A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
25year swe here. If AI disappeared tomorrow I’d “Oh no… anyways” in 2 seconds. AI’s a nice tool, it provides slight value. I’d miss it like I miss auto formatting or integrated terminals in IDEs, not really a big deal.
I’d miss it a bit. Not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, just scripter, and honestly AI has become a search engine and a quick answer machine and it’s ridiculous people pretending that it’s useless.
Is it evil? Yes. Does it enrich billionaire oligarchs? Yes. Should we stop using it? Yes.
But you can’t pretend it’s not useful.
honestly AI has become a search engine and a quick answer machine
This might be the best use for it. The Amazon AI review summary and Google search summary have been very helpful. The google search summary is often useful in that it let’s me know that there probably isn’t an answer on the Internet for a question that won’t take days of scouring to find.
I repeat myself but, and this might even sound elitist, but if you’re an academic, you will have exponentially greater use of AI than if you ain’t.
You get what you put. So if you put effort and know how to communicate and know coding and know what’s going on, you’re gonna have a better time than if you don’t. But still, that said, you have to be very careful because it is so comforting, humans are very susceptible to praise and flattery, we want to be lured in, we let ourselves be fooled, like a magic trick.
If you know it’s happening you have some defense, imagine all the people who don’t and get lost. but I suppose that’s the danger with anything really. Make sure you don’t get screwed over, as best you can. Sorry for rambling, I have a lot of thoughts on many matters, and I think it’s important that we talk about these things so we can figure it out together.
That’s how I feel right now and that’s that!
I tell folks to take what it tells you with a grain of salt because you can get it to agree with you no matter what, eventually. It will also confidently give you answers even if your question was vague or missing important specifications.
100%. And it’s dangerous as fuck. I am very aware, I dedicated my whole life to communicating through text, with computers, with humans, with myself, I studied philosophy and cognition and language and semiotics and computing and coding, so I’m at a tremendous advantage, and I have noticed that I have started talking a bit more like AI over the past few years.
Like, lie with dogs, get fleas.
Imagine if they decided that they will adjust the morality of the AI, to, let’s say, just be a little bit more favorable towards the concept of “white genocide” in South Africa, and the global effects you could see in sentiment. You think Facebook is bad? In ten years we are going to have a seriously big fucking problem with a handful of people truly controlling what people think. They already do, but this one is a game changer.
Sorry for rambling.
I work in IT so I know how important it is to be absolutely, 100% clear about what you are saying. Same is true for things like medicine, engineering, pilots, etc. Setting X to 0 vs 1 can make a big difference.
No notes! I hear ya.
Yah, it is generally a glorified search tool.
A pretty good one. I mean we’re running out of them, google isn’t very helpful anymore, and DDG is just a frontend…
Eh, I’ve had VERY mixed results. I’ve had it tell me information that I absolutely knew was wrong, and it did so with great confidence, until I copy and pasted the excerpt from the website and the URL back to it. It then goes, “Oh you’re right!” Ughhhh…
Yeah. Mixed results. Just like an ordinary search. And please note- you knew it was wrong. It is much easier using a tool when you know when it’s misbehaving. Sure the level of utility varies from person to person and situation to situation, but there are things I am truly grateful that AI helped me understand, learn, or just spit back at me. It is a very useful tool.
Auto Code formatting, not a big deal? What kind of hellish demon are you? What eldritch horror created you?
I can kind of relate. There are a lot of parts of coding I find a little boring.
- Once the interesting problem is solved and all you need to do is follow through
- Large scale refactorings in ways too complicated for an IDE.
- Fixing annoying dependency / migration issues
When you use an expensive AI agent, like Claude, it can nowadays handle these tasks competently, to the point where I only need to correct small things here and there.
When you give these tasks to an AI agent, it feels a bit like delegating to a junior, but without the guilt of giving someone a menial or boring task. That allows me to work on stuff I find more interesting. To me, THAT’S why it’s adictive.
However, this isn’t without cost. First, there’s the societal costs: Environmental, centralization of power, contribution to hardware shortages and a bubble
Second, there are more personal costs. You’ll come to rely more and more on these tools, and your skills will rust. You may end up avoiding learning things about a codebase because you delegate it away.
It’s a tempting tool. One which in my experience can genuinely help, but is easy to misuse.
Wow this is all so true and well put.
Some colleagues are showing off 20k+ line change commits with no review. Whilst I’m at most doing 100 lines, usually 10 or less. I am reading each change. Every plan is read thoroughly with multiple iterations. If I don’t understand a part, I ask the AI to explain. It is surprisingly good at explaining the work. However I do find mistakes. I have it commit after every change after the tests work and I’d say a third of the commits are prefixed as "fix: ". I’m still on the fence about the whole thing but it feels good and weird and phoney at the same time.
it feels good and weird and phoney at the same time.
I feel like: we’ve been developing these “best practices” of documented traceable requirements and design specs, repository storage of the whole change history, trace matrices showing test coverage / validation of all requirements and specs, code reviews, etc. etc. etc. and… for the most part… if you’ve got exclusively good responsible programmers on your team, most of that is a waste of time. But, when you have personnel turnover, people with … marginal skills, etc. those practices become much more important, even if they more than qunintuple the time required to do a thing, they enable projects to grow and be maintainable at much larger scale than if you don’t do them.
And along comes LLM agents, who strongly resemble those fresh hire colleagues of marginal skills, and they don’t complain about these “best practices” wasting time, and they’re so wicked fast that they can cut through the process that used to take 500% as long in 20% of the time instead… No, they’re not the greatest at getting things right on the first try, but they have been getting good at catching and correcting their own mistakes. And I can type messages like this one while they work on things that don’t need my attention…
Some colleagues are showing off 20k+ line change commits with no review.
Our primary use of the Cursor LLM agent is: code review. Refinement of the review to clear out the misconceptions - improvement of the pull request documentation to make intent more clear for everyone - not just the LLM agents.
We also have come (lately) to rely on it for writing unit tests. A year ago the LLM written tests tended to be ineffective, just “whitewash” coverage that didn’t really check the important aspects of the requirements. Today, they’re probably better than our Sr Sw Eng written unit tests, and you can crank the coverage arbitrarily high with very little effort.
Whilst I’m at most doing 100 lines, usually 10 or less.
One of my big criticisms of the .NET toolchain is that even simple changes can touch 47+ files, thousands of lines of code, and take hours just to have eyes on everything that changed, whereas a similar change in my Qt/C++ might be one line, or up to a dozen here a dozen there in maybe 6 files, but never the mess I’ve been seeing come out of .NET/WPF and friends for the past 20 years.
Second, there are more personal costs. You’ll come to rely more and more on these tools, and your skills will rust.
I mean, if you’re curious and you’re diligent, you can learn from what the AI chugs out. Skills only stagnate when you trust the AI blindly.
I’d say the bigger problem is that when you’re outsourcing junior coder work (even the tedious stuff) to a machine, you’re not investing in new junior coders.
I don’t trust the AI, I just can’t be bothered to argue. At the end of the day it’s no longer my code, so I feel no guilt about pushing in slop.
Trust But Verify is a good policy regardless of where your code comes from.
“AI” code is still human code in some capacity. Human code is what it was trained on. What would you do with a module you grabbed off GitHub or a script you found on Discord? Hopefully the same thing.
Yeah I relate strongly with this. Once you get used to having more time and energy for the tough problems, the interesting stuff, it’s hard to go back to the mechanical and menial.
But I’ve found it’s a lot like riding a bike. You don’t really rust, because the stuff the agents can handle today are the kind of shit that you’ve done so much and from the start, that it has become menial and boring. Which means it’s pretty ingrained into the backbone, at least that’s what I’ve found.
But damn if I don’t feel bad about it, recognizing and being conscious about the societal and environmental cost the convenience has.
Don’t get too bent about the environmental costs… the (US) AI data centers pollute about the same as 11 million office commuters. So, the great corporate leaders who are trying to mandate 30 million work-from-home workers back to the office are advocating for 3X as much pollution increase as the current crop of AI data centers emit.
I keep having the issue where I ask AI to do one small but tedious task, e.g. a refactor, and it sloppifies the rest of the code while it’s at it
Addictive? What the fuck are they coding?
Every time I try to use AI for coding I just get endlessly frustrated and angry.
The code LLMs spit is IME super buggy and gives as much work to correct it as it would have cost writing it from scratch… but it generally does the job. The addictive part is where you click a button and avoid thinking how to code.
This is my experience, but im an amateur and actually enjoy programming things… so, i piss on LLMs taking that from me.
EDIT: i know two persons that actively use LLMs, one does it to avoid having to ibteract with someone that actually knows how to code, the other learned to code to make money, so he really does not care that much.
Don’t forget that when you use LLMs you are helping these types of people:
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/claude-dario-amodei-wife-anthropic-e1eeda7d
Cami Clark—who started what she called a ‘revolutionary porn company’ where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein—keeps a low profile but is a key adviser to the AI chief. Its coming IPO could top trillions.
So my preferred agent atm is GitHub Copilot as a jetbrains plugin. The other day when GitHub had a 6 hour outage and I couldn’t log in, my first instinct was “guess I can’t work today”. I realized almost immediately how fucking dumb that initial thought was. Like I had forgotten that I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and around 17 of those with no AI whatsoever.
Was I slower that day? Yes absolutely. Was I incapable? Not at all.
I wouldn’t want to do without it, because on the positive side it has helped me discover libraries and tools I had no idea existed, and it’s made me a better archtitect. But, maybe we should still actually touch the code a little.
I’m curious what tasks are you using GitHub Copilot for? I left the industry before AI got huge so I was never pressured to use the tools.
It can write code decently well and fast, and is amazing at finding stuff in a large project.
But you still 100% need to verify what it does and truly understand it.
This isn’t what I was asking for, I’d like to see something like, “When tasked with X AI did Y” with breakdowns between simple bug fixes to standing up a monolith in a legacy environment.
I mean that you would have to test yourself. To me it seems like AI funnily enough has the same issues as humans, and that’s that it works worse in legacy codebases full of tech debt, and in large monoliths.
But it can still be an invaluable tool.
All agents are pretty much the same. Think of it like pair programming with someone, except that someone doesn’t have feelings and you can micromanage them.
In general, I give it instructions for what I want to accomplish. It has a “plan mode” that basically instructs the LLM to give me an execution plan to approve before actually doing it. We iterate on the implementation plan together and then when I satisfied I let it generate code.
It generated diffs essentially that I can approve or deny directly, in aggregate or by individual chunk.
I can (and do) provide custom instructions that it loads whenever I start a session. Instructions are basically md files, but it can be any text.
It’s a very different way of writing code, but if you ever pair programmed with a knowledgeable junior then that’s kind of what it feels like.
I wonder how long that will still be the case? The more of the mental load you pawn off on the chatbot, the less your brain will prioritize retaining it.
It’s like when you spend years only speaking a second language you’re fluent in, it can be hard to switch back to your native tongue when you need to.
I got a job once at a video processing software company, camera streams etc. The tasks there involved a lot of reverse engineering of under or undocumented things, very slow - I felt like I was getting 2-3 hours of “accomplishment” accomplished on a typical week there, very demoralizing, but they swore that’s how it always is there and I’m actually unusually quick at getting things done… IDK, I got a better offer and was out of there to a more productive job fairly quickly.
I was very hesitant to get on board with AI tools for software development for a long time, but my company just got us all Claude Code a couple of months ago and are encouraging us to use it. I know there is a pretty big stigma around AI in general, and I think the vast majority of AI integrations are a waste of resources at best. That being said, I’ve been using it in my workflow for a while now and have found it to be surprisingly useful. In my opinion, in its current state, it is still just a tool, and it has a number of shortcomings (even using the most current and "powerful/capable” models). I’ve found myself mostly using it for testing, documentation, and boiler plate stuff, and it genuinely has made me a lot more productive.
I still write a lot of code myself, because I believe I’m still far smarter and more capable than it is when it comes to designing and implementing new software. If it disappeared tomorrow, I’d be just fine. I would miss the convenience it provides, but it currently it’s not anywhere near the point of being able to replace me.
I don’t really derive a sense of accomplishment from it, so I don’t get the dopamine hit. It’s more write a simple bash script to do X because I hate working in that syntax, or this library has terrible documentation, tell me how I’m supposed to use it.
You still need to read and understand everything it writes, but it’s easier to validate something is correct sometimes rather than figure out the correct way to do something.
Also the freaking essays it writes as comments burying the useful information in the equivalent of a recipe blog post when you really just need assumptions about input, and side effects.
I definitely don’t get the high of coding anymore, but I do get a high of solving complex issues in architectural designs. I realized the high I chased when coding previously have shifted from coding design, to systems design.
I never got a high from coding, now compiling and seeing your tests have a green [PASS] next to them is a different story.
I get high when I stare at a terminal screen nonplussed for hours and suddenly it clicks and I fix it.
That’s a rush for me.
That’s what I’ve been saying too. AI is very much what you put in you get out. If you actually know what you’re doing, it’s a great little shortcut tool*. Ask stupid questions win stupid prizes, kind of.
* for SOME tasks - terms and conditions apply
I find it anti addictive. Work is pretty aggressive (but now not too aggressive thanks to cost, but still a bit aggressive). So everyone is expected to show some utilization or be shunned. For the first time, I find myself thinking it might be nice to get out of this entire industry, if only I could afford to
Anyway, I managed to consume what was my monthly quota in a week and was quite happy that I could credibly ignore AI for the next three weeks.
Then disappointed as an administrator quintupled my quota the next day.
Though nothing is nearly as annoying as everyone else’s use is AI. I hate using it, and it’s just even worse dealing with the consequences of other people using it.
Just burn through their money as fast as possible.
it might be nice to get out of this entire industry, if only I could afford to
I got pushed out of the industry right before COVID hit, so I haven’t ever dealt with AI. I’m a school bus driver now, which is infinitely more satisfying than programming since I get to drive a big Tonka truck around and gaslight children all day. The only downside is making 1/6 of what I used to make so this is not really a viable alternative for most people. At least I get subsidized health insurance.
Yeah, the other people factor is a pretty good point. Some people in the organization seem to think that they have no liability for their output anymore, so long as AI produced it for them. They will pass on bloated shit, unreviewed shit, laundry lists of glittering generalities, elaborate plans based on fundamental misunderstandings about a tool, … half of the problem never gets noticed because people see a wall of fancy text that they don’t understand, so they think it’s good. Stakeholders aren’t reading that shit, certainly not comprehending it. I know as much, because it’s a steaming pile of horseshit. Nobody is over here actually grading the horseshit. Nobody is having hard discussions about what’s acceptable and what isn’t.
I put a considerable amount of effort into making an LLM do exactly what I want… I use it daily, have for years, and I’m still pretty terrible at it. Just imagine what some people are producing, who actually trust these models… not to mention when they use the fucking model to step into my lane. I will call your shit out in a group conversation if you do that. Don’t fucking do that. If it’s my lane, don’t pollute it with that AI bullshit. Now I have to explain to everyone why that shit doesn’t work. Do a better job.
they use the fucking model to step into my lane
An extension of the “they think it can do everyone’s job (except their own)”. Even weirder, they tend to think that the people enjoy their obnoxious attempts to diminish their jobs. Then you just have one more thing to try to explain to management why the code generation from a sales guy doesn’t actually do what the sales guy thinks it does.
I will say at least around me, it has gotten less bad on this front as of late. Either a lot of these folks got bitten and learned the codegen doesn’t magically make them capable, or they just got bored of trying. Either way, it’s nice to have them quiet down a bit.
It helps if they actually have to use the crap code they vibe out. They can no longer yell at the nearest dev that their impossible requirement isn’t working. So there’s less pushback against bringing back their convenient scapegoats.
I use it to whip out bash and python scripts quickly. I review them to see what it is doing. If AI disappeared it would just slow me down but not stop me.
Same. It builds ansible playbooks for me pretty reliably. And saved me a fuck ton of time on the contract I’m on now converting our entire chef baseline into ansible.
Easily done, but doing it all by hand would have been a pain. Did it in a couple of days for the first draft, then manually tweaked it for the weird shit Claude hallucinated.
The biggest chilling effect I noticed, even as a developer who refuses to use AI, is that I feel like I can no longer ask my co-workers for advice. When I do, I get the the AI equivalent of “let me Google that for you, was that so hard?” So even without using it, I feel cut off from the normal places I would use to learn and improve my coding skills.
It is like drugs in the sense I have to keep going to my boss to ask for more tokens. They expect us not to write any code by hand and have a bot that checks so eventually I run out of tokens every few days and have to ask them for more. I can’t work without them ( I actually like writing the code by hand anyways but they said not to lol ). Then they get mad when I use too many tokens so idk what the fuck they want anymore.
I just want to make useful things and not be micromanaged anymore
This is a small, fairly biased survey with unpublished proper metrics. Whether you agree or disagree with the result, this is bad science.
Ah, but if you agree with the results you probably care much less about bad science than making AI users look bad.
Indeed
But coding is fun and there’s lots of free resources to help. What could be fun about begging an AI to write poorly made code?
Addictions aren’t necessarily fun
Okay fair but wouldn’t it be more aggravating than just making the code that does what you want it to do? If nothing else, they can copy from StackOverflow like everyone else does
Doesn’t mean they said it wasn’t helpful, just that the addictive score was higher than the helpful score for 80% of the developers asked.
But it’s the next step in human civilization!
Ai coding is like the loom for society but you have to know how to use it.
People claiming its garbage slop are 2 years out of date on current models.
To all those people I suggest you familiarize yourself with it as whats coming is going to ruin the world but not because its slop because its going to be capable.
AI can handle boilerplate and any coding project that has been done ad nauseam. AI can’t handle legacy system quirks, creative problem solving, or massive projects with changing requirements. I don’t think the AI bubble will be around long enough for them to solve these shortcomings or the issues of expanding scope and scale leading to hallucinations.
To me AI is just impressive enough to convince managers and inexperienced developers it is the future. I’ll believe that when a Fortune 500 company rebuilds their whole entire tech stack via AI, and I think AI could solve climate change before it could do that haha.
I disagree with much of your ai cant deal with complexity.
I dunno i am just saying be prepared because its going to blind side everyone thinking its a fad
Could you give some examples of AI handling complexity? From what I’ve read from senior developers is that the more scope AI has to chew on the more mistakes it makes. In terms of complexity I’m not talking about algorithms, differential calculus, or mind breaking recursion. I’m talking about the usual hodgepodge of monolithic microservices too many “Were a tech company that does X” companies have built over the past decade that are layered on top of software built before I was born.
Maybe I’m just creating too complex and specific use case, but my time as a software developer had me working through problems like that.
AI can’t handle legacy system quirks, creative problem solving, or massive projects with changing requirements.
I think that disliking ai - for whatever good reason - makes people shun the reality, cherry-pick articles/studies etc, but we have to be honest: We all do that - even when we try to balance it, so that is normal behaviour within a spectrum. However, current anti-ai leaning do end up blinded to how fast things are moving with this technology because it is moving so fast. There are massive burnouts just from those following AI development every day, and they constantly have to expand/narrow their scope. If anyone takes a few days of in their field of interest, it feels like they have to sprint to catch up. It is accelerating and is no longer confined to model inventions from big corps with mega models - developers are building ‘cognitive architectures’ around the current llm’ limitations.
So to me, these ‘AI can’t …’ type of sentences are always changing as they become yesterdays ‘AI cant …’ sentences within days or weeks. It is a great ‘moving goalpost’ tho, as there are a lot of human level evolutionary abilities lacking from current models. But every second, one+ of millions of people are working towards adding that next ‘AI cant …’ sentence to yesterdays claims, and things are moving fast.
I think it is vital for everyone - in all corners of human ‘belief-space’ - to keep in active touch with this technology, as much as they can muster, agree they are angry but try to shake some hard assumptions/‘loosen up’, see where it is headed and adjust their expectations/plans for the future accordingly. Anger is an easy but dangerous thing as it can make us refuse to acknowledge something that we need to prepare for. We’ve all been there - many many times, and we all know how we think and act in anger. Now, is a bad time for that. Please familiarise your self with ai tech.
Not starting an argument/debate (i’m burned out atmo), just a long-winded observation really…
Haha I feel the long winded observation, I get it. I’m open to being wrong about AI, but you missed the main point of my argument
I don’t think the AI bubble will be around long enough for them to solve these shortcomings or the issues of expanding scope and scale leading to hallucinations.
Right now AI simply can’t (or at least last time I checked because you’re correct the technology moves very fast) do the things I mentioned.
These things, in my mind, are the gatekeepers for profitability if AI can figure these and any other issues and turn a profit before the bubble bursts, then yes we’d have an AI future. If we really get down to brass tacks (and now that I’m really thinking about it) that is the objective issue with AI, it isn’t profitable yet, it doesn’t matter if it can code a simulation of every life form on this planet if it isn’t making money. If it can solve this problem however, then yes I’d agree, everyone saying “AI can’t…” with eat their words seasoned with a little salt.
To address your accusation of cherry picking articles and advice for keeping in touch, I was kind of forced to cherry pick while attempting to keep in touch? When I was researching modern developments in AI all I was fed was an excessive amount of marketing material (this is a red flag for obvious reasons), I had to intentionally break good faith and search for things like “The issues with claude code” to get something written by a person who did not have a conflict of interest when it came to reviewing AI
I’d love to see examples of AI proving the naysayers wrong, but I was either seeing nothing but hype or enough evidence to remain skeptical of the technology.
What I’m trying to say is that I’ve tried to follow AI, I’ve tried to be impartial, but combined with what I am seeing, what I experienced as a software developer, and the economic side of AI, I don’t see any sort of AI revolution akin to the printing press or the internet. Just another race to wealth fueled by hype and some very impressive math.
I do think that outside of coding AI has some really great promises, like being able to design an Excel spreadsheet in plain English is amazing for anyone afraid of Excel, so microsoft copilot has my respect within the M365 suite, granted I don’t know what the Excel wizards have to say about the matter, but I think your average 9 to 5 desk worker whose experience with Excel revolved around accidentally opening it once would love copilot.
I think claude fable could organize, plan, execute, basically any coding task and human level complexity…
I’m asking for specifics, benchmarks, analysis, and data. Your responses are not that. I’ll look on my own I guess.
2 years out of date
I have to figure that’s where these people are stuck. You can’t have used frontier models in anger in the last 6 months and still believe this tripe.
It could be the loom or it could be laserdisc
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