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AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Experienced software developer, here. "AI" is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I'm not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don't want to do it by hand, it saves me time.
And... that's about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.
On that last note, important thing they left out here being general news reporting tech stuff is that this was specifically bug fixing tasks. It can typically only provide the broadest of advice on that, and it’s largely incapable of tackling problems holistically when you often need to be thinking big picture while tackling a bug.
Interesting that the AI devs thought they were being quicker though.
Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.
In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.
Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn't it replace coders, it fundamentally can't. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.
The reason it goes down a "really bad path" is that it's basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn't know anything.
On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there's no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.
Take the phrase "fruit flies like a banana." Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?
It's a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we've got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don't.
Not quite true - GitHub Copilot in VS for example can be given access to your entire repo/project/etc and it then "knows" how things tie together and work together, so it can get more context for its suggestions and created code.
That's still not actually knowing anything. It's just temporarily adding more context to its model.
And it's always very temporary. I have a yarn project I'm working on right now, and I used Copilot in VS Code in agent mode to scaffold it as an experiment. One of the refinements I included in the prompt file to build it is reminders throughout for things it wouldn't need reminding of if it actually "knew" the repo.
I'm not saying it wasn't helpful. It probably cut 20% off the time it would have taken me to scaffold out the app myself, which is significant. But it certainly couldn't keep track of the context provided by the repo, even though it was creating that context itself.
Working with Copilot is like working with a very talented and fast junior developer whose methamphetamine addiction has been getting the better of it lately, and who has early onset dementia or a brain injury that destroyed their short-term memory.
From the article: "Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%."
I'm not saying you didn't save time, but it's remarkable that the research shows that this perception can be false.
Adding context is “knowing more” for a computer program.
Maybe it’s different in VS code vs regular VS, because I never get issues like what you’re describing in VS. Haven’t really used it in VS Code.
Are you using agent mode?
I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.
Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.
and the only reason it's not slowing you down on other things is that you don't know enough about those other things to recognize all the stuff you need to fix
Same. I also like it for basic research and helping with syntax for obscure SQL queries, but coding hasn't worked very well. One of my less technical coworkers tried to vibe code something and it didn't work well. Maybe it would do okay on something routine, but generally speaking it would probably be better to use a library for that anyway.
I actively hate the term "vibe coding." The fact is, while using an LLM for certain tasks is helpful, trying to build out an entire, production-ready application just by prompts is a huge waste of time and is guaranteed to produce garbage code.
At some point, people like your coworker are going to have to look at the code and work on it, and if they don't know what they're doing, they'll fail.
I commend them for giving it a shot, but I also commend them for recognizing it wasn't working.
I think the term pretty accurately describes what is going on: they don't know how to code, but they do know what correct output for a given input looks like, so they iterate with the LLM until they get what they want. The coding here is based on vibes (does the output feel correct?) instead of logic.
I don't think there's any problem with the term, the problem is with what's going on.
That's fair. I guess what I hate is what the term represents, rather than the term itself.
Everyone on Lemmy is a software developer.
Sometimes I get an LLM to review a patch series before I send it as a quick once over. I would estimate about 50% of the suggestions are useful and about 10% are based on "misunderstanding". Last week it was suggesting a spelling fix I'd already made because it didn't understand the - in the diff meant I'd changed the line already.
I've found it to be great at writing unit tests too.
I use github copilot in VS and it's fantastic. It just throws up suggestions for code completions and entire functions etc, and is easily ignored if you just want to do it yourself, but in my experience it's very good.
Like you said, using it to get the meat and bones of an application from scratch is fantastic. I've used it to make some awesome little command line programs for some of my less technical co-workers to use for frequent tasks, and then even got it to make a nice GUI over the top of it. Takes like 10% of the time it would have taken me to do it - you just need to know how to use it, like with any other tool.