However, I would argue (even though I have no data back this claim up) that most developers either choose to use it or are required by their employers. I can't predict the future, so I don't know if this is an ASM vs. C kind of moment, or if those giving in to the convenience will regret it years down the line when their skills atrophy.
Me personally, I use it and I feel more productive than ever. That said I can't help but feeling a bit of shame when admitting that. Hearing so many people say that AI-generated code is unusable and fixing it takes longer than writing it by hand, makes me wonder if they are working on a very specific field or I just have skill issues. Or maybe both.
How much AI are you using? If you do, do you feel comfortable admitting it?
In my work, there are people everywhere in the "AI adoption" spectrum.
On one hand, a certain Senior engineer spent a month having an AI write him thousands of lines of code for a feature. The AI wrote a million tests, tools to visualize data, everything. But he still has not delivered the code to the main repository since he knows nobody will ever review the mess the AI wrote, and he can't even properly understand it to defend it in review. We have human reviews as part of our process, the coworker is 100% stuck on it.
I, on the other hand, don't ask AI to write code for me, but I have AI explain me concepts, track down bugs, review my patches, etc. Sometimes it shows me patch format, but I prefer it doesn't touch my filesystem. I treat it as a senior employee whose task is to be there and help me. It's been going great. I am definitely more productive, I am coding faster, and the future is sustainable for me. Having it write shit for me would definitely be faster, but I want to use AI as a tool to teach me what to do, not do it for me.
There are also employees who are still working on the pre-AI model. Whenever AI is mentioned, they automatically assume it could be hallucinating and whatnot. To these, I never mention AI, because it simply derails the conversation to a useless point.
* Everybody thinks theyre more productive.
* Some devs do boost their productivity a bit.
* But nowhere near enough to counter the slop merchants.
On average if I measure productivity by pull requests, productivity has gone up. If I measure by bugs and incidents and value delivered, I think mostly it's gone down, often significantly due to the side effects of AI abuse and slop.
To be fair pull requests are a lot more measurable than the trust lost because of a series of critical bugs and incidents but if you work on the ground floor of a product you get a good sense of the relative trade offs.
If I look at open source as a whole ive noticed a rhyming pattern - established products aren't moving any faster these days (despite a flood of PRs) but there is a sudden new deluge of vibe coded projects you can wade through, none of which are really gaining traction.
I use ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. I have used it to look up a variety of things. I don't trust it though, I check everything for accuracy. You have to check it carefully. It can make very ridiculous recommendations. You can't take it at face value. Often you have to ask more than one tool for help. The results are completely different with different AI systems. AI is not deterministic, it is based on probability so you will get completely different answers from different AI. The algorithms, training methods, and core architectures are different for the different major AI providers.
I tried vibe coding with ChatGPT and it was awful. Then I tried vibe coding with Gemini and it could not quite do what I wanted. I ended up going to Replit which is a pain, but it works a little bit better. I still don't trust it. I have tried a variety of auditiing tools to keep the code stable. Claude and Gemini both have auditing tools to check code. So does Replit. I ask Replit and Claude to audit my site. I also have tried various third party tools to do site audits. In addition, I have asked people to look at what I am working on. The impression I get is that it is stable, but only with regular checks.
I have figured that you can get your code to be good and stable if you are careful with regular audits. However, it won't be excellent, that requires both trained developers and possibly more advanced AI systems like Figma for design. It also won't be good for large projects. It seems alright for prototypes and basic designs.
I know that sounds like pessimism, but I'm really content right now with ai and coding.
I don't tell my friends I like using the Google photo remix because that's kind of shameful, but it's so gender affirming haha
The value is not writing the code anymore, but deciding what to create and keeping the code maintainable and understandable.
I admit i use AI for coding definitely too but after getting disillusioned with it.
I will definitely vibe code a prototype to quickly validate an idea. Once i see how it might work. I start from scratch and become more manual.
The more quality i want in a feature to be the more manually i get involved.
The worst part is whenever my tokens ran out , my productivity was zero. I was even an engineer anymore just a glorified prompter.
Lately i have changed how i work, i still use it but like a fancy autocomplete, a debugger,
I make it draft stuff for me , then i interrogate it, i make it justify every line of code that it writes, until i understand the code myself that i can write it if i wanted to.
Guys listen to me oneshot an entire feature may seem like you're 10x productivity but once the code it generate becomes complex even the agent can't deal with the complexity it itself created.
Big LLM companies market the product as coding is over, just become a prompter and buy our subsbscription fees.
We used to get paid to write code, now we pay to write code.
A calculator uses known deterministic algorithms to compute an answer. As long as you stay within the precision bounds, you'll get reliable and correct answers 100% of the time.
An AI is the result of randomness put through a simulated evolution, each one is different. We tend to expect them all to be the same, but that would be like redoing the big-bang until present, and expecting the dominant beings to be human, live in the same countries, speak the same languages, and believe all same cultural norms.
Nobody really groks how alien AI truly is.
as a more extreme example: do we all understand how our brains work? we use it every day and interact with other brains.
Determinism can be a liability.
My view is that whatever tool you use, it is YOUR work. I don't wanna hear about the robot and what it did. I want you to stand by your work.
If I hire a tree trimmer and they drop a branch on my garage, it is not acceptable for them to blame the chainsaw.
A dev should be ashamed to blame the robots for their sloppiness.
I think it's important to disclaim AI generated content, as a matter of courtesy.
The Github CoPilot proved interesting, but when I tried to use it to create a simulator for my BitGrid project, it just created a massive pile of slop that kept growing and getting worse. On its own, it does nothing to curate code, it is strongly biased towards adding more patches.
ChatGPT is interesting for exploring ideas, but you can't trust its math, you have to check it. It easily gets itself off by 3 or more orders of magnitude when things get interesting.
All the parents in the group of people I socialise with from my children's school dabble with AI. They're not techies, but they're enjoying it. And they're curious about how I use it at work. Some of them (law) have started to use it more aggressively in their own work.
At my actual job, there is a reasonable amount of frustration at the verbosity of ai comments and people just copy pasting ai text in response to human questions. And I'm with them. But everyone, as far as I can tell, genuinely, has adapted to coding agents and use them for coding 99% now. I have been in my industry for a long time, and have a lot of connections around London (and across continents) and they report similar.
In the real world, people are just getting on with things.
The frankly surreal amount of vicious negativity about AI here is just not something I experience whatsoever in real life.
So yes, I'm very comfortable talking about it, and even the phrase "admit" is leading, implying by default I should be ashamed.
About the AI generated slop thing, honestly a tool which i use is impeccable - you can find it on Github. It transforms your generic AI slop code into something beautiful.
Personally I'm really comfortable admitting I use AI - it just seems like the better way to do things!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637538
Maybe it's a skill issue and my prompting is too weak. But this is HN so I will conclude that my coding skills are much superior to everyone else's, so while bots can code for you plebs, their coding is of little use to me.