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

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214 points Brajeshwar | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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marcyb5st ◴[31 Aug 25 21:03 UTC] No.45087065[source]▶
In terms of LOCs maybe, in terms of importance I think is much less. At least that's how I use LLMs.

While I understand that <Enter model here> might produce the meaty bits as well, I believe that having a truck factor of basically 0 (since no-one REALLY understands the code) is a recipe for a disaster and I dare say long term maintainability of a code base.

I feel that you need to have someone in any team that needs to have that level of understanding to fix non trivial issues.

However, by all means, I use the LLM to create all the scaffolding, test fixtures, ... because that is mental energy that I can use elsewhere.

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epicureanideal ◴[31 Aug 25 21:17 UTC] No.45087181[source]▶
Agreed. If I use an LLM to generate fairly exhaustive unit tests of a trivial function just because I can, that doesn’t mean those lines are as useful as core complex business logic that it would almost certainly make subtle mistakes in.
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andsoitis ◴[31 Aug 25 21:24 UTC] No.45087230[source]▶
> If I … generate fairly exhaustive unit tests of a trivial function

… then you are not a senior software engineer

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triyambakam ◴[31 Aug 25 21:26 UTC] No.45087252[source]▶
Neither are you if that's your understanding of a senior engineer
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mgh95 ◴[31 Aug 25 21:46 UTC] No.45087398[source]▶
I think the parent commentors point was that it is nearly trivial to generate variations on unit tests in most (if not all) unit test frameworks. For example:

Java: https://docs.parasoft.com/display/JTEST20232/Creating+a+Para...

C# (nunit, but xunit has this too): https://docs.nunit.org/articles/nunit/technical-notes/usage/...

Python: https://docs.pytest.org/en/stable/example/parametrize.html

cpp: https://google.github.io/googletest/advanced.html

A belief that the ability of LLMs to generate parameterizations is intrinsically helpful to a degree which cannot be trivially achieved in most mainstream programming languages/test frameworks may be an indicator that an individual has not achieved a substantial depth of experience.

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com2kid ◴[31 Aug 25 22:17 UTC] No.45087613[source]▶
The useful part is generating the mocks. The various auto mocking frameworks are so hit or miss I end up having to manually make mocks which is time consuming and boring. LLMs help out dramatically and save literally hours of boring error prone work.
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mgh95 ◴[31 Aug 25 23:28 UTC] No.45088016[source]▶
Why mock at all? Spend the time making integration tests fast. There is little reason a database, queue, etc. can't be set up in a per-test group basis and be made fast. Reliable software is built upon (mostly) reliable foundations.
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lanstin ◴[31 Aug 25 23:42 UTC] No.45088108[source]▶
hmmmm. I do like integration tests, but I often tell people the art of modern software is to make reliable systems on top of unreliable components. And the integration tests should 100% include times when the network flakes out and drops 1/2 of replies and corrupts msgs and the like.
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1. sethammons ◴[01 Sep 25 07:51 UTC] No.45090518[source]▶
Minor nit. I wouldn't call those failing systems tests integration tests.

Unit tests are for validation of error paths. Unit tests can leverage mocks or fakes. Need 3 retires with exponential back off, use unit tests and fakes. Integration tests should use real components. Typically, integration tests are happy path and unit are error paths.

Making real components fail and having tests validate failure handling in a more complete environment jumps from integration testing to resilience or chaos testing. Being able to accurately validate backoffs and retries may diminish, but validating intermediate or ending state can be done with artifact monitoring via sinks.

There is unit-integration testing which fakes out as little as possible but still fakes out some edges. The difference being that the failures are introduced via fake vs managing actual system components. If you connect to a real db on unit-integration tests, you typically wouldn't kill the db or use Comcast to slow the network artificially. That would be reserved for the next layer in the test pyramid.