Selected developer quotes:
“I’m torn. I’d like to help provide updated data on this question but also I really like using AI!” — a developer from the original study early-2025 when asked to participate in the late-2025 study.
“I found I am actually heavily biased sampling the issues … I avoid issues like AI can finish things in just 2 hours, but I have to spend 20 hours. I will feel so painful if the task is decided as AI-disallowed.” — a developer from the new study noting selection effects when choosing what tasks to include in the study.
“my head’s going to explode if I try to do too much the old fashioned way because it’s like trying to get across the city walking when all of a sudden I was more used to taking an Uber.” — a developer from the new study noting selection effects when choosing what tasks to include in the study.
That’s fucking bleak. Maybe this is the dev equivalent of AI psychosis. AI paralysis?
I mean, it makes sense that it’s addictive, right?
I also suspect it’s one of those things that just naturally splits people. For some, the addictiveness and appeal just don’t make sense. For others it’s irresistible.
It’s part of the reason why I’m so doomer on the state of things, from a generally anti-AI/sceptical perspective. There’s just something compulsive that this kind of tool triggers in many people.
More like “why the fuck would I walk all the way across the city now that I own a car”
Once you find out how a bunch of boring bulk tasks can be automated away and 20 hours of work turns into 20 minutes, you really dont wanna go back to the old way.
If someone asks me to code in C# without my IDE in notepad, can I do it? Sure
But it fuckin sucks losing all your hotkeys and refactor quick actions and auto complete and lsp error checking…
Would you find it weird for someone to state they’d rather use an IDE than not when coding, because it saves so much time/effort?
That’s a bad analogy.
Using an LLM for coding gives you an initial speed up with the trade off being skill atrophy, and a build up of cognitive debt in the project.
A better analogy would be the Greek government before their national debt crisis. It would have been better to invest in themselves, not lie about their own finances, and not kick the can down the road. But they kept lying and kicking the can down the road because it was easier in the short term. Of course, we all know how that turned out in the end.
You only skill atrophy if you go and perk off playing video games while the agents cook.
If you actually are productive and spend that freed up time working on tasks the agents cant do fast and easy, aka, the hard stuff, you instead will improve your skill even faster as now you are spending most of your time on the important tasks and not wasting 95% of your workday on easy boilerplate stuff anyone with 2 braincells can pump out.
What you’re describing is skill atrophy, it’s just in skills you don’t value.
It’s also skill acquisition/reinforcement for skill you do value.
More like, “why would I, an avid runner, who has trained in running for over a decade, run five blocks when I can just drive”.
Not everyone that runs is an avid runner.
But I do feel like the analogies aren’t that great. Coding in notepad instead of an IDE is dumb because IDEs work and don’t really have any downsides. AI mostly seems to produce slop that barely works without a ton of cajoling.
What I meant with the runner analogy is that coding is a skill just like running. If you let a machine do it for you for long enough, you lose that skill.
Yeah I know, but if you really mean that analogy then the conclusion is that the normal thing for 99% of programmers to do should be to use AI. In the same way that 99% of people do not get around by running.
I don’t agree with that yet - so far I’ve found AI to be a very fast but mediocre programmer. Kind of like giving a beginner access to all the documentation and a time machine. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want. But definitely not most of the time.
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