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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

#221

Post by freehorse »

encody wrote: post #217

I think I'm using it wrong. I'm using Zed as my editor, and maybe 18 months ago I upgraded my system. I didn't miss the AI autocomplete at the time, so I didn't bother to set it up again. However, around two weeks ago I figured I'd give it another go. I set up GitHub Copilot in Zed and... it's horrible. It seems like most of its suggestions are completely misguided and incorrect, usually just duplicating the code imm…

> suggestions are proactively generated and count against your account credit even if not accepted

This is no longer the case. They only count if you accept them.

Ime their model is not great, but better than copilot (ime copilot is just too slow and disruptive).

Also the options you have for tab-complete, afaik, are zed/zeta, guthub copilot, supermaven, and local models. I dont think there are other providers right now, glad if I am wrong in that.

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

#222

Post by laurentiurad »

This is the usual propaganda from private equity that invest in LLMs to make you feel like you're missing out for not generating AI slop yourself. I am not surprised that this gets so much traction on YC-owned website since they invest only in AI generating slop companies lately.

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

#223

Post by darkwater »

theshrike79 wrote: post #215
darkwater wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the folks on the "reduce mental burden", "reduce cognitive load" train, are you all aware that this basically means you are exercising less your brain day in and day out, and in the end you will forget how to do things? You will learn how to guide an AI agent, but until the day an AI agent is perfect (and we don't know if we will ever see that day), you are just losing inch by inch your ability to actually un…

This, to me, feels like you're complaining to the 45 year old builder that they should be using a hammer instead of a nail gun. I know how to nail a nail, I've nailed so many nails that I can't remember them all. My job is to build a house efficiently, not nail nails. Anything that can make me more efficient at it is a net positive. Now I've saved 2 hours in the framing process by using a nail gun, I have 2 extra hou…

IMO it's different. That's why I brought the e-bike similitude: climbing even mild mountains or hills with your own legs will actually make your legs, heart and lungs stronger in the process. So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only). We might say that using a hammer constantly will develop more your muscles, but in carpentry there are still plenty of manual work that will develop your muscles anyway. (and we still don't have bricks laying machines)

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

#224

Post by closewith »

darkwater wrote: post #223
theshrike79 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, to me, feels like you're complaining to the 45 year old builder that they should be using a hammer instead of a nail gun. I know how to nail a nail, I've nailed so many nails that I can't remember them all. My job is to build a house efficiently, not nail nails. Anything that can make me more efficient at it is a net positive. Now I've saved 2 hours in the framing process by using a nail gun, I have 2 extra hou…

IMO it's different. That's why I brought the e-bike similitude: climbing even mild mountains or hills with your own legs will actually make your legs, heart and lungs stronger in the process. So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only). We mig…

> So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only).

The vast majority of developers aren't summitting beautiful mountains of code, but are instead are sifting through endless corporate slop.

> We might say that using a hammer constantly will develop more your muscles, but in carpentry there are still plenty of manual work that will develop your muscles anyway.

The trades destroy human bodies over time and lead to awful health outcomes.

Most developers will and should take any opportunity to reduce cognitive load, and will instead spend their limited cognitive abilities on things that matter: family, sport, art, literature, civics.

Very few developers are vocational. If that is you and your job is your identity, then that's good for you. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that's a normal or desirable situation for others.

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

#225

Post by mlnj »

sdesol wrote: post #200
protocolture wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Com…

Meanwhile an entire lake has evaporated in Northern Canada to deliver me a slightly different version of yet another payment options page.

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

#226

Post by watwut »

darkwater wrote: post #212
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.

For all the folks on the "reduce mental burden", "reduce cognitive load" train, are you all aware that this basically means you are exercising less your brain day in and day out, and in the end you will forget how to do things? You will learn how to guide an AI agent, but until the day an AI agent is perfect (and we don't know if we will ever see that day), you are just losing inch by inch your ability to actually un…

> are you all aware that this basically means you are exercising less your brain day in and day out, and in the end you will forget how to do things?

IDE did the same thing and we found other ways to exercise our brains. This one is really something unreasonable to worry about.

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

#227

Post by AlecSchueler »

closewith wrote: post #224
darkwater wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's different. That's why I brought the e-bike similitude: climbing even mild mountains or hills with your own legs will actually make your legs, heart and lungs stronger in the process. So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only). We mig…

> So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only). The vast majority of developers aren't summitting beautiful mountains of code, but are instead are sifting through endless corporate slop. > We might say that using a hammer constantly will develo…

> The vast majority of developers aren't summitting beautiful mountains

I'm not sure you're approaching this metaphor the right away. The point is that coding manually is great cognitive exercise which keeps the mind sharp for doing the beautiful stuff.

> The trades destroy human bodies over time and leads to awful health outcomes.

Again, you're maybe being too literal and missing the point. No one is destroying their minds by coding. Exercise is good.

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

#228

Post by Rochus »

The article claims, that senior developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to heavily rely on AI tools compared to their junior counterparts. No p-values or statistical significance tests are reported in either The Register article or Fastly's original blog post.

I have over 30 years of experience and recently used Claude Opus 4.1 (via browser and claude.ai) to generate an ECMA-335 and an LLVM code generator for a compiler, and a Qt adapter for the Mono soft debugging protocol. Each task resulted in 2-3kLOC of C++.

The Claude experience was mixed; there is a high probability that the system doesn't respond or just quickly shows an overloaded message and does nothing. If it generates code, I quckly run in some output limitation and have to manually press "continue", and then often the result gets scrambled (i.e. the order of the generated code fragments gets mixed up, which requires another round with Claude to fix).

After this process, the resulting code then compiled immediately, which impressed me. But it is full of omissions and logical errors. I am still testing and correcting. All in all, I can't say at this point that Claude has really taken any work off my hands. In order to understand the code and assess the correctness of the intermediate results, I need to know exactly how to implement the problem myself. And you have to test everything in detail and do a lot of redesigning and correcting. Some implementations are just stubs, and even after several attempts, there was still no implementation.

In my opinion, what is currently available (via my $20 subscription) is impressive, but it neither replaces experience nor does it really save time.

So yes, now I'm one of the 30% seniors who used AI tools, but I didn't really benefit from them in these specific tasks. Not surprisingly, also the original blog states, that nearly 30% of senior developers report "editing AI output enough to offset most of the time savings". So not really a success so far. But all in all I'm still impressed.

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

#229

Post by protocolture »

mlnj wrote: post #225
sdesol wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Com…

Meanwhile an entire lake has evaporated in Northern Canada to deliver me a slightly different version of yet another payment options page.

Awesome. That must be on the same planet where 300% of the worlds power goes to processing a single bitcoin transaction.

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

#230

Post by johnisgood »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #227
closewith wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you get both the wonderful views (building the house or delivering the software) but also you get improved health (keeping your mind trained on both high level thinking and low level implementation vs high level only). The vast majority of developers aren't summitting beautiful mountains of code, but are instead are sifting through endless corporate slop. > We might say that using a hammer constantly will develo…

> The vast majority of developers aren't summitting beautiful mountains I'm not sure you're approaching this metaphor the right away. The point is that coding manually is great cognitive exercise which keeps the mind sharp for doing the beautiful stuff. > The trades destroy human bodies over time and leads to awful health outcomes. Again, you're maybe being too literal and missing the point. No one is destroying thei…

I am using LLMs, too, and I do not consider myself thinking less. I still have to be part of the whole process, incl. architectural process among other things that require my knowledge and my thinking.
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