@phire Yeah this person has two friends and they both use AI is how it reads to me.

@phire I've observed two broad moieties of LLM based code tool user: First the extremely skilled and knowledgeable, who do not benefit from them, but whose expertise allows them to piss away enormous amounts of time playing around to see what they can be made to do. Second, the very low-skilled practitioners who lack the ability to assess the results, and therefore wind up making a mess they cannot dig themselves out of.

Both groups waste time, effort, and carbon emissions for no net benefit.

@phire I think the most reliable number I can find is from Stack Overflow’s 2024 survey, in which about 62% of respondents indicated they were using AI coding tools. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ai

(SO has further details on their survey demographics which I would personally assume bias this number in the upward direction, although I don’t know for sure.)

@phire I have no idea about anybody else but I write my code the old fashioned way.

@phire many software dev companies have specifically banned copilot and similar for any dev task that deal with changing older existing code. In our experience it tends to slow down devs because they spend more time finding and fixing bugs afterwards, but fully understand less of the code changes, thus taking longer to understandin depth what is happening.

@phire they're totally trying to make people FOMO into AI to compensate for the fact that it's useless at anything other than the degree of control it enables for its owners.

@phire

I, professional programmer, have *zero* peers that use AI "assistants" professionally.

(That, or they're hiding it from me.)

@phire I know of basically no devs who uses AI coding assistants, at least not on purpose and in a sustained manner. Once in a while I’ll read a True Believer™ claim amazingness on the company messaging tool, but really, everyone is collectively shrugging their shoulder and going back to the usual coding tools.

@phire I’m as far as you can get from commie pinko, but — so far — even on purely utilitarian grounds, I haven’t found these things to be of enough benefit to use with any regularity.

They’re far too mistake-prone.

@phire Here's how it looks from my torment-nexus-adjacent workplace: Junior devs: mostly ignorant of the threat, mostly some adoption.
Senior devs: Mostly not keen, mostly mocking of the very idea.
Middle mgmt: mostly ignorant of everything except the hype cycle, which they have bought into, so they tell senior devs adoption is not optional.
Senior mgmt: Smart, aware of how hype cycle sucks, but even more aware of government policy pushing evidence of adoption as a funding criterion.