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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

#331

Post by handoflixue »

mihaaly wrote: post #314
epolanski wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho your post summarizes 90% of the posts I see about AI coding on HN: not understanding the tools, not understanding their strenghts and weaknesses, not being good at prompting or context management yet forming strong(ish) opinions. If you don't know what they are good at and how to use them of course you may end up with mixed results and yes, you may waste time. That's a criticism I have also towards AI super enth…

How do you know that your humble opinion is right about who knows what tool and how deep? Even if you know better than themselves how musch they know, isn't the tool inadequate just yet for power use then when it is sooo easy to misuse? Too much tweeking and adapting users to the needs of the tool (vs. the other way around) and there is little point using those (which is a bit of the sickness of modern day computing:…

Would you agree with the claim that emacs/vim is an inadequate tool, since it has such a high learning curve?

Prior to LLMs, my impression was "high learning curve, high results" was a pretty popular sweet-spot with a large portion of the tech crowd. It seems weird how much LLMs seem to be an exception to this.

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

#332

Post by t_mahmood »

stavros wrote: post #316
t_mahmood wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I am paying $20, for a glorified code generator, that may or may not be correct, to write a small function that I can do for free, and be confident about the correctness, if I have not been lazy to implement a test for it. If you point out, with test it's also the same with any AI tool available, but to come to that result, I have to continuously prompt it till it gives me the desired output, while I may be able…

The biggest hole you don't see is that it's worth the $20 to make me overcome my laziness, because I don't like writing code, but I like making stuff, and this way I can make stuff while fooling my brain into thinking I'm not writing code.

Sure, that can be a point, which is helping you overcome your personal barrier, But that can be anything,

That is not you were vouching for on the original comment. It was about saving time.

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

#333

Post by furyofantares »

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'm just shy of 30 years experience. I think I've spent more time learning how to use these tools than any other technology I've learned, and I still don't know the best way to use them.

They certainly weren't a time-saver right away but they became one after some time giving them a real shot. I tested their + my limits on small projects, working out how to get them to do the whole project, figuring out when they stop working and why, figuring out which technology they work best with, figuring out the right size problems to give them, figuring out how to recognize if I'm asking them something they can't do well a ask something different instead, guide them into creating code that they can't actually continue to be successful with.

I started last December in Cursor's agentic mode and have been in Claude Code ever since probably March or April. It's definitely been a huge boost all year for side projects - but only in the last couple months have I been having success in a large codebase.

Even with all this experience I don't know that I would really be able to get much value out of the chat interface for them. They need to be proposing changes I can just hit accept or reject on (this is how both Claude Code and Cursor work btw - you don't have to allow it to write to any file you don't want or execute any command you don't want).

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

#334

Post by angled »

cc62cf4a4f20 wrote: post #307

I've been coding professionally for almost 30 years. I use Claude Code heavily, even for larger features. To get that to work half-decent, you have to take on a PM/Tech-lead role, you're no longer a senior engineer. For large pieces of work, I will iterate with CC to generate a feature spec. It's usually pretty good at getting you most of the way there first shot and then either have it tweak things or manually do so…

I’ve arrived at something similar:

* brainstorm all the ideas, get Claude to write docs + code for all them, and then throw away the code

* ask it to develop architecture and design principles based on the contents of those docs

* get it to write a concise config spec doc that incorporates all the features, respects the architecture and design as appropriate

* iterate over that for a while until I get it into a state I like

* ask it to write an implementation plan for the config spec

* babysit it as I ask it to implement phase by phase of the implementation plan while adhering to the config spec

It’s a bit slower to than what I’d hoped originally, but it’s a lot better in terms of end result and gives me more opportunity to verify tests, tweak implementation, briefly segue or explore enhancements, etc.

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

#335

Post by tbrake »

paulcole wrote: post #329
cc62cf4a4f20 wrote: post #307

I've been coding professionally for almost 30 years. I use Claude Code heavily, even for larger features. To get that to work half-decent, you have to take on a PM/Tech-lead role, you're no longer a senior engineer. For large pieces of work, I will iterate with CC to generate a feature spec. It's usually pretty good at getting you most of the way there first shot and then either have it tweak things or manually do so…

> To get that to work half-decent, you have to take on a PM/Tech-lead role, you're no longer a senior engineer. But you’re saying it can be half-decent? The problem is that about 75% of HN commenters have their identities tightly wound up in being a (genuflect) senior engineer and putting down PM/tech-lead type roles. They’ll do anything to avoid losing that identity including writing non-stop about how bad AI code i…

Kinda but kinda not.

I'd agree that 75% you speak of is generally hostile to the mere concept of PMs, but that's usually from a misapplication of PMs as proxy-bosses for absentee product owners/directors who don't want to talk to nerds - flow interruptions, beancounting perceived as useless, pointless ceremonies, even more pointless(er) meetings etc, and the further defiling of the definition of "agile".

But a deep conceptual product and roadmap understanding that helps one steer Claude Code is invaluable for both devs and PMs, and I don't think most of that 75% would begrudge that quality in a PM

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

#336

Post by gammarator »

handoflixue wrote: post #331
mihaaly wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that your humble opinion is right about who knows what tool and how deep? Even if you know better than themselves how musch they know, isn't the tool inadequate just yet for power use then when it is sooo easy to misuse? Too much tweeking and adapting users to the needs of the tool (vs. the other way around) and there is little point using those (which is a bit of the sickness of modern day computing:…

Would you agree with the claim that emacs/vim is an inadequate tool, since it has such a high learning curve? Prior to LLMs, my impression was "high learning curve, high results" was a pretty popular sweet-spot with a large portion of the tech crowd. It seems weird how much LLMs seem to be an exception to this.

Emacs and vim have complex interfaces that have been stable for decades. Seems like every new flavor of LLM requires learning its warts and blind spots from scratch.

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

#337

Post by wiz21c »

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…

you are obviously not past 50 years old. At that age, eventhough I "train" (as you imply it) a lot (I code about 50 hours a week, 40 at work, the rest for my own projects; not of them easy, my job is writing numerical code for simulation and my pet project is writinga very accurate emulator (which implies physics modelling, tons of research, etc)). I can definitely feel I'm not as productive as before (before I could sustain 60 hours a week) eventhough I do feel I'm using my brain to the maximum...

So yeah, past a certain age, you'll be happy to reduce your mental load. No question about it. And I feel quite relieved when Claud writes this classic algorith I have understood long ago and don't want to re-activate in my brain. And I feel quite disappointed when Claude misses the point and I have to code review it...

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

#338

Post by andy_ppp »

This is nonsense, if they are getting this AI slop past code review that is a disgrace. When I take solutions from AI I need to rewrite almost every line for style and project alignment reasons. There is something uncanny valley about AI code that just needs to be deleted or changed too, for example the comments it writes are usually terrible.

Maybe I can potentially believe at one point AI code was used to create a starting point for 50% of PRs…

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

#339

Post by demarq »

jennyholzer wrote: post #251
demarq wrote: post #192

Big assumption here, is that developers don’t spend time fixing their own work or other developers work. I feel the benchmark is some engineer who shoots out perfect work the first time they hit the keyboard.

as a human being i take it as massive disrespect when another human developer makes me wipe up their AI diarrhea.

What are you replying to

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

#340

Post by kamaal »

izacus wrote: post #70

So how many developers in that survey are those? They surveyed 791 developers (:D) and "a third of senior developers" do that. That's... generiously, what... 20 people? It's amazing how everyone can massage numbers when they're trying to sell something.

>It's amazing how everyone can massage numbers when they're trying to sell something.

More like massage words.

Like one fairly smart person told me- Doing math with words is pointless.

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