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Posted on 08/29/2025 7:13:49 PM PDT by nickcarraway
They use AI more but also check it more
For those who thought AI vibe coding was just for the youngsters, newly published research shows that developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to do it.
According to a July survey of 791 US developers from cloud services platform Fastly, around a third of senior developers with more than a decade of experience are using AI code-generation tools such as Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to produce over half of their finished software, compared to 13 percent for those devs who've only been on the job for up to two years.
Austin Spires, senior director of developer engagement at Fastly, explained to The Register that the difference doesn’t necessarily mean older coders are slacking off. It's more a reflection of the demands on a senior developer’s day.
"When you really zoom out and think about what a senior engineer does, they don't write code all day," he explained. "So if there's ways that people can test autonomously or move really quickly to get a prototype out that kind of hits, that visceral, fun dopamine hit that made coding so fun in the beginning. That's why we're seeing the pattern from that research."
In a way, seeing younger coders relying less on AI tools less was "heartening," he said, showing that those new to the field want to craft code the old-fashioned way. They appear to be looking at AI coding tools as handy, but not a replacement for baking your own software.
A slight majority of older developers say AI tools help them ship software faster, although they do have to spend more time checking it for artificially developed bugs. By contrast, fewer than half of junior developers felt that way.
Spires speculates that this may be down to experience showing its benefits. Senior developers are more likely to be able to quickly scan code and spot flaws, whereas younger workers have a tougher time of software editing. Only 1.8 percent of respondents said they never use AI code generation tools.
Overall, over 70 percent of all developers questioned said that AI tools made their jobs more enjoyable, compared to less than 20 percent who said it made things harder. Over 30 percent of respondents said automatic coding made their work role "significantly more enjoyable."
One other standout from the survey was the degree to which coders are considering the environmental impact of software they write. Among younger devs, barely half said they considered the energy costs of running new code, but that rose to 80 percent of older programmers. Nearly one in ten respondents admitted they didn’t know how much energy their software requires.
"There's not a lot of incentive for AI coding tools to disclose what the carbon footprint of these tools are," Spires said.
"More senior engineers understand the second and third effects of their code in how it relates to users and how it relates to their community. And I think it's just a matter of time before junior developers start to understand those ramifications a little bit further."
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I can easily believe it.
Back when I worked for a living as a test-designer and builder, I’d joke with the project code leads that their best hires would be the laziest coders they could find. The coders who automated/scripted/whatever any process they’d be required to do more than two or three times.
If I was still designing/coding I’d be using some form of AI to generate the ground code. That was always the best way to get a project started - steal some code either from my own vast snippet library or from some generous chap online. If you weren’t a good code thief, I didn’t want you on my project. Of course, all the code I’m talking about was ‘in-house’, and never marketed. Back then, there were dozens of websites where good-hearted blokes shared generous chunks of working code - copy/paste/modify and move to next leg.
I use it.
I’ve been writing software for 57 years. I don’t need AI. I have a monstrous “toolbox” and I’ve very fast.
It’s great for saving 10 minutes here and there. Anything deep or more obscure like thread pools and Windows sockets for example can easily cost hours of debugging time. Better to ask it questions and write the code yourself in those situations.
Easily 60-80% of code is boilerplate.
Been writing code since the 80s. This has always been true.
This. I use AI tools from time to time in development, but as a rule of thumb, I treat it like I would a quirky but brilliant intern. As with any tool, it requires knowing when to use it, and how to effectively apply it, and that’s where all us “old hat” software devs come in.
I find that AI needs constant hand-holding and double-checking to get things just right. If I ask very pointed, sandboxed type questions with minimal scope, then AI is often pretty decent at coming up with quick solutions that help be build the larger system of code I’m working on, or giving an explanation for what needs to be done, which I can then take and write up the proper code for.
However, I have also found that AI is almost totally useless when it comes to throwing a broad system concept at it, especially one that requires domain knowledge, and having it hand you a correct block of code. Even if it manages to give you code that works, it will almost always be a naive solution, unoptimized, if it even works at all. More often than not, what you’ll actually get back is a pile of incoherent garbage.
“No more calls we have a winner!”. If I’m called upon to whip up a bash script, AI’s getting to do the heavy lifting, I’ll test it, and fix anything that it breaks, but it does all the fiddly syntax. I also provide input and output and ask for the guts to be done for some small functions.
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