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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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Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what's on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information Ok....
Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don't have to keep track of everything. No... Thats all wrong... Yeah I know it's complicated, that's why I wanted it refactored. No you can't do that... fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.
Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.
I have asked questions, had conversations for company and generated images for role playing with AI.
I've been happy with it, so far.
That's kind of outside the software development discussion but glad you're enjoying it.
As a developer
I’ve had success with:
Essentially, all the stuff that I’d need to review anyway, but use of AI means that actually generating the content can be done in a consistent manner that I don’t have to think about. I don’t let it create anything, just transform things in blocks that I can quickly review for correctness and appropriateness. Kind of like getting a junior programmer to do something for me.
Ah. True.
I realise it now.
If you give it the right task, it’s super helpful. But you can’t ask it to write anything with any real complexity.
Where it thrives is being given pseudo code for something simple and asking for the specific language code for it. Or translate between two languages.
That’s… about it. And even that it fucks up.
I bet it slows down the idiot software developers more than anything.
Everything can be broken into smaller easily defined chunks and for that AI is amazing.
Give me a function in Python that if I provide it a string of XYZ it will provide me an array of ABC.
The trick is knowing how it fits in your larger codebase. That's where your developer skill is. It's no different now than it was when coding was offshored to India. We replaced Ravinder with ChatGPT.
Edit - what I hate about AI is the blatant lying. I asked it for some ServiceNow code Friday and it told me to use the sys_audit_report table which doesn't exist. I told it so and then it gave me the sys_audit table.
The future will be those who are smart enough to know when AI is lying and know how to fix it when it is. Ideally you are using AI for code you can do, you just don't want to. At least that's my experience. In that, it's invaluable.
This was the case a year or two ago but now if you have an MCP server for docs and your project and goals outlined properly it's pretty good.