this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
550 points (97.3% liked)

Technology

87450 readers
3323 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Armand1@lemmy.world 45 points 1 day ago (9 children)

I can kind of relate. There are a lot of parts of coding I find a little boring.

  • Once the interesting problem is solved and all you need to do is follow through
  • Large scale refactorings in ways too complicated for an IDE.
  • Fixing annoying dependency / migration issues

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.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Second, there are more personal costs. You’ll come to rely more and more on these tools, and your skills will rust.

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.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

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.

load more comments (6 replies)