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Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
371–380 of 388 posts
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#372The 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…
The fact that you use Claude, not gpt5 which is light-years ahead for coding, tells me all I need to know.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#373The 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…
The fact that you use Claude, not gpt5 which is light-years ahead for coding, tells me all I need to know.
I don't think it is true that GPT-5 is much better than Claude 4.1. And more important is that light year is distance measure and I am sure openAI data centers is still on earth.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#374LLMs 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…
> LLMs are tools. If you master your tools, you become more productive. LLMs are unpredictable tools which change all the time, let’s not pretend otherwise. You can’t “master” them in the same way as previous tools. You can learn some tricks to trick them to be closer to what you want, and that’s about it. Imagine if every time you did the exact same movement to hammer a nail, you had to check your work. Maybe this t…
I didn't say they were perfect tools; quite the opposite actually.
> You can’t “master” them in the same way as previous tools.
It seems I'm getting better and better results over time. I think you want this to be true but that doesn't make it true.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#375The 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…
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…
The situation has improved a little bit over the last few months but LLMs are still only barely usable in languages like C/C++/Zig - and it's not about prompting. I would say that LLMs are usable for JS/Python and while the code is not always what I'd write myself, it can be used and improved later (unless you are working on perf-sensitive JS app, then it's useless again).
And it might be also something with GC, because I suppose the big boys are doing some GRPO over synthetically generated/altered source code (I would!) but obviously doing that in C++ is much more challenging - and I'd expect Rust to be straight impossible.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably jest, but I'm sure some HN users do actually have split personalities. (or dissociative identities, as they're called nowadays)
And I’m sure some HN users are autistic or have other traits that make them unable to appreciate a joke.
Okay?
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#377Earlier 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…
In that it fits the LLM situation quite well. LLMs remove the anxieties around coding for newbies at scale better than they make indisputable productivity gains for senior developers, similar to how e-bikes help with newbies more than cyclists.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#378I 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…
For autocompletion I suggest giving Zed's own offering another try. It's guesses somewhat correctly at least half the time and is very convenient when it get's what you're trying to do durin a refactor and suggest valid multiline changes. It's still rather annoying when it replaces regular autocompletion for import paths with it's plausible sounding guesses. Before that I was using Cody, but I don't think that they have free tier any more.
> immediately consumed the entire free tier's worth of credits in just a few minutes of normal coding
Happened to me too when I've tried to do a single edit with connected gemini pro. It somehow ran out of free quota even before finishing it.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 gi…
Nah, don't agree that struggle adds much.
I'm in the 10People will learn if they find the lesson valuable and interesting, no matter how much struggle and time wasting was involved.
Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. At least in Germany people rather joke that the moment e-bikes became popular, people began to realize that they suddenly became too unathletic to be capable of pedaling a bicycle. I know of no person who uses an e-bike who did not ride an ordinary bicycle before.…
But they still cannot assist 100%, there needs to be effort from the user.
Otherwise they would be considered e-scooters and would have different rules and regulations applied.