Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fastly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 388 posts

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

#241

Post by oliwary »

Rochus wrote: post #228

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…

Hey! I would encourage you to try our Claude code instead, which is also part of your subscription. It's a CLI that takes care of many of the issues you encountered, as it works directly on the code files in a directory. No more copy pasting or unscrambling results. Likewise, it can run commands itself to e.g. compile or even test code.

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

#242

Post by jennyholzer »

VectorLock wrote: post #84
lpapez wrote: post #63

This 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…

Interactive debuggers and printf() are both completely valid and have separate use-cases with some overlap. If you're trying to use, or trying to get people to use, exclusively one, you've got some things to think about.

printf() users in this thread are very proud of their own ignorance

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

#243

Post by jennyholzer »

quantiq wrote: post #214
lpapez wrote: post #63

This 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…

Yeah, I'm not putting stock in this at all. The methodology of this survey seems dubious.

30% of the articles on this forum are covert LLM advertising

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

#244

Post by jennyholzer »

gdubs wrote: post #144
Gigachad wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried the interactive debuggers but I'm yet to find a situation where they worked better than just printing. I use an interactive console to test what stuff does, but inline in the app I've never had anything that printing wasn't the straightforward fast solution.

I'm not above the old print here or there but the value of an interactive debugger is being able to step and inspect the state of variables at all the different call sites, for instance.

it's genuinely embarassing that the printf() diehards in this thread are not clear on this detail.

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

#245

Post by jennyholzer »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #206

LLMs are tools. If you master your tools, you become more productive. I've had the same mixed experiences with LLMs that others have. Some good, some not so great. But I've been merging quite a bit of codex created PRs in the last weeks. Some needed manual intervention. Some were tedious to create. And some clearly saved me a lot of work. I always have more work than I can handle. Part of my job is deciding what not…

a crack pipe is a tool. if you master your tools you become more productive. i've had the same mixed experiences with crack cocaine that others have. some good, some not so great. But i've been writing a lot of crack-fueled PRs in the last weeks. some needed manual intervention. some were tedious to create. and some clearly saved me a lot of work.

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

#246

Post by darkwater »

LinXitoW wrote: post #236
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…

Ironically, e-bikes, at least in the EU, are having the exact opposite effect. More people that don't normally ride bikes are using e-bikes to get about. The motor functions not as a replacement, but as a force multiplier. It also makes "experimenting" easier, because the motor can make up for any mistakes or wrong turns. Caveat: In the EU, an e-bike REQUIRES some physical effort any time for the motor to run. Thrott…

I know that's what many people, especially elder one, say but this is still a hill I will die on :) They are mostly used to go in mostly flat roads, like some slow-speed motorcycle that needs some low effort. The ones using them outside paved road, using them as multipliers, are the ones that already did mountain biking when they were younger and they want to continue doing it at a higher level their age would permit without (which it's perfectly fine!).

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

#247

Post by jennyholzer »

binarymax wrote: post #2

I guess I’m an older developer. But I’ve come full circle and have gone back to hand coding after a couple years of fighting LLMs. I’m tired of coaxing their style and fixing their bugs - some of which are just really dumb and some are devious. Artisanal hand craft for me!

I'm in this boat. On top of this though, I genuinely think less of developers who rely on LLMs. I very seriously believe that they are beneath me.

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

#248

Post by jennyholzer »

Gigachad wrote: post #99
binarymax wrote: post #2

I guess I’m an older developer. But I’ve come full circle and have gone back to hand coding after a couple years of fighting LLMs. I’m tired of coaxing their style and fixing their bugs - some of which are just really dumb and some are devious. Artisanal hand craft for me!

I've also just turned off copilot now. I had several cases where bugs in the generated code slipped through and ended up deployed. Bugs I never would have written myself. Reviewing code properly is so much harder than writing it from scratch.

"write it right the first time" is my new mantra/challenge to myself.

along with improving my skills in vim, this approach has made me significantly more productive and has made my code much simpler compared to when i was using LLM code generation tools.

there is no shortcut around hard work.

there is no shortcut to thoroughly interrogating the constraints of the software problem at hand.

developers who rely on LLM code generation are poor coworkers because they don't understand what they've written and why they've written it.

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

#249

Post by darkwater »

jvanderbot wrote: post #232
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…

My current pattern is to manually craft during the first half of the day when I enjoy that, and during the second half when I'd be normally burnt on hard thought and not quite up for another coffee, pomodoro, theanine deep dive, I can start tackling tests, exploratory data analysis, or small bugs, and these tasks are 50% or more LLM. So yeah, 30%-50% seems right, but it's not like I lost any part of my job that I lov…

That's a good approach, I like it and probably adopt it as well. I'm not dogmatically against LLMs, I just need we should think about possible consequences, and not thinking about them like a holy grail of everything.

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

#250

Post by jennyholzer »

gardnr wrote: post #35
binarymax wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then I’ve mostly given up. I’ve seen LLMs change from snake case to camel case for a single method and leave the rest untouched. I’ve seen them completely fabricate APIs to non existent libraries. I’ve seen them get mathematical formulae completely wrong. I’ve seen it make entire methods for things that are builtins of a library I’m already using. It’s just not worth it anymore for anything that is part of an ac…

This changed my experience significantly: https://github.com/BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server/blob/ma... It basically uses multiple different LLMs from different providers to debate a change or code review. Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5 all have a go at it before it writes out plans or makes changes.

it's a lot faster and a lot easier and it gives you a much better understanding of the problem if you just think about the changes you want to make and write them yourself.

why are you looking for a shortcut? just do the work.

Post reply on HN