Are Devs Becoming Lazy? The Rise of AI and the Decline of Care

Thoughtless reliance on AI is a concern, but this post also hearkens back to a halcyon age that never existed. The places where developers use tab-complete now are exactly those where they would have previously copied from Stack Overflow, which suffers from the same issue of convenient but insecure code becoming widely adopted. If anything, LLMs are able to exercise some degree of quality control due to post-training improvements rather than sampling only from the middle of the training distribution, so the average suggestion should be better and less stale than the SO equivalent.

The primary danger here is a substitution effect in which developers who would previously have thought carefully about a given bit of code no longer do, because the AI takes care of it for them. Both anecdotally and in my own experience, developers can still discern between situations where they are the expert, in which case it is more efficient to rely on their own code than AI suggestions because it lowers the chances of error, and situations where they are operating outside their expertise or simply writing boilerplate, in which case AI is the optimal choice.

I challenge anyone to produce a well-documented study in which the average quality of a large codebase declines as the correlates of AI usage rise. Until I see that, I will continue to read "decline of care" posts as "kids these days."

> However we’ll be using AI for code reviews and security audits soon

So the solution to the problems that genAI brings is more genAI? I'm very skeptical about that.

AI code review is better than no code review, and it's also better than a brief glance at the git diff of a codebase too big for the human equivalent of a context window where we all know we shrug and type "lgtm" before clicking accept… but it's definitely not a silver bullet either.

To keep the metaphor, it's an M60: ammo hungry, easily damaged or jammed, still very popular.

We've always been lazy.

To the point I've seen people here argue against striving for quality workmanship, in favour of efficiency.

But like any other trade, some of us are craftsmen who really care about our work.

One thing I have noticed with some newer coworkers / fresh grads is that they seem much more willing to copy someone's issue from slack into gpt and regurgitate out a "here's what gpt says", which muddies the water a bit or is at least a bit unhelpful.

Which is fine - developing the feeling of what to say and when takes time and experience. And sometimes it can help, after all - or spark a useful learning opportunity about why a particular llm recommendation looks useful but isn't. Though it takes a bit of energy to walk the line of teaching and encouraging growth without dampening enthusiasm, and spending that energy is its own opportunity cost.

But it does feel a bit different than before - I don't recall seeing as much less-helpful "here's what a stack overflow post said" messages in threads years ago. It did and does happen, but I think it is much more common with LLMs.

Thankfully, that is just a case of someone actively trying to not be lazy; trying to help, using the resources at hand. Decades ago that would have meant looking in some old docs or textbooks or specs, years ago that would have been googling, and now it's something else.

I think the accessibility and availability of answers from LLMs for such "quick research" situations is the culprit, rather than any particular decline in developer behaviors themselves. At least, in this case. I'm sure I would have seen the same rate of "trying to help but getting in the way" posting years ago had stack overflow or google had a way of conjuring answers to questions that simply didn't exist in its corpus.

I think the "in the old days" sentiment from the author somewhat divides things into a before/after AI situation, but IMO it has been a gradual gradient as new tooling and information sources have become available. AI is another one of those, and a big jump, but it doesn't feel like a novel change in "laziness" yet.

Though, there's been some big pushes towards relying more and more on various AI code reviewers and fuzzers in my area. I feel like that is an area where the author's concerns will come more and more into play - laziness at the boundary layers, at the places of oversight; essentially, laziness by senior devs and leadership.