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.

• 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.

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.