Thoughts on AI Use For Coding

I still remain pretty skeptical that AI tools like Claude for example speed up development time in the long run. I don’t think enough research has really been done to show that this is the case, and just anecdotally I haven’t seen it. What I have seen is a new class of bugs created that are specific to generative AI use which is similar to one of the major pitfalls in other areas where AI is used which is reasonable sounding answers that prove to be false.

When a person does this they are usually misremembering or lying, but these AI models can’t do either. It’s important that whatever output is generated is confirmed by a person. But this constant need to verify the output, severely limits its usefulness.

It takes away a lot of job satisfaction to hand over critical thinking and planning over to a machine, I don’t think the output is correct most of the time, and it reduces my understanding of the codebase in the long-run. It seems like these AI tools potentially give the biggest burst to productivity in areas that the developer is unfamiliar with but this creates a couple issues:

1. Because they are unfamiliar with the subject matter, it is difficult to confirm the output is correct. (I’ve seen examples of this happening where configuration variables are created which don’t exist now or in the past, but seem reasonable based on other similarly named config variables. I’ve also seen the harder to catch configurations which were valid in the past, but have been deprecated).
2. It creates technical debt in the future for the developer working in the area because they don’t understand it. Other developers can’t ask the original implementer about it, and they can’t really ask the AI because the AI will give a different response based on the phrasing of the question and a bunch of other factors which shouldn’t matter to the answer but will impact the answer receieved.

I’ve seen a few small studies on the use of AI in software development. These aren’t super big groups and aren’t enough to prove one way or the other. I think more research will be necessary in the future. The impacts I am confident AI has had have been mostly negative. The use of AI to cut contracts deemed to be DEI.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study