32% of Senior Developers Say Half Their Shipped Code is AI-Generated (infoworld.com)
- Reference: 0179060754
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/0615217/32-of-senior-developers-say-half-their-shipped-code-is-ai-generated
- Source link: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4049949/senior-developers-let-ai-do-more-of-the-coding-survey.html
"About a third of senior developers (10+ years of experience) say [2]over half their shipped code is AI-generated ," Fastly writes, "nearly two and a half times the rate reported by junior developers (0-2 years of experience), at 13%."
> "AI will bench test code and find errors much faster than a human, repairing them seamlessly. This has been the case many times," one senior developer said...
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> Senior developers were also more likely to say they invest time fixing AI-generated code. Just under 30% of seniors reported editing AI output enough to offset most of the time savings, compared to 17% of juniors. Even so, 59% of seniors say AI tools help them ship faster overall, compared to 49% of juniors. Just over 50% of junior developers say AI makes them moderately faster. By contrast, only 39% of more senior developers say the same.
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> But senior devs are more likely to report significant speed gains: 26% say AI makes them a lot faster, double the 13% of junior devs who agree. One reason for this gap may be that senior developers are simply better equipped to catch and correct AI's mistakes... Nearly 1 in 3 developers (28%) say they frequently have to fix or edit AI-generated code enough that it offsets most of the time savings. Only 14% say they rarely need to make changes. And yet, over half of developers still feel faster with AI tools like Copilot, Gemini, or Claude.
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> Fastly's survey isn't alone in calling AI productivity gains into question. A recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) of experienced open-source developers found something even more striking: [3]when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete their tasks. This disconnect may come down to psychology. AI coding often feels smooth... but the early speed gains are often followed by cycles of editing, testing, and reworking that eat into any gains. This pattern is echoed both in conversations we've had with Fastly developers and in many of the comments we received in our survey...
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> Yet, AI still seems to improve developer job satisfaction. Nearly 80% of developers say AI tools make coding more enjoyable... Enjoyment doesn't equal efficiency, but in a profession wrestling with burnout and backlogs, that morale boost might still count for something.
Fastly quotes one developer who said their AI tool "saves time by using boilerplate code, but it also needs manual fixes for inefficiencies, which keep productivity in check."
The study also found the practice of green coding "goes up sharply with experience. Just over 56% of junior developers say they actively consider energy use in their work, while nearly 80% among mid- and senior-level engineers consider this when coding."
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/4049949/senior-developers-let-ai-do-more-of-the-coding-survey.html
[2] https://www.fastly.com/blog/senior-developers-ship-more-ai-code
[3] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
As with any tool ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... you learn the nuances of your chosen tools. You learn which uses enhance productivity, and which are more likely to detract.
In any case, it all gets tested by me and then QA-ed by others before seeing the production light of day. What is this "trust" thing people keep babbling about?
Re: (Score:2)
I would say they are testing every feature at once and we have to fight with being lab rats... maybe forever while they desperately try to train it off our interactions on how to replace us. Privacy, cost, and vendor lock-in is a big concern as well; oh, and don't forget how relaxing simple coding can be between harder problems and how it's going to only leave the difficult bits and us having to understand it's increasingly complex slop needing corrections.
The biggest PAIN is API and syntax errors. Most th
Why would they say that? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a liability of possibly insecure/plagiarized code that is directly on them, shouldn't they keep it quiet?
Re: Why would they say that? (Score:2)
Because they are bad engineers?
Internal Suggestion Engine (Score:1)
When an AI SE advises an ISE everyone wins.
No doubt it is effective (Score:2)
The fact is you can get a lot of code written quickly that works 95% of the time. You just have to be very clear with requirements and implement things in small chunks; though I have YOLO'd it on personal projects with decent results a few times. Sure, I could write every from scratch but it would take a while. At work I find something like copilot very handy for summarizing code to see what it thinks it does and seeing where it deviates from my assumptions.
Re: (Score:3)
I used to keep a library of PowerShell admin scripts so I wouldn't have to rewrite them when I needed them again. Now I can ask ChatGPT to write them for me faster than I can find them in my library.
As you say, though, small chunks. When I've tried more complex tasks I end up spending more time debugging the AI's code than the task is worth.
Developers are efficient (Score:3)
Artists may still be debating if they think art is defined by a lot of work. Developers are taking "shortcuts" since many decades. Copy & Paste code I wrote for another project? Of course! Refactor code into functions to be reusable? Not doing so is a code smell! Using libraries maintained by others? Yes, thank you! Standard snippets, code completion, refactoring features in the IDE? Why not? Using high level programming languages with a large STL? Yes, please!
Ignoring tools that may make you more efficient would be stupid. You don't have to use all or use them all the time, but of course people will evaluate when they are an advantage and then use them. 32% sounds like the number one can expect from people using AI as an advantage but not shoehorning it into everything just because. You won't get to 100% now or any time soon, but a third is what you can achieve from using it for productivity.
Re: (Score:3)
Companies don't want developers who are efficient. They want developers who are mediocre but still make progress, because those developers are easily replaceable when they quit or are fired.
AI coding (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, it has replaced Stack Overflow as a resource. After it gives me a solution, I still have to read the documentation and test it, just like I did with Stack Overflow. ChatGPT is remarkably good as a search engine replacement.
That said, Google's AI is remarkably bad as a search engine replacement. It's bad enough that my reflexive reaction is that it is lying to me (a reflex learned unfortunately from experience).
Re: AI coding (Score:2)
They really have fumbled with their AI search havent they. I cant even call it lying its just a horrible product theyre actively destroying their main draw with. It contradicts the top link for a search so I genuinely dont know what it is training on.
Re: (Score:1)
> That said, Google's AI is remarkably bad as a search engine replacement.
Googles search engine replacement is already remarkably bad compared to their search engine.
Their AI is just garbage icing on the garbage cake.
They have been removing search flags at an alarming rate and I'd swear they gimped how double quotes used to work to prevent any literal searches.
More and more sentences will have words actively ignored by google as it invents some query to use instead that often has little to do with my query.
Pasting an error code is laughable. No amount of quotation will produce u
Re: AI coding (Score:2)
They have started a bad habit of ignoring what you search for and giving results for what they think you mean. Add in all the SEO/AI spam taking up the top results not answering the questions you have posed and suddenly the library is looking more appealing again. If youre lucky enough to still have a local library.