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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

#381

Post by darkwater »

theshrike79 wrote: post #380
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #330

Earlier 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. 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.

Yes, you pedal with almost zero effort when flat and with a little more effort when uphill. Obviously if you are going to go up the Tourmalet you will run out of battery pretty soon, but that's not the context most e-bikers use them.

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

#382

Post by darkwater »

theshrike79 wrote: post #286
darkwater wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. "B…

> 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.

This is a very optimistic take. If you are in the type of company that just gives you boring code and tasks, you will required to use the other half-day to work on some other boring feature. This will not give us time to pay tech debt. Maybe it will do in the beginning when using AI agents has not been institutionalized yet, but once it has, you will be asked to churn out more "features"

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

#383

Post by aspir »

bgwalter wrote: post #61

Fastly is in the AI business like Cloudflare: https://www.fastly.com/products/ai https://www.fastly.com/products/fastly-ai-bot-management https://www.fastly.com/documentation/guides/compute/about-th...

Disclaimer: not only am I a Fastly employee, I'm the Fastly employee quoted in the register article originally linked.

We'd argue our stance and focus are a bit different. Our stance is -- we help eng teams and the open web with whatever their preference for AI might be.

If you want to go all in and monetize AI traffic or sign an agreement with a foundation model for training, we have tools that can help you do that. If you want to go scorched-earth on AI bots that try to scrape your systems, we can help you do that too.

It's all about helping engineers tasked with tough problems get their jobs done, regardless of whether the flavor of the week is AI or something else.

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

#384

Post by fragmede »

jennyholzer wrote: post #364
fragmede wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single last link here is some form of an advertisement, why single out LLM-related ads?

because the underlying technology is so egregiously overhyped in relation to the quality of the services offered

Sure, but why this technology. It's not like that's the first time that's happened, and it won't be the last.

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

#386

Post by beaugunderson »

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…

this is a persistent myth about eMTBs... they are still great for exercise! here's a study showing you get 94% of the heart rate on an eMTB compared to the same route on a non-eMTB: https://www.americantrails.org/resources/pedal-assist-mounta...

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

#387

Post by blackqueeriroh »

globnomulous wrote: post #264
blackqueeriroh wrote: post #178

Earlier 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…

While I appreciate that you don’t particularly care what I’ve shared, or what any social science research says, instead seeking to fair your own subjective experience and generalizing it to others, and going so far as to say that as an educator you believe people who need modified learning methods or methodologies, or even additional help and assistance to learn concepts that others may find simple don’t deserve to be engineers, some of us prefer to actually engage with data and reality.

You can operate on your own opinion all you want, but here we value data and science and facts. You have provided nothing but your own fulminations and prejudices. Enjoy them while you can, I will warn students away from taking your classes because you, sir, at a minimum, believe that anyone with a learning disability shouldn’t be an engineer, which is the fundamental definition of ableism, and failing to give accommodation, as an educator, is a violation of the ADA.

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

#388

Post by Sebalf »

epolanski wrote: post #302
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…

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…

Vibe coder that reads hacker news chiming in here. I think that the true usefullness of LLMs for coding is often lost on the usual audience of this website, because most people here have extremely high standards of what they expect LLMs to accomplish.

But take people like me, I am an MD who was always into computers, but that just ended up going down a separate series of life decision, and could never find the time or energy to actually learn to code. When GPT-4 arrived, I started trying out using it for a medically-related coding hobby project, which eventually escalated into an ongoing PhD. Now, the fact is that this whole thing would just never have happened without LLMs. I would have never even thought of starting such a project, and if I did I wouldn't have had the time, and would have never made any progress even if I did. Vibe coding enabled me to do something entirely outside the scope of my previous capabilities. And the reality is that if I hadn't been able to do everything myself (down to the point of installing hardware managing the servers I am using), the project as a whole just wouldn't have happened.

The code I produce isn't going into production anywhere, it is only used for my particular purposes, it is not exposed to the web in any way, and so typical LLM issues like security etc. are a non-issue. And while my understanding of what my code is actually doing is pretty rudimentary (for instance, basic syntax conventions is something I just never bothered to learn), this doesn't really matter in practice. If it works it works.

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