Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

I guess I’m an older developer.

But I’ve come full circle and have gone back to hand coding after a couple years of fighting LLMs. I’m tired of coaxing their style and fixing their bugs - some of which are just really dumb and some are devious.

Artisanal hand craft for me!

The article is saying older devs vibe code: I think you misunderstood

By all means, if my goal is actually crafting anything.

Usually it isn't, though - I just want to pump out code changes ASAP (but not sooner).

Key word: "But"

Even then I’ve mostly given up. I’ve seen LLMs change from snake case to camel case for a single method and leave the rest untouched. I’ve seen them completely fabricate APIs to non existent libraries. I’ve seen them get mathematical formulae completely wrong. I’ve seen it make entire methods for things that are builtins of a library I’m already using.

It’s just not worth it anymore for anything that is part of an actual product.

Occasionally I will still churn out little scripts or methods from scratch that are low risk - but anything that gets to prod is pretty much hand coded again.

I didn’t misunderstand. I tried to vibe code, and now I don’t. Not sure how you misinterpreted that.

This changed my experience significantly:

https://github.com/BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server/blob/ma...

It basically uses multiple different LLMs from different providers to debate a change or code review. Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5 all have a go at it before it writes out plans or makes changes.

(Article was https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/older_developers_ai_c... when this was posted; we've since changed it)

I've also just turned off copilot now. I had several cases where bugs in the generated code slipped through and ended up deployed. Bugs I never would have written myself. Reviewing code properly is so much harder than writing it from scratch.

I'm in the same exact boat. I started with a lot of different tools but eventually went back to hand coding everything. When using tools like co-pilot I noticed I would ship a lot mode dumb mistakes. I even experimented with not even using a chat interface and it turns out that a lot of answers to problems are indeed found with a web search.

I'm in this boat. On top of this though, I genuinely think less of developers who rely on LLMs. I very seriously believe that they are beneath me.

"write it right the first time" is my new mantra/challenge to myself.

along with improving my skills in vim, this approach has made me significantly more productive and has made my code much simpler compared to when i was using LLM code generation tools.

there is no shortcut around hard work.

there is no shortcut to thoroughly interrogating the constraints of the software problem at hand.

developers who rely on LLM code generation are poor coworkers because they don't understand what they've written and why they've written it.

it's a lot faster and a lot easier and it gives you a much better understanding of the problem if you just think about the changes you want to make and write them yourself.

why are you looking for a shortcut? just do the work.

I feel like it’s my job to understand new tools and keep abreast of the way things are changing in my industry.

It is faster, right now, to just write it myself; at least for most things. I definitely want to understand when and how that might change.

Judging from the downvotes, not everybody shares that curiosity.