solving.

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

#197

Post by pera »

dang wrote: post #49
dfxm12 wrote: post #8

around a third of senior developers with more than a decade of experience are using AI code-generation tools such as Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to produce over half of their finished software, compared to 13 percent for those devs who've only been on the job for up to two years. A third? I would expect at least a majority based on the headline and tone of the article... Isn't this saying 66% are down on vibe coding?

(Article was https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/older_developers_ai_c... when this was posted; we've since changed it. We also changed the title.)

This submission was written by the marketing department of a company with commercial interests on the given topic and with almost no information about the "survey" itself, it's essentially blogspam.

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

#198

Post by com2kid »

mgh95 wrote: post #88
com2kid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The useful part is generating the mocks. The various auto mocking frameworks are so hit or miss I end up having to manually make mocks which is time consuming and boring. LLMs help out dramatically and save literally hours of boring error prone work.

Why mock at all? Spend the time making integration tests fast. There is little reason a database, queue, etc. can't be set up in a per-test group basis and be made fast. Reliable software is built upon (mostly) reliable foundations.

Because if part of my tests involve calling an OpenAI endpoint, I don't want to pay .01 cent every time I run my tests.

Because my tests shouldn't fail when a 3rd party dependency is down.

Because I want to be able to fake failure conditions from my dependencies.

Because unit tests have value and mocks make unit tests fast and useful.

Even my integration tests have some mocks in them, especially for any services that have usage based pricing.

But in general I'm going to mock out things that I want to simulate failure states for, and since I'm paranoid, I generally want to simulate failure states for everything.

End to End tests are where everything is real.

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

#199

Post by mgh95 »

com2kid wrote: post #198
mgh95 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why mock at all? Spend the time making integration tests fast. There is little reason a database, queue, etc. can't be set up in a per-test group basis and be made fast. Reliable software is built upon (mostly) reliable foundations.

Because if part of my tests involve calling an OpenAI endpoint, I don't want to pay .01 cent every time I run my tests. Because my tests shouldn't fail when a 3rd party dependency is down. Because I want to be able to fake failure conditions from my dependencies. Because unit tests have value and mocks make unit tests fast and useful. Even my integration tests have some mocks in them, especially for any services that…

> Because if part of my tests involve calling an OpenAI endpoint, I don't want to pay .01 cent every time I run my tests.

This is a good time to think to yourself: do I need these dependencies? Can I replace them with something that doesn't expose vendor risk?

These are very real questions that large enterprises grapple with. In general (but not always), orgs that view technology as the product (or product under test) will view the costs of either testing or inhousing technology as acceptable, and cost centers will not.

> But in general I'm going to mock out things that I want to simulate failure states for, and since I'm paranoid, I generally want to simulate failure states for everything.

This can be achieved with an instrumented version of the service itself.

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

#200

Post by sdesol »

protocolture wrote: post #148
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.

Joking aside, if he is one of the top developers in the company and if he is "actually" a good developer, when compared to others outside of the company, then I can see this bill.

The current feature that I'm working on, required 100 messages to finalize things and I would say the context window was around 35k - 50k per "chat completion". My model of choice is Gemini 2.5 Flash which has an input cost of $0.30/1M. Compare this to Sonnet which is $3.00/1M.

If the person was properly designing and instructing the LLM to build something advanced correctly, I can see the bill being quite high. I personally don't think you need to use Sonnet 99% of the time, but if somebody else is willing to pay the bill, why not.

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