posted in Technology
80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful
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.
www.zdnet.com/article/80-of-developers-find-ai-coding-more-addictive-than-helpful/
I can kind of relate. There are a lot of parts of coding I find a little boring.
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.
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.