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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

#261

Post by actionfromafar »

danielvaughn wrote: post #254
mnky9800n wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel like you lack mental energy at 40? I do not feel any different from 30. I think the main difference between 30 and 40 is I am much more efficient at doing things and therefore am able to do more.

I do, but I’m not sure it’s age related. Ever since 2020, it feels like my physical and mental energy has been on a downward trajectory. I feel like I’ve lost several IQ points. What’s interesting is that I’ve heard the same from a lot of people. Not sure what the root cause is, but I do need to take better care of myself.

I think it may be just age and stress. Also apparently even pretty mild Covid could cause some vasculatory damage?

On the flip side physical excercise can cause even very old people to improve radically.

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

#262

Post by motbus3 »

danielvaughn wrote: post #79
yodsanklai wrote: post #65

Seems 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.

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.

I will say that some weeks it make me 10% more productive, some weeks -10%. I came to the conclusion that I need to do all the hard work and only ask it to fill the gaps otherwise it will generate too much crap.

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

#263

Post by dep_b »

The nice thing about having AI generated code is that you get more time to focus on designing the system and it's edge cases. My code coverage (the significant metric, not the vain metric) and documentation coverage is really high because it's a very strong productivity boost when coupled with LLM generated code.

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

#264

Post by globnomulous »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #178
globnomulous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything that makes development faster or easier is going to be welcomed by a good developer. I strongly disagree. Struggling with a problem creates expertise. Struggle is slow, and it's hard. Good developers welcome it.

> Struggling with a problem creates expertise. Struggle is slow, and it's hard. Good developers welcome it. There is significant evidence that shows mixed results for struggle-based learning - it’s highly individualized and has to be calibrated carefully: https://consensus.app/search/challenge-based-learning-outcom...

I don't particularly care what this, or any, LLM spits out, and given the pervasive problems that have bedeviled social-science research, I also don't care what the results show, let alone what they show on average.

Anybody who has developed software should understand the value of struggling with a difficult problem. I'm obviously not talking about classroom exercises where the problem sets are expected to match a given skill level or cultivate a specific skill set, so the very idea of individualized, calibrated learning is irrelevant.

As a teacher I'm also 100% uninterested in highly individualized, calibrated challenges for what I teach -- or for what I do professionally. The people who need those highly individualized, wildly different, more gently graduated increases in difficulty, for general problem solving or for the study of any area of programming or computer science, simply should not become engineers.

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

#265

Post by ynx »

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…

On the contrary, I am a lot more willing to think through the contours of the problems I need to solve because I haven't drained my mental energy writing five repetitive - but slightly different - log lines and tweaking the wording slightly to be correct.

I'm training smarter, and exercising better, instead of wasting all the workout/training time on warmups, as it were.

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

#266

Post by boesboes »

oliwary wrote: post #241
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.

I've been trying it for a couple of months, I can't recommend it either tbh. It's frustrating as hell to work with: super inconsistent, very bad at following its own instructions, wasteful and generally unreliable.

The problem is, it's like a very, very junior programmer that knows the framework well, but won't use it consistently and doesn't learn from mistakes AT ALL. And has amnesia. Fine for some trivial things, but anything more complicated the hand-holding becomes so involved you are better off doing it yourself. That way you internalise some of the solutions as well, which is nice because then you can debug it later! Now I have a huge PR that even I myself don't really grasp as much as I would want.

But for me the nail in the coffin was the terrible customer service. ymmv.

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

#267

Post by jennyholzer »

actionfromafar wrote: post #256
jennyholzer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wow, shots fired! Would you add something to that?

i spend a lot of time fixing unacceptably poor code that LLM platforms have tricked human coworkers into finding adequate.

my coworkers are increasingly ignorant about the software products they work on.

LLM-informed software development is organizationally poisonous.

Businesses selling LLM coding tools occupy the same place in my mind as drug dealers.

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

#268

Post by closewith »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #258
closewith wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, I'm challenging the metaphor. Working the trades isn't exercise - it's a grind that wears people out. > Again, you're maybe being too literal and missing the point. No one is destroying their minds by coding. Exercise is good. We ac…

> We actually have good evidence that the effects of heavy cognitive load are detrimental to both the brain and mental health. We know that overwork and stress are extremely damaging to both. I don't think this is fair either, you're comparing "overwork and stress" to "work." It's like saying we have evidence that extreme physical stress is detrimental ergo it's "unambiguously" healthier to drive than to walk. Maybe…

We have plentiful evidence and studies on the effect of even moderate day-long cognitive work has on cognitive ability and on the effect of stress.

This is so well-founded that I do not have to provide individual sources - it is the current global accepted reality. I wouldn't provide sources for the effect of CO2 emissions on the climate or gravity, either.

However, the opposite is not true. If you have evidence that routine coding itself improves adult brain health or cognitive ability, please share RCTs or large longitudinal studies showing net cognitive gains under typical workloads.

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

#270

Post by cpursley »

danielvaughn wrote: post #259
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…

It completely depends on how you use AI. If you turn off your brain entirely and just coast as much as possible, then yeah your comment would apply. But I think of work as essentially two things - creative activity and toil. I simply use AI for toil, and let my brain focus on creativity and problem solving. Writing my 100,000th for loop is not going to preserve my brain.

This is why I recommend the functional programming map pattern ;)
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