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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

#91

Post by another_twist »

lpapez wrote: post #63

This article goes completely against my experience so far. I teach at an internship program and the main problem with interns since 2023 has been their over reliance on AI tools. I feel like I have to teach them to stop using AI for everything and think through the problem so that they don't get stuck. Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace…

Nitpicking a bit here but theres nothing wrong with printf debugging. Its immensely helpful to debug concurrent programs where stopping one part would mess up the state and maybe even avoid the bug you were trying to reproduce.

As for tooling, I really love AI coding. My workflow is pasting interfaces in ChatGPT and then just copy pasting stuff back. I usually write the glue code by hand. I also define the test cases and have AI take over those laborious bits. I love solving problems and I genuinely hate typing :)

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

#92

Post by another_twist »

ojosilva wrote: post #83
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.

I didn't see much mention of tab-completions in the survey and comments here. To me that's the ultimate coding AI is doing at my end, even though it seems to pass unnoticed nowadays. It's massive LOC (and comments!), and that's were I find AI immensely productive.

Tab completions simply hit the bottleneck problem. I dont want to press tab on every line it makes no sense. I would rather AI generate a function block and then integrate it back. Saves me the typing hassle and I can focus in design and business logic.

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

#93

Post by svachalek »

dboreham wrote: post #29
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…

Yes, but in my experience actually no. At least not with the bleeding edge models today. I've been able to get LLMs to write whole features to the point that I'm quite surprised at the result. Perhaps I'm talking to it right (the new "holding it right"?). I tend to begin asking for an empty application with the characteristics I want (CLI, has subcommands, ...) then I ask it to add a simple feature. Get that working…

All the hype is about asking an LLM to start with an empty project with loose requirements. Asking it to work on a million lines of legacy code (inadequately tested, as all legacy code) with ancient and complex contracts is a completely different experience.

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

#94

Post by ottah »

ojosilva wrote: post #83
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.

I didn't see much mention of tab-completions in the survey and comments here. To me that's the ultimate coding AI is doing at my end, even though it seems to pass unnoticed nowadays. It's massive LOC (and comments!), and that's were I find AI immensely productive.

Don't you have to keep dismissing incorrect auto-complete? For me I have a particular idea in mind, and I find auto-complete to be incredibly annoying.

It breaks flow. It has no idea my intention, but very eagerly provides suggestions I have to stop and swat away.

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

#95

Post by Gigachad »

lpapez wrote: post #63

This article goes completely against my experience so far. I teach at an internship program and the main problem with interns since 2023 has been their over reliance on AI tools. I feel like I have to teach them to stop using AI for everything and think through the problem so that they don't get stuck. Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace…

I've tried the interactive debuggers but I'm yet to find a situation where they worked better than just printing. I use an interactive console to test what stuff does, but inline in the app I've never had anything that printing wasn't the straightforward fast solution.

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

#96

Post by another_twist »

INTPenis wrote: post #41

I wouldn't say I'm old, but I suddenly fell into the coding agent rabbit hole when I had to write some Python automations against Google APIs. Found myself having 3-4 different sites open for documentation, context switching between 3 different libraries. It was a lot to take in. So I said, why not give AI a whirl. It helped me a lot! And since then I have published at least 6 different projects with the help of AI.…

When it comes to dealing with shitty platforms AI is really the best thing ever. I have had the misfortune of writing automations for Atlassian with their weird handling of refresh keys and had AI not pointed out that Atlassian had the genius idea of invalidating refresh keys after single use, I would have wasted a lot more of my time. For this sort of manual labout, AI is the best tool there is.

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

#97

Post by Gigachad »

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…

I find this half state kind of useless. If I have to know and understand the code being generated, it's easier to just write it myself. The AI tools can just spit out function names and tools I don't know off the top of my head, and the only way to check they are correct is to go look up the documentation, and at that point I've just done the hard work I wanted to avoid.

Feels like a similar situation to self driving where companies want to insist that you should be fully aware and ready to take over in an instant when things go wrong. That's just not how your brain works. You either want to fully disengage, or be actively doing the work.

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

#98

Post by lanstin »

mgh95 wrote: post #88
com2kid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The useful part is generating the mocks. The various auto mocking frameworks are so hit or miss I end up having to manually make mocks which is time consuming and boring. LLMs help out dramatically and save literally hours of boring error prone work.

Why mock at all? Spend the time making integration tests fast. There is little reason a database, queue, etc. can't be set up in a per-test group basis and be made fast. Reliable software is built upon (mostly) reliable foundations.

hmmmm. I do like integration tests, but I often tell people the art of modern software is to make reliable systems on top of unreliable components. And the integration tests should 100% include times when the network flakes out and drops 1/2 of replies and corrupts msgs and the like.

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

#99

Post by Gigachad »

binarymax wrote: post #2

I guess I’m an older developer. But I’ve come full circle and have gone back to hand coding after a couple years of fighting LLMs. I’m tired of coaxing their style and fixing their bugs - some of which are just really dumb and some are devious. Artisanal hand craft for me!

I've also just turned off copilot now. I had several cases where bugs in the generated code slipped through and ended up deployed. Bugs I never would have written myself. Reviewing code properly is so much harder than writing it from scratch.

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

#100

Post by TheRoque »

cbanek wrote: post #77
lordnacho wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace their printf() debug habits, let alone AI tooling... When I was new to the business, I used interactive debugging a lot. The more experienced I got, the less I used it. printf() is surprisingly useful, especially if you upgrade it a little bit to a log-level aware framework. Then you can leave your de…

This is absolutely true. If anything, interactive debuggers are a crutch and actual logging is the real way of debugging. You really can't debug all sorts of things in an interactive debugger, things like timing issues, thread problems, and you certainly can't find the actual hard bugs that are in running services in production, you know, where the bugs actually happen and are found. Or on other people's machines tha…

Both are valid, if your code is slightly complex it's invaluable to run it at least once with a debugger to verify that your logic is all good. And using logs for this is highly inefficient. E.g. if you have huge data structures that are a pain to print, or if after starting the program you notice that you forgot to add some print somewhere needed.

And obviously when you can't hook the debugger, logs are mandatory. Doesn't have to be one or the other.

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