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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 kno

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 Was 9 years out of date and it’s running in prod now with less errors than before.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.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  Strangely I've found myself more exhausted at the end of the week and I think it's because of the constant supervision necessary to stop Claude from colouring outside the lines when I don't watch it like a hawk. Also I tend to get more done at a time, it makes it easier to get started on "gruntwork" tasks that I would have procrastinated on. Which in turn can lead to burnout quite quickly. I think in the end it's just as much "work", just a different kind of work and with more quantity as a result.
  - daveguy 1y ago
    Now we just need an AI that helps with more quality.
    - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
      No, what I want better is tooling that makes supervising and getting insight into what it's doing a superior experience. A far more interactive coding "agent" that makes sure it walks through every change it makes with you, and doesn't just rush through tasks. That helps team members come up to speed on a repository by working through it with them.
  - matwood 1y ago
    > Strangely I've found myself more exhausted at the end of the week and I think it's because of the constant supervision necessary to stop Claude from colouring outside the lines when I don't watch it like a hawk. Welcome to management. Computers and code are easy. People and people wannabes like LLMs are a pain.
- nicodjimenez 1y ago
  What kind of codebases do you work on if you don't mind me asking? I've found a huge boost from using AI to deal with APIs (databases, k8s, aws, ...) but less so on large codebases that needed conceptual improvements. But at worst, i'm getting more than 10% benefit, just cause the AI's can read files so quickly and answer questions and propose reasonable ideas.
  - Sl1mb0 1y ago
    How are you quantifying that 10% ?
- ambicapter 1y ago
  Is the alleviating of the mental energy going to make you a worst programmer in the long run? Is this like skipping mental workouts that were ultimately keeping you sharp?
  - mertd 1y ago
    Do coding in non-assembly programming languages make you a worse programmer in the long run because you are not exposed to the deepest level of complexity?
    - krmboya 1y ago
      My guess is if we assume the high level and low level programmers are equally proficient in their mediums, they would use the same amount of effort to tackle problems, but the kinds of problems they can tackle are vastly different
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    At 51, no one hires me because of my coding ability. They hire me because I know how to talk to the “business” and lead (larger projects) or implement (smaller projects) and to help sales close deals. Don’t get me wrong, I care very deeply about the organization and maintainability of my code and I don’t use “agents”. I carefully build my code (and my infrastructure as code based architecture) piece by piece through prompting. And I do have enough paranoia about losing my coding ability - and I have lost some because of LLMs - that I keep a year in savings to have time to practice coding for three months while looking for a job.
  - weego 1y ago
    Also in my 40s and above senior level. Theres not many mental workouts in day to day coding because the world is just not a new challenge every day. What I consider 'boilerplate' just expands to include things I've written a dozen times before in a different context. AI can write that to my taste and I can tackle the few actual challenges.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    I know a couple of people whose mental faculties took a sharp nosedive after they started relying on LLMs too much. They might be outliers but just a few years ago I considered them to be really sharp and these days they often struggle with pretty basic reasoning and problem solving.
- cschneid 1y ago
  I find AI is most useful at the ancillary extra stuff. Things that I'd never get to myself. Little scripts of course, but more like "it'd be nice to rename this entire feature / db table / tests to better match the words that the business has started to use to discuss it". In the past, that much nitpicky detail just wouldn't have gotten done, my time would have been spent on actual features. But what I just described was a 30 minute background thing in claude code. Worked 95%, and needed just one reminder tweak to make it deployable. The actual work I do is too deep in business knowledge to be AI coded directly, but I do use it to write tests to cover various edge cases, trace current usage of existing code, and so on. I also find AI code reviews really useful to catch 'dumb errors' - nil errors, type mismatches, style mismatch with existing code, and so on. It's in addition to human code reviews, but easy to run on every PR.
  - blks 1y ago
    Wow, 30 minutes to rename functions and tests? I wonder how much energy and water that llm wasted for something that any lsp supporting editor can do in a second.
  - lovestaco 1y ago
    Nice, which reviewer do you use? I was using CodeRabbi now switched to LiveReview.
- darkwater 1y ago
  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 understand what the agent is writing and what is going on. I'm pretty radical on this topic but for me cognitive load is good, you are making your neurons work and keep synapses in place where they matter (at least for your job). I totally accept writing down doc or howto to make doing some action in future easier and reduce that cognitive load, but using AI agent IMO is like going to bike in the mountain with an electrical bike. Yes, you keep seeing the wonderful vistas but you are not really training your legs.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    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 hours to do things that need my experience. Maybe spot the contractor using a nail plate in the wrong way or help the apprentice on their hammering technique.
    - ApeWithCompiler 1y ago
      I'd like to counter argue we need to shift the notion of efficiency. While the nailgun is more efficient than the hammer, both need to be operated by a real human. Including all limitations of physical and mental health. While we can improve the efficiency of the tools we should consider not to burn out humans to match the goal.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      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 might say that using a hammer constantly will develop more your muscles, but in carpentry there are still plenty of manual work that will develop your muscles anyway. (and we still don't have bricks laying machines)
- mnky9800n 1y ago
  Do you feel like you lack mental energy at 40? I do not feel any different from 30. I think the main difference between 30 and 40 is I am much more efficient at doing things and therefore am able to do more.
  - danielvaughn 1y ago
    I do, but I’m not sure it’s age related. Ever since 2020, it feels like my physical and mental energy has been on a downward trajectory. I feel like I’ve lost several IQ points. What’s interesting is that I’ve heard the same from a lot of people. Not sure what the root cause is, but I do need to take better care of myself.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      I think it may be just age and stress. Also apparently even pretty mild Covid could cause some vasculatory damage? On the flip side physical excercise can cause even very old people to improve radically.
      - mnky9800n 1y ago
        Also creatine is good for everyone for mind and body.
    - blks 1y ago
      This could be long COVID.
- mshanu 1y ago
  I am pleasantly surprised when it is able to figure out the root cause of some bugs which at times require a lot of mental energy
  - danielvaughn 1y ago
    Exactly
- motbus3 1y ago
  I will say that some weeks it make me 10% more productive, some weeks -10%. I came to the conclusion that I need to do all the hard work and only ask it to fill the gaps otherwise it will generate too much crap.
ojosilva 1y ago
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.
- another_twist 1y ago
  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.
- ottah 1y ago
  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.
  - verdverm 1y ago
    fwiw, VS Code has a snooze auto complete button. Each press is 5m, a decently designed feature imo
    - rblatz 1y ago
      Copilot replacing intellisense is a huge shame. Why get actual auto complete when you can get completely hallucinated methods and properties instead.
      - RugnirViking 1y ago
        Does it actually replace it? I can still get intellisense style suggestions on my ides (various jetbrains and visual studio) and it's still just as useful (what can this object do I wonder...)
victorbjorklund 1y ago
100%. My instructions are often pretty exact "i want a genserver that fetches the data every X sec and updates Y if new data"
- cpursley 1y ago
  Yeah, Claude has gotten much better with Elixir. I think too many people expect one-shot miracles, but you have to guide it along like you would a junior, including directing it towards the proper context.
socalgal2 1y ago
Can you be specific about what you're asking it to write? I'm pretty confidient that I couldn't get it to implement a element in a web browser. I'm talking about C++ in WebKit or Chromium, not a custom element in HTML/JS. Let's say browsers wanted a new data-table element that natively implemented a scrolling window such that you registered events to supply elements and it asked for only the portion that were visible. I feel like those code bases are too complex for LLMs to add this (could certainly be wrong). In any case, more concrete examples would help these discussions. I can give a concrete example: I just asked ChatGPT (should have asked something more integrated into my editor), to give me JavaScript to directly parse meta data out of an MP4 file in JS in the browser. It gave my typescript but told me I should look at mp4box. I spent 15-20 minutes getting a mp4box example setup (probably should have asked for that too). Only to find that I think mp4box does not get me the data I wanted. So I went back to ChatGPT and asked for JavaScript because I was hacking in something like jsfiddle. It gave me that and it worked! I then said I wanted the title and comments meta data as that was missing from what it gave me. That worked too, first try.
npn 1y ago
I typed less using AI, so it is a net win I guess

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.
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
Strangely I've found myself more exhausted at the end of the week and I think it's because of the constant supervision necessary to stop Claude from colouring outside the lines when I don't watch it like a hawk. Also I tend to get more done at a time, it makes it easier to get started on "gruntwork" tasks that I would have procrastinated on. Which in turn can lead to burnout quite quickly. I think in the end it's just as much "work", just a different kind of work and with more quantity as a result.
- daveguy 1y ago
  Now we just need an AI that helps with more quality.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    No, what I want better is tooling that makes supervising and getting insight into what it's doing a superior experience. A far more interactive coding "agent" that makes sure it walks through every change it makes with you, and doesn't just rush through tasks. That helps team members come up to speed on a repository by working through it with them.
- matwood 1y ago
  > Strangely I've found myself more exhausted at the end of the week and I think it's because of the constant supervision necessary to stop Claude from colouring outside the lines when I don't watch it like a hawk. Welcome to management. Computers and code are easy. People and people wannabes like LLMs are a pain.
nicodjimenez 1y ago
What kind of codebases do you work on if you don't mind me asking? I've found a huge boost from using AI to deal with APIs (databases, k8s, aws, ...) but less so on large codebases that needed conceptual improvements. But at worst, i'm getting more than 10% benefit, just cause the AI's can read files so quickly and answer questions and propose reasonable ideas.
- Sl1mb0 1y ago
  How are you quantifying that 10% ?
ambicapter 1y ago
Is the alleviating of the mental energy going to make you a worst programmer in the long run? Is this like skipping mental workouts that were ultimately keeping you sharp?
- mertd 1y ago
  Do coding in non-assembly programming languages make you a worse programmer in the long run because you are not exposed to the deepest level of complexity?
  - krmboya 1y ago
    My guess is if we assume the high level and low level programmers are equally proficient in their mediums, they would use the same amount of effort to tackle problems, but the kinds of problems they can tackle are vastly different
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  At 51, no one hires me because of my coding ability. They hire me because I know how to talk to the “business” and lead (larger projects) or implement (smaller projects) and to help sales close deals. Don’t get me wrong, I care very deeply about the organization and maintainability of my code and I don’t use “agents”. I carefully build my code (and my infrastructure as code based architecture) piece by piece through prompting. And I do have enough paranoia about losing my coding ability - and I have lost some because of LLMs - that I keep a year in savings to have time to practice coding for three months while looking for a job.
- weego 1y ago
  Also in my 40s and above senior level. Theres not many mental workouts in day to day coding because the world is just not a new challenge every day. What I consider 'boilerplate' just expands to include things I've written a dozen times before in a different context. AI can write that to my taste and I can tackle the few actual challenges.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  I know a couple of people whose mental faculties took a sharp nosedive after they started relying on LLMs too much. They might be outliers but just a few years ago I considered them to be really sharp and these days they often struggle with pretty basic reasoning and problem solving.
cschneid 1y ago
I find AI is most useful at the ancillary extra stuff. Things that I'd never get to myself. Little scripts of course, but more like "it'd be nice to rename this entire feature / db table / tests to better match the words that the business has started to use to discuss it". In the past, that much nitpicky detail just wouldn't have gotten done, my time would have been spent on actual features. But what I just described was a 30 minute background thing in claude code. Worked 95%, and needed just one reminder tweak to make it deployable. The actual work I do is too deep in business knowledge to be AI coded directly, but I do use it to write tests to cover various edge cases, trace current usage of existing code, and so on. I also find AI code reviews really useful to catch 'dumb errors' - nil errors, type mismatches, style mismatch with existing code, and so on. It's in addition to human code reviews, but easy to run on every PR.
- blks 1y ago
  Wow, 30 minutes to rename functions and tests? I wonder how much energy and water that llm wasted for something that any lsp supporting editor can do in a second.
- lovestaco 1y ago
  Nice, which reviewer do you use? I was using CodeRabbi now switched to LiveReview.
darkwater 1y ago
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 understand what the agent is writing and what is going on. I'm pretty radical on this topic but for me cognitive load is good, you are making your neurons work and keep synapses in place where they matter (at least for your job). I totally accept writing down doc or howto to make doing some action in future easier and reduce that cognitive load, but using AI agent IMO is like going to bike in the mountain with an electrical bike. Yes, you keep seeing the wonderful vistas but you are not really training your legs.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  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 hours to do things that need my experience. Maybe spot the contractor using a nail plate in the wrong way or help the apprentice on their hammering technique.
  - ApeWithCompiler 1y ago
    I'd like to counter argue we need to shift the notion of efficiency. While the nailgun is more efficient than the hammer, both need to be operated by a real human. Including all limitations of physical and mental health. While we can improve the efficiency of the tools we should consider not to burn out humans to match the goal.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    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 might say that using a hammer constantly will develop more your muscles, but in carpentry there are still plenty of manual work that will develop your muscles anyway. (and we still don't have bricks laying machines)
mnky9800n 1y ago
Do you feel like you lack mental energy at 40? I do not feel any different from 30. I think the main difference between 30 and 40 is I am much more efficient at doing things and therefore am able to do more.
- danielvaughn 1y ago
  I do, but I’m not sure it’s age related. Ever since 2020, it feels like my physical and mental energy has been on a downward trajectory. I feel like I’ve lost several IQ points. What’s interesting is that I’ve heard the same from a lot of people. Not sure what the root cause is, but I do need to take better care of myself.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    I think it may be just age and stress. Also apparently even pretty mild Covid could cause some vasculatory damage? On the flip side physical excercise can cause even very old people to improve radically.
    - mnky9800n 1y ago
      Also creatine is good for everyone for mind and body.
  - blks 1y ago
    This could be long COVID.
mshanu 1y ago
I am pleasantly surprised when it is able to figure out the root cause of some bugs which at times require a lot of mental energy
- danielvaughn 1y ago
  Exactly
motbus3 1y ago
I will say that some weeks it make me 10% more productive, some weeks -10%. I came to the conclusion that I need to do all the hard work and only ask it to fill the gaps otherwise it will generate too much crap.

ojosilva 1y ago

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.

another_twist 1y ago
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.
ottah 1y ago
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.
- verdverm 1y ago
  fwiw, VS Code has a snooze auto complete button. Each press is 5m, a decently designed feature imo
  - rblatz 1y ago
    Copilot replacing intellisense is a huge shame. Why get actual auto complete when you can get completely hallucinated methods and properties instead.
    - RugnirViking 1y ago
      Does it actually replace it? I can still get intellisense style suggestions on my ides (various jetbrains and visual studio) and it's still just as useful (what can this object do I wonder...)

victorbjorklund 1y ago

100%. My instructions are often pretty exact "i want a genserver that fetches the data every X sec and updates Y if new data"

cpursley 1y ago
Yeah, Claude has gotten much better with Elixir. I think too many people expect one-shot miracles, but you have to guide it along like you would a junior, including directing it towards the proper context.

socalgal2 1y ago

Can you be specific about what you're asking it to write? I'm pretty confidient that I couldn't get it to implement a element in a web browser. I'm talking about C++ in WebKit or Chromium, not a custom element in HTML/JS. Let's say browsers wanted a new data-table element that natively implemented a scrolling window such that you registered events to supply elements and it asked for only the portion that were visible. I feel like those code bases are too complex for LLMs to add this (could certainly be wrong). In any case, more concrete examples would help these discussions. I can give a concrete example: I just asked ChatGPT (should have asked something more integrated into my editor), to give me JavaScript to directly parse meta data out of an MP4 file in JS in the browser. It gave my typescript but told me I should look at mp4box. I spent 15-20 minutes getting a mp4box example setup (probably should have asked for that too). Only to find that I think mp4box does not get me the data I wanted. So I went back to ChatGPT and asked for JavaScript because I was hacking in something like jsfiddle. It gave me that and it worked! I then said I wanted the title and comments meta data as that was missing from what it gave me. That worked too, first try.

npn 1y ago

I typed less using AI, so it is a net win I guess