←back to thread

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

(www.fastly.com)
214 points Brajeshwar | 2 comments | 31 Aug 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
yodsanklai ◴[31 Aug 25 21:40 UTC] No.45087351[source]▶
Seems about right for me (older developer at a big tech company). But we need to define what it means that the code is AI-generated. In my case, I typically know how I want the code to look like, and I'm writing a prompt to tell the agent to do it. The AI doesn't solve any problem, it just does the typing and helps with syntax. I'm not even sure I'm ultimately more productive.
replies(6): >>45087633 #>>45087699 #>>45087883 #>>45089870 #>>45090395 #>>45090712 #
1. spunker540 ◴[31 Aug 25 22:22 UTC] No.45087633[source]▶
I’m not yet up to half (because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI)

But your approach sounds familiar to me. I find sometimes it may be slower and lower quality to use AI, but it requires less mental bandwidth from me, which is sometimes a worthwhile trade off.

replies(1): >>45090636 #
2. wordofx ◴[01 Sep 25 08:10 UTC] No.45090636[source]▶
> because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI

What language? I picked up an old JS project that had several developers fail over weeks to upgrade to newer versions of react. But I got it done in a day by using AI to generate a ton of unit tests then loop an upgrade / test / build. Was 9 years out of date and it’s running in prod now with less errors than before.

Also upgraded rails 4 app to rails 8 over a few days.

Done other apps too. None of these are small. Found a few memory leaks in a C++ app that our senior “experts” who have spent 20 years doing c++ couldn’t find.