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

The article claims, that senior developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to heavily rely on AI tools compared to their junior counterparts. No p-values or statistical significance tests are reported in either The Register article or Fastly's original blog post.

I have over 30 years of experience and recently used Claude Opus 4.1 (via browser and claude.ai) to generate an ECMA-335 and an LLVM code generator for a compiler, and a Qt adapter for the Mono soft debugging protocol. Each task resulted in 2-3kLOC of C++.

The Claude experience was mixed; there is a high probability that the system doesn't respond or just quickly shows an overloaded message and does nothing. If it generates code, I quckly run in some output limitation and have to manually press "continue", and then often the result gets scrambled (i.e. the order of the generated code fragments gets mixed up, which requires another round with Claude to fix).

After this process, the resulting code then compiled immediately, which impressed me. But it is full of omissions and logical errors. I am still testing and correcting. All in all, I can't say at this point that Claude has really taken any work off my hands. In order to understand the code and assess the correctness of the intermediate results, I need to know exactly how to implement the problem myself. And you have to test everything in detail and do a lot of redesigning and correcting. Some implementations are just stubs, and even after several attempts, there was still no implementation.

In my opinion, what is currently available (via my $20 subscription) is impressive, but it neither replaces experience nor does it really save time.

So yes, now I'm one of the 30% seniors who used AI tools, but I didn't really benefit from them in these specific tasks. Not surprisingly, also the original blog states, that nearly 30% of senior developers report "editing AI output enough to offset most of the time savings". So not really a success so far. But all in all I'm still impressed.

I hate to play the "you're holding it wrong" card, but when I started, I had more or less the same experience. Eventually you start to learn how to better talk to it in order to get better results.

Something I've found useful with Claude Code is that it works a lot better if I give it many small tasks to perform to eventually get the big thing done, rather than just dumping the big thing in its lap. You can do this interactively (prompt, output, prompt, output, prompt, output...) or by writing a big markdown file with the steps to build it laid out.