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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

#281

Post by chillingeffect »

kelnos wrote: post #271
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…

I hate to play the "you're holding it wrong" card, but when I started, I had more or less the same experience. Eventually you start to learn how to better talk to it in order to get better results. Something I've found useful with Claude Code is that it works a lot better if I give it many small tasks to perform to eventually get the big thing done, rather than just dumping the big thing in its lap. You can do this i…

Similar here. AI works much better as a consultant than as a developer. I ask it all kinds of things I have suspicions and intuitions about and it provides clarity and examples. It's great for subroutines. Trying to make full programs is just too large of a space. It's difficult to communicate all the implicit requirements.

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

#282

Post by stavros »

Rochus wrote: post #253
oliwary wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm working on old hardware and not-recent Linux and compiler versions, and I have no confidence yet in allowing AI direct (write) access to my repositories. Instead I provided Claude with the source code of a transpiler to C (one file) which is known to work, uses the same IR as the new code generators were supposed to use. This is a controlled experiment with a clear and complete input and clear expectations and sp…

I use Claude Code with the Max plan, and the experience isn't far off from what you describe. You still need to understand the system and review the implementation, because it makes many mistakes.

That's not the part it saves me time in, it saves me time in looking up the documentation. Other than that, it might be slower, because the larger the code change is, the more time I need to spend reviewing, and past a point I just can't be bothered.

The best way I've found is to have it write small functions, and then I tell it to compose them together. That way, I know exactly what's happening in the code, and I can trust that it works correctly. Cursor is probably a better way to do that than Claude Code, though.

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

#283

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

But if my goal is to ride Downhill[0] me exhausting myself riding up the hill isn't bringing any extra enjoyment for me.

With electric assist, I can get up faster and to the business of coming down the hill really fast.

We have ski-lifts for the exact same reason. People doing downhill skiing would make their legs, heart and lungs stronger in the process of walking up the hill with their skis. But who wants to do that, that's not the fun part.

And to step back from analogy-land.

I'm paid to solve problems, I'm good at architecture, I can design services, I can also write the code to do so. But in most cases the majority of the code I write is just boilerplate crap with minor differences.

With LLMs I can have them write the Terraform deployment code, write the C# CRUD Controller classes and data models and apply the Entity Framework migrations. It'll do all that and add all the fancy Swagger annotation while it's at it. It'll even whip up a Github build action for me.

Now I've saved a few days of mindless typing and I can get into solving the actual problem at hand, the one I'm paid to do. In reality I'm doing it _while_ I'm instructing the LLM to do the menial crap + reviewing the code it produced so I'm moving at twice the speed I would be normally.

"But can't you just..." nope, if every project was _exactly_ the same, I'd have a template already, there are just enough differences to not make it worth my time[1]. If I had infinite time and money, I could build a DSL to do this, but again, referring to [1] - there's no point =)

It's more cost efficient to pay the LLM tax to OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever and use it as a bespoke bootstrapping system for projects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downhill_mountain_biking

[1] https://xkcd.com/1319/

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

#284

Post by closewith »

darkwater wrote: post #274
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…

> No, I'm challenging the metaphor. Working the trades isn't exercise - it's a grind that wears people out. If your job is just grinding out code in a stressful and soul-crushing manner, the issue lies elsewhere. You will be soon either grinding out prompts to create software you don't even understand anymore or you will be replaced by an agent. And by no way I'm implying you are part of the issue.

> If your job is just grinding out code in a stressful and soul-crushing manner, the issue lies elsewhere.

The vast majority of developers are in or near this category. Most software developers never write code outside of education or employment and would avoid doing so if an AI provided the opportunity. Any opportunity to reduce cognitive load is welcome

I think you don't recognise how much of an outlier you are in believing that your work improves your cognitive abilities.

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

#285

Post by AlecSchueler »

closewith wrote: post #268
AlecSchueler wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Again you're conflating things and are now also moving goalposts (overwork->moderate work) and asking me for very precise kinds of studies while refusing to even point towards the basis for your own claims. On top of this you're implying that I'm some kind of lunatic by associating my questions with climate denial.

It's clear that you're more interested in "winning" than actually have a reasonable discussion so goodbye. I've had less frustrating exchanges with leprechauns.

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

#286

Post by theshrike79 »

darkwater wrote: post #274
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…

> No, I'm challenging the metaphor. Working the trades isn't exercise - it's a grind that wears people out. If your job is just grinding out code in a stressful and soul-crushing manner, the issue lies elsewhere. You will be soon either grinding out prompts to create software you don't even understand anymore or you will be replaced by an agent. And by no way I'm implying you are part of the issue.

But LLMs can make the soul crushing part so much easier.

I need to add a FooController to an existing application, to store FooModels to the database. The controller needs the basic CRUD endpoints, etc.

I can spend a day doing it (crushing my soul) or I can just tell any Agentic LLM to do it and no something that doesn't crush my soul, like talk with the customer about how the FooModels will be used after storing.

"But it'll produce bad code!"

No it doesn't. It knows _exactly_ how to do a basic CRUD HTTP API controller in C#. It's not an art form, it's just rote typing and adding Attributes to functions.

Because it's an Agentic LLM, it'll go look at another controller and copy its structure (which is not standard globally, but this project has specific static attributes in every call).

Then I review the code, maybe add a few comments for actual humans, commit and push.

My soul remains uncrushed, client is happy when I delivered the feature on time and I have half the day off for other smaller tasks that would become technical debt otherwise.

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

#287

Post by JeanMarcS »

kelnos wrote: post #271
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…

I hate to play the "you're holding it wrong" card, but when I started, I had more or less the same experience. Eventually you start to learn how to better talk to it in order to get better results. Something I've found useful with Claude Code is that it works a lot better if I give it many small tasks to perform to eventually get the big thing done, rather than just dumping the big thing in its lap. You can do this i…

This. For me (senior as in I am in the field since last century), that's how I use it. "I want to do that, with this data, to obtain that"

I still do the part of my job that I got experience on, analyze the need, and use the AI like an assistant to do small libraries or part of code. Like these, errors have less chance to appear. Then I glue that together.

For me the time ratio is best use like that. If I have to describe the whole thing, I'm not far from doing it myself, so there's no need for me.

Important: I work alone, not in a team, so maybe it has an impact on my thought

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

#288

Post by [deleted] »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #161
manoDev wrote: post #14

“AI” is great for coding in the small, it’s like having a powerful semantic code editor, or pairing with a junior developer who can lookup some info online quickly. The hardest part of the job was never typing or figuring out some API bullshit anyway. But trying to use it like “please write this entire feature for me” (what vibe coding is supposed to mean) is the wrong way to handle the tool IMO. It turns into a spec…

It turns into a specification problem. This, IMHO, is the critical point and why a lot of “deep” development work doesn’t benefit much from the current generation of AI tools. Last week, I was dealing with some temporal data. I often find working in this area a little frustrating because you spend so much time dealing with the inherent traps and edge cases, so using an AI code generator is superficially attractive. H…

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by AlecSchueler »

johnisgood wrote: post #230
AlecSchueler wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I use them too and actually agree with you that the cognitive load is somewhat comparable. I was only pointing out what seemed like an abuse of the metaphor.

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

#290

Post by deadbabe »

kelnos wrote: post #271
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…

I hate to play the "you're holding it wrong" card, but when I started, I had more or less the same experience. Eventually you start to learn how to better talk to it in order to get better results. Something I've found useful with Claude Code is that it works a lot better if I give it many small tasks to perform to eventually get the big thing done, rather than just dumping the big thing in its lap. You can do this i…

It’d be nice if we could “pipe” prompts directly similar to how we pipe multiple Unix commands to eventually get what we really want.

Then we can give someone that entire string of prompts as a repeatable recipe.

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