A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
A new Coddy Developer Survey found that four in five developers, 80%, say their use of AI has felt more like a dependence than an advantage.
I can kind of relate. There are a lot of parts of coding I find a little boring.
When you use an expensive AI agent, like Claude, it can nowadays handle these tasks competently, to the point where I only need to correct small things here and there.
When you give these tasks to an AI agent, it feels a bit like delegating to a junior, but without the guilt of giving someone a menial or boring task. That allows me to work on stuff I find more interesting. To me, THAT’S why it’s adictive.
However, this isn’t without cost. First, there’s the societal costs: Environmental, centralization of power, contribution to hardware shortages and a bubble
Second, there are more personal costs. You’ll come to rely more and more on these tools, and your skills will rust. You may end up avoiding learning things about a codebase because you delegate it away.
It’s a tempting tool. One which in my experience can genuinely help, but is easy to misuse.
I mean, if you’re curious and you’re diligent, you can learn from what the AI chugs out. Skills only stagnate when you trust the AI blindly.
I’d say the bigger problem is that when you’re outsourcing junior coder work (even the tedious stuff) to a machine, you’re not investing in new junior coders.
I don’t trust the AI, I just can’t be bothered to argue. At the end of the day it’s no longer my code, so I feel no guilt about pushing in slop.
Trust But Verify is a good policy regardless of where your code comes from.
“AI” code is still human code in some capacity. Human code is what it was trained on. What would you do with a module you grabbed off GitHub or a script you found on Discord? Hopefully the same thing.
Yeah I relate strongly with this. Once you get used to having more time and energy for the tough problems, the interesting stuff, it’s hard to go back to the mechanical and menial.
But I’ve found it’s a lot like riding a bike. You don’t really rust, because the stuff the agents can handle today are the kind of shit that you’ve done so much and from the start, that it has become menial and boring. Which means it’s pretty ingrained into the backbone, at least that’s what I’ve found.
But damn if I don’t feel bad about it, recognizing and being conscious about the societal and environmental cost the convenience has.
Don’t get too bent about the environmental costs… the (US) AI data centers pollute about the same as 11 million office commuters. So, the great corporate leaders who are trying to mandate 30 million work-from-home workers back to the office are advocating for 3X as much pollution increase as the current crop of AI data centers emit.
I keep having the issue where I ask AI to do one small but tedious task, e.g. a refactor, and it sloppifies the rest of the code while it’s at it