14 ms·

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

• binarymax 1y ago
  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!
  • crowbahr 1y ago
    The article is saying older devs vibe code: I think you misunderstood
    • oasisaimlessly 1y ago
      Key word: "But"
    • binarymax 1y ago
      I didn’t misunderstand. I tried to vibe code, and now I don’t. Not sure how you misinterpreted that.
    • dang 1y ago
      (Article was https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/older_developers_ai_code/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/older_developers_ai_c... when this was posted; we've since changed it)
  • baq 1y ago
    By all means, if my goal is actually crafting anything. Usually it isn't, though - I just want to pump out code changes ASAP (but not sooner).
    • binarymax 1y ago
      Even then I’ve mostly given up. I’ve seen LLMs change from snake case to camel case for a single method and leave the rest untouched. I’ve seen them completely fabricate APIs to non existent libraries. I’ve seen them get mathematical formulae completely wrong. I’ve seen it make entire methods for things that are builtins of a library I’m already using. It’s just not worth it anymore for anything that is part of an actual product. Occasionally I will still churn out little scripts or methods from scratch that are low risk - but anything that gets to prod is pretty much hand coded again.
      • gardnr 1y ago
        This changed my experience significantly: https://github.com/BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server/blob/main/docs/tools/thinkdeep.md https://github.com/BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server/blob/ma... It basically uses multiple different LLMs from different providers to debate a change or code review. Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5 all have a go at it before it writes out plans or makes changes.
        • jennyholzer 1y ago
          it's a lot faster and a lot easier and it gives you a much better understanding of the problem if you just think about the changes you want to make and write them yourself. why are you looking for a shortcut? just do the work.
          • gardnr 1y ago
            I feel like it’s my job to understand new tools and keep abreast of the way things are changing in my industry. It is faster, right now, to just write it myself; at least for most things. I definitely want to understand when and how that might change. Judging from the downvotes, not everybody shares that curiosity.
  • Gigachad 1y ago
    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.
    • jennyholzer 1y ago
      "write it right the first time" is my new mantra/challenge to myself. along with improving my skills in vim, this approach has made me significantly more productive and has made my code much simpler compared to when i was using LLM code generation tools. there is no shortcut around hard work. there is no shortcut to thoroughly interrogating the constraints of the software problem at hand. developers who rely on LLM code generation are poor coworkers because they don't understand what they've written and why they've written it.
  • uludag 1y ago
    I'm in the same exact boat. I started with a lot of different tools but eventually went back to hand coding everything. When using tools like co-pilot I noticed I would ship a lot mode dumb mistakes. I even experimented with not even using a chat interface and it turns out that a lot of answers to problems are indeed found with a web search.
  • jennyholzer 1y ago
    I'm in this boat. On top of this though, I genuinely think less of developers who rely on LLMs. I very seriously believe that they are beneath me.
• daft_pink 1y ago
  Developers are lazy. Anything that makes development faster or easier is going to be welcomed by a good developer. If you find it is quicker not to use it then you might hate it, but I think it is probably better in some cases and worse in other cases.
  • invl 1y ago
    as a developer my first priority is whether the software works, not whether it is fast or easy to develop
    • dang 1y ago
      I think we can assume that what daft_pink means by "development" includes that the software works. ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
  • globnomulous 1y ago
    > Anything that makes development faster or easier is going to be welcomed by a good developer. I strongly disagree. Struggling with a problem creates expertise. Struggle is slow, and it's hard. Good developers welcome it.
    • jasonjmcghee 1y ago
      Indeed. This is my biggest fear for engineers as a whole. LLMs can be a great productivity boost in the very short term, but can so easily be abused. If you build a product with it, suddenly everyone is an engineering manager and no one is an expert on it. And growth as an engineer is stunted. It reminds me of abusing energy drinks or grinding to the point of burnout... But worse. I think we'll find a middle ground though. I just think it hasn't happened yet. I'm cautiously optimistic.
    • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
      > 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-outcomes/rpLiaIBWRF-zP6i9TJxYUA/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=clipboard https://consensus.app/search/challenge-based-learning-outcom...
• dfxm12 1y ago
  around a third of senior developers with more than a decade of experience are using AI code-generation tools such as Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to produce over half of their finished software, compared to 13 percent for those devs who've only been on the job for up to two years. A third? I would expect at least a majority based on the headline and tone of the article... Isn't this saying 66% are down on vibe coding?
  • asveikau 1y ago
    I guess the article was vibe coded.
    • biglyburrito 1y ago
      "This one developer was down with the vibe coding."
  • dang 1y ago
    (Article was https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/older_developers_ai_code/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/older_developers_ai_c... when this was posted; we've since changed it. We also changed the title.)
    • pera 1y ago
      This submission was written by the marketing department of a company with commercial interests on the given topic and with almost no information about the "survey" itself, it's essentially blogspam.
• csbrooks 1y ago
  Is "vibe coding" synonymous with using AI code-generation tools now? I thought vibe coding meant very little direct interaction with the code, mostly telling the LLM what you want and iterating using the LLM. Which is fun and worth trying, but probably not a valid professional tool.
  • ladyprestor 1y ago
    Yeah, for some reason the term has been used interchangeably for a while, which is making it very hard to have a conversation about it since many people think vibe coding is just using AI to assist you. From Karpathy's original post I understood it to be what you're describing. It is getting confusing.
    • bonoboTP 1y ago
      The term sounds funny and quirky, so got overused. Also simply the term pushes emotional buttons on a lot of people so it's good for clickbait.
  • crazygringo 1y ago
    I think what happened is that a lot of people started dismissing all LLM code creation as "vibe coding" because those people were anti-LLM, and so the term itself became an easy umbrella pejorative. And then, more people saw these critics using "vibe coding" to refer to all LLM code creation, and naturally understood it to mean exactly that. Which means the recent articles we've seen about how good vibe coding starts with a requirements file, then tests that fail, then tests that pass, etc. Like so many terms that started out being used pejoratively, vibe coding got reclaimed. And it just sounds cool. Also because we don't really have any other good memorable term for describing code built entirely with LLM's from the ground up, separate from mere autocomplete AI or using LLM's to work on established codebases.
    • actsasbuffoon 1y ago
      “Agentic coding” is probably more accurate, though many people (fairly) find the term “Agentic” to be buzz-wordy and obnoxious. I’m willing to vibe code a spike project. That is to say, I want to see how well some new tool or library works, so I’ll tell the LLM to build a proof of concept, and then I’ll study that and see how I feel about it. Then I throw it away and build the real version with more care and attention.
• philip1209 1y ago
  I looked at our anthropic bill this week. Saw that one of our best engineers was spending $300/day on Claude. Leadership was psyched about it.
  • pydry 1y ago
    I was told that I wasnt using it enough by one arm of the company and that I was spending too much by another. Meanwhile, try as I might I couldnt prevent it from being useless. I know of no better metaphor than that of what it's like being a developer in 2025.
  • merlincorey 1y ago
    Claude is making $72k a year for a consistent $300/day spend.
    • PhantomHour 1y ago
      Bear in mind those are revenue figures, they're costing claude hundreds a day. One imagines Leadership won't be so pleased after the inevitably price hike (which, given the margins software uses, is going to be in the 1-3 thousands a day) and the hype wears off enough for them to realize they're spending a full salary automating a partial FTE.
      • ojosilva 1y ago
        But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output. At least that's how it's been with OSS models, or with the Openai api model. So maybe the inevitable price hike (or rate limiting) may lead to switching models / providers and the results being just as good.
        • krainboltgreene 1y ago
          > But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output So far there's negative evidence of this. Things are getting more expensive for similar outputs.
• manoDev 1y ago
  “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 specification problem.
  • dboreham 1y ago
    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 then ask it to enhance functionality progressively, testing as we go. Then when functionality is working I ask for a refactor (often it puts 1500 loc in one file, for example), doc, improve help text, and so on. Basically the same way you'd manage a human. I've also been close to astonished at the capability LLMs have to draw conclusions from very large complex codebases. For example I wanted to understand the details of a distributed replication mechanism in a project that is enormous. Pre-LLM I'd spent a couple of days crawling through the code using grep and perhaps IDE tools, making notes on paper. I'd probably have to run the code or instrument it with logging then look at the results in a test deployment. But I've found I can ask the LLM to take a look at the p2p code and tell me how it works. Then ask it how the peer set is managed. I can ask it if all reachable peers are known at all nodes. It's almost better than me at this, and it's what I've done for a living for 30 years. Certainly it's very good for very low cost and effort. While it's chugging I can think about higher order things. I say all this as a massive AI skeptic dating back to the 1980s.
    • manoDev 1y ago
      > 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. That makes sense, as you're breaking the task into smaller achievable tasks. But it takes an already experienced developer to think like this. Instead, a lot of people in the hype train are pretending an AI can work an idea to production from a "CEO level" of detail – that probably ain't happening.
• calibas 1y ago
  I think they're being really loose with the term "vibe coding", and what they really mean is AI-assisted coding. Older devs are not letting the AI do everything for them. Assuming they're like me, the planning is mostly done by a human, while the coding is largely done by the AI, but in small sections with the human giving specific instructions. Then there's debugging, which I don't really trust the AI to do very well. Too many times I've seen it miss the real problem, then try to rewrite large sections of the code unnecessarily. I do most of the debugging myself, with some assistance from the AI.
  • 9rx 1y ago
    > Assuming they're like me, the planning is mostly done by a human, while the coding is largely done by the AI I've largely settled on the opposite. AI has become very good at planning what to do and explaining it in plain English, but its command of programming languages still leaves a lot to be desired.
    • calibas 1y ago
      It's good at checking plans, and helping with plans, but I've seen it make really really bad choices. I don't think it can replace a human architect.
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        It can't replace a human anything, yet, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from trying unfortunately:(
      • 9rx 1y ago
        Yes, much like many of the humans I have worked with, sometimes bad choices are introduced. But those bad choices are caught during the writing of the code, so that's not really that big of a deal when it does happen. It is still a boon to have it do most of the work. And remains markably better than when AI makes bad choices while writing code. That is much harder to catch and requires pouring over the code with a fine tooth comb to the point that you may as well have just written it yourself, negating all the potential benefits of using it to generate code in the first place.
• cooloo 1y ago
  So many words to say nothing. Maybe it wan generated by an AI tool?
• pydry 1y ago
  Im not sure I believe this. It's the exact opposite in my experience - the young'uns are all over vibe coding.
• LarryMade2 1y ago
  I tried it - didn't like it. Had an LLM work on a backup script since I don't use Bash very often. Took a bunch of learning the quirks of bash to get the code working properly. While I'll say it got me started, it wasn't a snap of the fingers and a quick debug to get something done. Took me quite a while to figure out why something worked but really it didn't (LLM using command line commands where Bash doesn't interpret the results the same). If its something I know, probably wont use LLM (as it doesn't do my style). If it's something I don't know, might use it to get me started but I expect that's all I'll it for.
  • dboreham 1y ago
    Can I ask which agent/model you used? I'm similarly irritated with shell script coding, but find I have to make scripts fairly often. My experience using various models but latterly Claude Code has been quite different -- it churned out pretty much what I was looking for. Also old, fwiw. I'm older than all shells.
    • LarryMade2 1y ago
      It was Gemini, I picked the point of least resistance. I've heard Claude does better but haven't looked at it.
• jmull 1y ago
  Apparently vibe coding now just means ai assisted coding beyond immediate code completion? For me, success with LLM-assisted coding comes when I have a clear idea of what I want to accomplish and can express it clearly in a prompt. The relevant key business and technical concerns come into play, including complexities like balancing somewhat conflicting shorter and longer term concerns. Juniors are probably all going to have to be learning this kind of stuff at an accelerated rate now (we don't need em cranking out REST endpoints or whatever anymore), but at this point this takes a senior perspective and senior skills. Anyone can get an LLM and agentic tool to crank out code now. But you really need to have them crank out code to do something useful.
• zwilliamson 1y ago
  Of course. We are the most well equipped to run with it. Others will quickly create a sloppy mess while wise developers can keep the beast tame.
• matula 1y ago
  I've been at this for many years. If I want to implement a new feature that ties together various systems and delivers an expected output, I know the general steps that I need to take. About 80% of those steps are creating and stubbing out new files with the general methods and objects I know will be needed, and all the test cases. So... I could either spend the next 4 hours doing that, or spend 3 minutes filling out a CLAUDE.md with the specs and 5 minutes having Claude do it (and fairly well). I feel no shame in doing the later. I've also learned enough about LLMs that I know how to write that CLAUDE.md so it sticks to best practices. YMMV.
  • blast 1y ago
    > I've also learned enough about LLMs that I know how to write that CLAUDE.md so it sticks to best practices. Could you share some examples / tips about this?
• bob1029 1y ago
  I often use LLMs for method level implementation work. Anything beyond the scope of a single function call I have very little confidence in. This is OK though, since everything is a function and I can perfectly control the blast radius as long as I keep my hands on the steering wheel. I don't ever let the LLM define method signatures for me. If I don't know how to structure functions around a problem, I will also use the LLM, but I am asking it to write zero code in this case. I am just having a conversation about what would be good paths to consider.
• INTPenis 1y ago
  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. It refactors stuff for me, it writes boilerplate for me, most importantly it's great at context switching between different topics. My work is pretty broadly around DevOps, automation, system integration, so the topics can be very wide range. So no I don't mind it at all, but I'm not old. The most important lesson I learned is that you never trust the AI. I can't tell you how often it has hallucinated things for me. It makes up entire libraries or modules that don't even exist. It's a very good tool if you already know the topic you have it work on. But it also hit me that I might be training my replacement. Every time I correct its mistakes I "teach" the database how to become a better AI and eventually it won't even need me. Thankfully I'm very old and will have retired by then.
  • baq 1y ago
    I love the split personality vibe here.
    • JadeNB 1y ago
      Or perhaps the commenter just aged a lot while writing the post.
      • johnfn 1y ago
        First line: "I wouldn't say I'm old" Last line: "Thankfully I'm very old" Hmm.....
        • rossant 1y ago
          Maybe he meant "I'll be very old..." the second time.
    • LoganDark 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• kachapopopow 1y ago
  I think at this point it's whoever can get the most useful work out of AI which is actually really hard due to their 'incomplete' state. Finding uses which require very little user input is going to be the next big thing in my opinion since it seems that LLMs are currently at a wall where they require technical advancements before they can overcome it.
• marcyb5st 1y ago
  In terms of LOCs maybe, in terms of importance I think is much less. At least that's how I use LLMs. While I understand that <Enter model here> might produce the meaty bits as well, I believe that having a truck factor of basically 0 (since no-one REALLY understands the code) is a recipe for a disaster and I dare say long term maintainability of a code base. I feel that you need to have someone in any team that needs to have that level of understanding to fix non trivial issues. However, by all means, I use the LLM to create all the scaffolding, test fixtures, ... because that is mental energy that I can use elsewhere.
  • epicureanideal 1y ago
    Agreed. If I use an LLM to generate fairly exhaustive unit tests of a trivial function just because I can, that doesn’t mean those lines are as useful as core complex business logic that it would almost certainly make subtle mistakes in.
    • andsoitis 1y ago
      > If I … generate fairly exhaustive unit tests of a trivial function … then you are not a senior software engineer
      • triyambakam 1y ago
        Neither are you if that's your understanding of a senior engineer
        • mgh95 1y ago
          I think the parent commentors point was that it is nearly trivial to generate variations on unit tests in most (if not all) unit test frameworks. For example: Java: https://docs.parasoft.com/display/JTEST20232/Creating+a+Parameterized+Unit+Test https://docs.parasoft.com/display/JTEST20232/Creating+a+Para... C# (nunit, but xunit has this too): https://docs.nunit.org/articles/nunit/technical-notes/usage/Parameterized-Tests.html https://docs.nunit.org/articles/nunit/technical-notes/usage/... Python: https://docs.pytest.org/en/stable/example/parametrize.html https://docs.pytest.org/en/stable/example/parametrize.html cpp: https://google.github.io/googletest/advanced.html https://google.github.io/googletest/advanced.html A belief that the ability of LLMs to generate parameterizations is intrinsically helpful to a degree which cannot be trivially achieved in most mainstream programming languages/test frameworks may be an indicator that an individual has not achieved a substantial depth of experience.
• mr90210 1y ago
  > survey of 791 developers We have got to stop. In a universe of well over 25 million programmers a sample of 791 is not significant enough to justify such headlines. We’ve got to do better than this, whatever this is.
  • recursive 1y ago
    Validity of the sample size is not determined by its fraction of the whole population. I don't know the formulas and I'm not a statistician. Maybe someone can drop some citations.
  • oasisaimlessly 1y ago
    You should read more about statistical significance. Under some reasonable assumptions, you can confidently certain deduce things with small sample sizes. From another perspective: we've deduced a lot of things about how atoms work without any given experiment inspecting more than an insignificant fraction of all atoms. TL;DR: The population size (25e6 total devs, 1e80 atoms in observable universe) is almost entirely irrelevant to hypothesis testing.
  • spmurrayzzz 1y ago
    I generally agree with this just from a perspective of personal sentiment, it does feel wrong. But statistically speaking, at a 95% confidence level you'd be within a +/- 3.5% margin of error given the 791 sample size, irrespective of whether the population is 30k or 30M.
• smusamashah 1y ago
  Article did not say what kind languages/applications thosd 791 developers were working on. I work on a legacy Java code base (which looks more like C than Java, thankfully) and I cant imagine AI doing any of it. It can do small isolated, well formulated chunks (functions that do a very specific task) but even that will require very verbose explanation. I just can't fathom shipping a big percentage of work using LLMs.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  Fastly is in the AI business like Cloudflare: https://www.fastly.com/products/ai https://www.fastly.com/products/ai https://www.fastly.com/products/fastly-ai-bot-management https://www.fastly.com/products/fastly-ai-bot-management https://www.fastly.com/documentation/guides/compute/about-the-ai-accelerator-page/ https://www.fastly.com/documentation/guides/compute/about-th...
  • aspir 1y ago
    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.
• morkalork 1y ago
  Sounds about right in my experience. Not every piece of code has to be elite John Carmack tier quality
• lpapez 1y ago
  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 their printf() debug habits, let alone AI tooling...
  • lordnacho 1y ago
    > 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 debugging lines in the code and switch it on or off with loglevel = TRACE or INFO, something like that.
    • cbanek 1y ago
      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 that you can't just attach a debugger. You need good logging with a good logging library that doesn't affect performance too much when it's turned off, and those messages can also provide very useful context to what things are going on, many times as good if not better than a comment, because at least the log messages are compiled in and type checked, as opposed to comments, which can easily go stale.
      • TheRoque 1y ago
        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.
• yodsanklai 1y ago
  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.
  • spunker540 1y ago
    I’m not yet up to half (because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI) But your approach sounds familiar to me. I find sometimes it may be slower and lower quality to use AI, but it requires less mental bandwidth from me, which is sometimes a worthwhile trade off.
    • wordofx 1y ago
      > because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI What language? I picked up an old JS project that had several developers fail over weeks to upgrade to newer versions of react. But I got it done in a day by using AI to generate a ton of unit tests then loop an upgrade / test / build. Was 9 years out of date and it’s running in prod now with less errors than before. Also upgraded rails 4 app to rails 8 over a few days. Done other apps too. None of these are small. Found a few memory leaks in a C++ app that our senior “experts” who have spent 20 years doing c++ couldn’t find.
  • danielvaughn 1y ago
    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.
    • theonething 1y ago
      > it alleviates a lot of mental energy For me, this is the biggest benefit of AI coding. And it's energy saved that I can use to focus on higher level problems e.g. architecture thereby increasing my productivity.
• hotpotat 1y ago
  Claude writes 99% of my code, I’m just a manager and architect and QC now.
  • chadcmulligan 1y ago
    What sort of coding do you do? I can't imagine getting that level of code from AI
• izacus 1y ago
  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.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • thegrim33 1y ago
    The other thing they do is conveniently not mention all the negative stuff about AI that the source article mentions, they only report on the portion of content from the source that's in any way positive of AI. And of course, its an article based on a source article based on a survey (of a single company), with the source article written by a "content marketing manager", and the raw data of the survey isn't released/published, only some marketing summary of what the results (supposedly) were. Very trustworthy.
  • kamaal 1y ago
    >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.
• goosejuice 1y ago
  This is self reported unless I missed something. I bet that skews these results quite a bit. Many are very hesitant to say they use AI, and I suspect that's much more likely to be the case when you are new to the field. Also, green coding? That's new to me. I guess we'll see optional carbon offset purchasing in our subs soon.
• gerdesj 1y ago
  Really? I'm not a coder but a sysadmin. 35 years or so. I'm conversant with Perl, Python, (nods to C), BASIC, shell, Powershell, AutoIT (int al) I muck about with CAD - OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and 3D printing. I'm not a senior developer - I pay them. LLMs are handy in the same way I still have my slide rules and calculators (OK kids I use a calc app) but I do still have my slide rules. ChatGPT does quite well with the basics for a simple OpenSCAD effort but invents functions within libraries. That is to be expected - its a next token decider function and not a real AI. I find it handy for basics, very basic.
  • platevoltage 1y ago
    I just got back into OpenSCAD after recently getting my first new 3D Printer in 10 years, so I basically had to relearn it. ChatGPT got the syntax wrong for the most basic of operations.
    • gerdesj 1y ago
      Chat did work for some operations for me but not many. My screwdrivers, drills, planes, and all the rest don't tell me how to use them and I think that you need to treat LLMs in the same way. They can provide an insight or a prod or whatever that gets you over the line but I do not think that they are ... AI of any sort. I can cut say 12mm of plywood with a panel saw within an accuracy of about 1mm if I am careless. If I take more care, I can do way better. Depends on the job. However, I have to keep my eye in. Chat will get the basics right but will hallucinate badly when it comes to libraries like https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki Just like a slightly blunt chisel, you have to treat Chat and co in the same way - they are tools. No more and no less. You need to know how to sharpen them up (oil and a whetstone).
• mihaitodor 1y ago
  LMFTFY: a third of senior developers who answer surveys say over half of their code is AI-generated
  • platevoltage 1y ago
    Haha right. I would imagine a "Senior Developer" who is super into AI assisted coding would be more likely to come across this survey and want to participate.
• mcv 1y ago
  I would certainly hope junior developers don't rely too much on AI; they need the opportunity to learn to do this stuff themselves.
• matt3210 1y ago
  Brute forcing a problem by writing more lines with an LLM instead of designing better code is a step the wrong direction
  • lyu07282 1y ago
    better code == less code? In my mind that would be highly succinct purely functional code in scala or haskell. Those really allow you to "compress" code down to its barest essential domain logic? Perhaps the future is writing highly domain specific DSLs and have the LLM generate the runtime for it.
• rpmisms 1y ago
  I use the inline commands to convert pseudo code to normal code. It works great.
• scubadude 1y ago
  At a minimum, 30-50% of bogus surveys are bogus but I'm willing to bet it's a lot more.
• kaishiro 1y ago
  Jesus, that's a staggering figure to me coming from senior developers. I guess I'm the odd one out here, but ChatGPT is nothing more than an index of Stack Overflow (and friends) for me. It's essentially replaced Googling, but once I get the answer I need I'm still just slinging code like an asshole. Copying the output wholesale from any of these LLMs just seems crazy to me.
  • adw 1y ago
    If you’re using ChatGPT directly for work then I believe that you are doing it so profoundly wrong, at this point, that you’re going to make really incorrect assumptions. As we have all observed, the models get things wrong, and if you’re wrong 5% of the time, then ten edits in you’re at 60-40. So you need to run them in a loop where they’re constantly sanity checking themselves—-linting, styling, typing and testing. In other words; calling tools in a loop. Agents are so much better than any other approach it’s comical precisely because they’re scaffolding to let models self-correct. This is likely somewhat domain-specific; I can’t imagine the models are that great at domains they haven’t seen much code in, so they probably suck at HFT infrastructure for example, though they are decent at reading docs by this point. There’s also a lot of skill in setting up the right documentation, testing structure, interfaces, etc etc etc to make the agents more reliable and productive (fringe benefit; your LLM-wielding colleagues actually write docs now, even if they’re full of em-dashes and emoji). You also need to be willing to let it write a bunch of code, look at it, work out why it’s structurally deficient, throw it away, and build the structure you want to guide it - but the typing is essentially free, so that’s tractable. Don’t view it as bad code, view it as a useful null result. But if you’re not using Claude Code or Codex or Roo or relatives, you’re living in an entirely different world to the people who have gone messianic about these things.
    • kaishiro 1y ago
      Yes, I was using "ChatGPT" colloquially. I’ve tried Claude Code, Copilot - I currently have Gemini running though madox2's vim-ai plug - and a few of the others, but I’ve never personally seen the kind of 10x productivity gains some people here talk about. In my experience, it’s typically been quicker to just write the code myself than to wrangle with the model’s output, iterate, and debug. That’s not to say the tools are useless - like I said I think they're great at exposing docs that are disparate or obtuse (looking at you Google) but for actual problem-solving and building, they’ve unfortunately rarely felt like a net win. I'm sure you're correct that a lot of this comes down to workflow and domain - in mine, the overhead of prompting, reviewing, and correcting usually outweighs the benefits. Of course, as always, this is just one asshole's opinion!
• deterministic 1y ago
  90% of my code is auto generated using custom code generation tools. No AI needed.
• gdubs 1y ago
  One thing I don't hear a lot of people talk about is building prototypes. That's where I see a gigantic time savings. It doesn't have to be beautiful code, it just has to help me answer a question so I can make a decision about where to go next. That and tools. There have been many times where I've wanted to build a task-specific tool but justifying the time would be hard. Now I can create little tools like that, and it's a huge productivity boost.
• devmor 1y ago
  I’m still yet to find a use-case for AI-generated code in my workflow. Even when I am building tools that heavily utilize modern AI, I haven’t found it. Recently, I disabled the AI-powered code completion in my IDE because I found that the cognitive load required to evaluate the suggestions it provided was greater and more time consuming than just writing the code I was already going to write anyways. I don’t know if this is an experience thing or not - I mainly work on a tech stack I have over a decade of experience in - but I just don’t see it. Others have suggested generating tests with AI but I find that horrifying. Tests are the one thing you should be the most anal about accuracy on compared to anything else in your codebase.
• reactordev 1y ago
  I’m glad to see people still employed… I remember what that was like.
• uludag 1y ago
  Naive question but wouldn't it could as having AI write 50%+ of your code if you just use an unintelligent complete-the-line AI tool? In this case the AI is hardly doing anything intelligent, but is still getting credit for doing most of the work.
  • righthand 1y ago
    Yes there is even a small business that champions an small LLM that is trained on the language Lsp, your code base, and your recent coding history (not necessarily commit, but any time one presses ctrl + s). How it works is essentially autocomplete. This functionality is packaged as an IDE plugin: TabNine However now they try to sell subscriptions to LLMs. Tabnine has been in the scene since at least 2018.
• aledalgrande 1y ago
  I can be massively more ambitious when coding with AI, but most importantly I have zero emotional investment in the code so I can throw it away and start again whenever I want.
• smrtinsert 1y ago
  It's 80% at least for me. I've hit a groove for sure. It's not only 80% is very well tested, and almost exactly how I would have preferred. Big tips are to design your CLAUDE.md files how you would actually code from a high level perspective, and not try the usual "You are an expert Google Distributed Engineer" and all that embarassing AI hype bro crap.
• percentcer 1y ago
  “I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
• jesterson 1y ago
  That doesn't worry me much. Whats way more concerning is junior/middle developers have likely way more than 1/2 of their code "AI" generated. At least seniour developer allegedly know how to error-proof their code to some extend.
• countWSS 1y ago
  Most of code that "needs to be written" is just a copy of something standard, "Do X in the simplest way possible" code that doesn't need optimizations, and writing it by hand is just waste of time. AI is good enough to write megabytes of that code, since its statistically common and part of tons of codebases. Its the other half of code that AI can't handle, that you need to manually verify it doesn't hallucinate fantastic stuff that manages to compile, but doesn't work.
• JustExAWS 1y ago
  Been in the industry professionally since 1996 writing code and before that 10 years as a hobbyist between a little BASIC, C and a lot of assembly (65C02, 68k, PPC and x86). In the last 6 months, when I have had an assignment that involved coding, AI has generated 100% of my code. I just described the abstractions I wanted and reusable modules/classes I needed and built on it.
• throwaway290 1y ago
  Breaking news: 1/3 of devs use autocomplete. Breaking news: autocomplete now autocompletes more code.
• bdcravens 1y ago
  I don't know about half, but I do use AI a lot these days to speed run the boilerplate to get to the good parts. I think it's important to have a least the level of experience to be able to quickly verify that the generated code will work as expected.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• demarq 1y ago
  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.
  • babhinav 1y ago
    [dead]
  • jennyholzer 1y ago
    as a human being i take it as massive disrespect when another human developer makes me wipe up their AI diarrhea.
    • demarq 1y ago
      What are you replying to
      • Rochus 1y ago
        Their inner demons?
• babhinav 1y ago
  [dead]
• pera 1y ago
  It would be nice if we could avoid blog posts like this with extraordinary claims but nearly zero methodological information written by a "content marketing manager" from a company that sells AI products.
• rwmj 1y ago
  Where is all this code? If the tools are so useful it should show up in widely used open source projects, but I'm not seeing anything.
  • jillesvangurp 1y ago
    How would you know?
    • rwmj 1y ago
      Various projects have proposed a "Co-Developed-By" tag. Even if that were not used I'd expect some open source developers to have become much more productive, and written about it. We'd also see widespread adoption of ancillary tools like AI code reviewers (which have had some adoption but in my experience make suggestions that are worse than useless).
• Cloudef 1y ago
  Survey: a third of surveys say that over half of them are bullshit
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  LLMs 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 to do and what to drop because it hasn't got the right priority. Me spending an afternoon on a thing that is fun but not valuable is usually a bad use of my time. With LLMs, I'm taking on a few more of the things that I previously wouldn't have. That started with a few hobby projects that I'm now doing that I previously wasn't. And it's creeping into work as well. LLMs struggle on larger code bases. But less so with recent model releases.
  • latexr 1y ago
    > 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 time it hammered it in perfectly, or maybe it smashed your finger, or maybe it only went half-way through. You could never develop muscle memory for such a tool. You could use it, sure, but never master it.
    • jillesvangurp 1y ago
      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.
  • jennyholzer 1y ago
    a crack pipe is a tool. if you master your tools you become more productive. i've had the same mixed experiences with crack cocaine that others have. some good, some not so great. But i've been writing a lot of crack-fueled PRs in the last weeks. some needed manual intervention. some were tedious to create. and some clearly saved me a lot of work.
• jedisct1 1y ago
  I’ve been writing code for more than four decades. But today, roughly 80% of it is generated and maintained by prompting Roo Code. It’s still coding. Just at a higher level of abstraction.
• encody 1y ago
  I 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 immediately above or below the cursor location while updating the name of a single identifier to match some perceived pattern. Not remotely close to what I'd consider useful; I'm definitely a faster & better programmer without it. I also tried setting up some local models on ollama: I kept getting random tokens inserted that seemed to be markup from the model output that Zed didn't know how to parse. (On mobile rn, will post sample output when I am back at work if I remember to.) Is paying Anthropic an arm and a leg for the privilege of granting them first-party access to train on my user data really the competitive move as a modern developer? P.S. I know Zed has their own AI (and it seems like it should be really good!), but when they first introduced it, I tried it out and it immediately consumed the entire free tier's worth of credits in just a few minutes of normal coding: suggestions are proactively generated and count against your account credit even if not accepted, so I didn't really feel like I'd gotten a good sense of the tool by the time the trial ran out. Even if it's really good, it burns through credits extremely fast.
  • __jonas 1y ago
    I don’t think you should look at the Copilot autocomplete as anything other than autocomplete, as far as I know they use worse but faster models for that. I’m not big on AI but I get occasional use out of Copilot with the chat / agent mode and Claude Sonnet 4.
  • freehorse 1y ago
    > suggestions are proactively generated and count against your account credit even if not accepted This is no longer the case. They only count if you accept them. Ime their model is not great, but better than copilot (ime copilot is just too slow and disruptive). Also the options you have for tab-complete, afaik, are zed/zeta, guthub copilot, supermaven, and local models. I dont think there are other providers right now, glad if I am wrong in that.
  • 1y ago
• laurentiurad 1y ago
  This is the usual propaganda from private equity that invest in LLMs to make you feel like you're missing out for not generating AI slop yourself. I am not surprised that this gets so much traction on YC-owned website since they invest only in AI generating slop companies lately.
  • jennyholzer 1y ago
    these companies are destined to fail, just tell the truth about this dog shit technology and watch them flounder.
• Rochus 1y ago
  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 an LLVM code generator for a compiler, and a Qt adapter for the Mono soft debugging protocol. Each task resulted in 2-3kLOC of C++. The Claude experience was mixed; there is a high probability that the system doesn't respond or just quickly shows an overloaded message and does nothing. If it generates code, I quckly run in some output limitation and have to manually press "continue", and then often the result gets scrambled (i.e. the order of the generated code fragments gets mixed up, which requires another round with Claude to fix). After this process, the resulting code then compiled immediately, which impressed me. But it is full of omissions and logical errors. I am still testing and correcting. All in all, I can't say at this point that Claude has really taken any work off my hands. In order to understand the code and assess the correctness of the intermediate results, I need to know exactly how to implement the problem myself. And you have to test everything in detail and do a lot of redesigning and correcting. Some implementations are just stubs, and even after several attempts, there was still no implementation. In my opinion, what is currently available (via my $20 subscription) is impressive, but it neither replaces experience nor does it really save time. So yes, now I'm one of the 30% seniors who used AI tools, but I didn't really benefit from them in these specific tasks. Not surprisingly, also the original blog states, that nearly 30% of senior developers report "editing AI output enough to offset most of the time savings". So not really a success so far. But all in all I'm still impressed.
  • oliwary 1y ago
    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.
    • Rochus 1y ago
• dep_b 1y ago
  The nice thing about having AI generated code is that you get more time to focus on designing the system and it's edge cases. My code coverage (the significant metric, not the vain metric) and documentation coverage is really high because it's a very strong productivity boost when coupled with LLM generated code.
• cassianoleal 1y ago
  What does it mean, "AI-generated"? Does "fancy auto-complete" by an LLM count? What does it mean, "half their code"? Lines of code? Number of methods/functions? Classes? Number of whole refactors?
• codingdave 1y ago
  > Senior developers were also more likely to say they invest time fixing AI-generated code. That quote is the key - even if 1/3 of senior devs are pushing mostly AI-driven code, they are checking it first. And while the survey did not cover it, I suspect they are using their experience to decide which areas of a codebase are commonplace enough that AI can handle it vs. which areas are unique and require coding without AI. People are learning when to use AI as a helpful tool and when not to.
• DrewADesign 1y ago
  Many young developers’ careers are fucked for at least a decade. Their lifetime earnings will never recover from this.
• cc62cf4a4f20 1y ago
  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. Implementation is having CC first generate a plan, and iterating with it on the plan - a bit like mentoring a junior, except CC won't remember anything after a little while. Once you get the plan in place, then CC is generally pretty good at getting through code and tests, etc. You'll still have to review it after for all the reasons others have mentioned, but in my experience, it'll get through it way faster than I would on my own. To parallelize some of the work, I often have Visual Studio Code open to monitor what's happening while it's working so I can redirect early if necessary. It also allows me to get a head start on the code review. I will admit that I spent a lot of time iterating on my way of working to get to where I am, and I don't feel at all done (CC has workflows and subagents to help with common tasks that I haven't fully explored yet). I think the big thing is that tools like CC allow us to work in new ways but we need to shift our mindset and invest time in learning how to use these tools.
  • paulcole 1y ago
    > 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 is. There’s an Upton Sinclair quote that fits the situation quite nicely.
    • tbrake 1y ago
      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
• FpUser 1y ago
  My programming background - started from machine codes. Did everything - business desktop, high performance game like apps, firmware for microcontrollers, web front ends, high performance enterprise grade backends, distributed etc. etc. Multiple languages. So lots of experience. Now I use AI quite extensively to generate snippets / classes of code with small and well defined functionality. Most of the time it works just fine and due to my extensive experience I could quickly spot wrong approach, inefficiency, potential issues etc. After telling AI to fix whatever if any problems I've found I usually satisfied with the solution. So overall AI has become a very valuable tool for me, saves gobbles of time. How much exactly - do not really know / care.
• RianAtheer 1y ago
  I’m not surprised. AI tools have become such a huge time saver. I use them a lot too, but I still double check everything to keep quality high. I read an article on finance gossips called “The Rise of AI in Banking: Friend or Foe”, and it really put this into perspective. AI’s growth in finance shows how quickly it is reshaping industries, so seeing devs rely on AI for half their code makes total sense. Like in banking, it’s not about replacing humans but creating smarter systems, as long as we manage trust, ethics, and transparency, it’s a tool to level us up, not phase us out.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > as long as we manage trust, ethics, and transparency Trust, ethics and transparency are at all time lows in every corner of every capitalist industry imo I don't know how anyone could look at the current state of things and think AI isn't being positioned to gut employment across many industries Naive, childish and short sighted mentality imo
• pheelicks 1y ago
  This agrees with my experience on a project I’ve been working on this year, in particular related to porting the code. I’ve developed a strategy that I’m calling “Polyglot Mirroring” where the code is written in multiple languages at once, with LLMs handling the mirroring. I actually made a Ask HN about it just today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45091607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45091607 but for some reason the HN algorithm never even showed it on the Ask page :/
• Michael_Keller 1y ago
  [dead]
• ath3nd 1y ago
  Related: "MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline" https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/ https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi... Checks out
• andy_ppp 1y ago
  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…
• mandeepj 1y ago
  > This also: AI slowing down completion time by 19% - https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 Not sure which one is true
• egorfine 1y ago
  As a developer with over 30 years of experience, I face a dilemma when asked "how much AI code do you commit"? a) Answer "a lot". This answer supports the notion that developers are a dying breed and soon everyone will be able to vibe code their own personal software. Which at this point is obviously false. This answer is detrimental to my job. b) Answer "not much". Then this gets interpreted as "he's an old fart, he can't learn new things, we should be thinking of retiring him". Which is (hopefully) false. Which is - again - detrimental to my job.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• willhslade 1y ago
  I know this is late to the party but I think, given that this topic comes up.every day, we should start including statistics in our posts to get a better sense of how AI is working or not for us. I imagine a years of experience / primary language used / tool used / AI positive or negative as a percentile estimate. Personally for me it's 20 years of experience / Python / Copilot / 85% positive experience.
• v3xro 1y ago
  Still negative interest in being in the users of AI-generated group. Make it work, make it not steal other people's work and we'll talk then. :)
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• fennecbutt 1y ago
  Not mine. I mean maybe if you include tests, which for some projects are almost a repeating pattern.