this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Programming
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That middle graph is absolute fucking bullshit. AI is not fucking ever going to replace 75% of developers or I've been working way too fucking hard for way to little pay these past 30 years. It might let you cut staff 5-10% because it enables folks to accomplish certain things a bit faster.
Christ on a fucking crutch. Ask developers who are currently using AI (not the ones working for AI companies) how much time and effort it actually saves them. They will tell you.
It doesn’t have to make sense or make the outcome be better, the only thing it has to do is make the company look better on paper to its shareholders. If something can make the company look better on paper it will be done, the quality of the work is not relevant
Not only the shareholders. If some of the higher level administration can get richer in the short run, even if that might actually hurt the shareholders in the medium run, you can bet that many of them will do so.
I use it here and there. it just seems to shift effort from writing code to reading and fixing code. the "amount" of work is about the same.
I use it so much. All my Google searches for syntax or snippets? Web searches are unuseable at this point, AI can spit it out faster. But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it's draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom
It probably does write 75% of my code by lines, but maybe 5% of the business logic is AI (sometimes I just let it take a crack at a problem, but usually if I have to type it out I might as well code it)
What it's good at drains my concentration, so doing the grunt work for me is a real force multiplier. I don't even use it every day, but it might be a 3x multiplier for me and could improve
But here's the thing - programmers are not replaceable. Not by other humans, not by AI - you learn hyper specific things about what you work on
It's hard to say without being immersed in the codebase you work on, but wouldn't making your code DRY (when possible) take care of a lot of the repetition without needing to write a bunch of incredibly similar code (be it by hand or with an LLM)?
Get better at it, manually, or you'll suck at it forever. It's a skill like anything else.
AI writing code for me made me the software architect I always dreamed of becoming.
I fucking LOVE to think about a hard problem for days, planning, researching, comming up with elegant solutions, doing quick POC, thinking what needs to be refactored for it to scale to a real life scenario, then documenting it all in a way that is properly communicating the important aspects in an easy to understand way. It's so exciting!
And I fucking HATE having to sit down and actually type out the solved code for hours and hours. It's so boring.
Best 20$ per month subscribtion I've ever had.
Yep. It's gonna be $20 forever, too. Have fun!
Lol. Lmao even
It does save a lot of time and effort, and does lead to better code in the hands of a skilled developer. Writing out thorough test code and actually doing proper test driven development suddenly becomes a lot less onerous.
Their graph also has no numbers and is just there to help visualize the difference they're referring to.
No it doesn't.
Oh I'm glad you're the be all know all arbiter of all software developers, and not just some grump on the internet.
To the first part, I agree. A skilled developer who can quickly separate the wheat from the chaff can get a boost out of AI. I'd put it at around 5-10%, but I've had some tiny projects where it was 400% boost. I think it's a small net gain.
As for your second point I just have to disagree. There are no numbers but it is clearly selling the idea of the majority of code being AI generated, and that's bullshit whether it's an outright lie with numbers, or merely vaguely misleading. It's like when someone cuts off the bottom of a graph to make relative change look huge. It wants people to glance at it, get the wrong idea, and move off without curiosity.
It takes less time to just write code than to babysit an artificial dumbass.