AI VIBE For those who thought coding was only for young people, a newly released study shows that developers with more than 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to do it.
According to a July survey of 791 U.S. developers by cloud services platform Fastly, about one-third of senior developers with more than 10 years of experience use AI code generation tools such as Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to create more than half of their completed software. This compares to 13% of developers who have been with the company for less than two years.
Austin Spiers, Fastly’s senior director of developer engagement, explained: register This difference doesn’t necessarily mean older programmers are slacking off. This reflects the demands of senior developers’ days.
“If you really think about what senior engineers do, they don’t write code all day long,” he explained. “So if there was a way for people to autonomously test or prototype very quickly, those kind of hits, those intuitive, fun dopamine hits, that made coding so fun in the first place. That’s why we’re seeing patterns from that research.”
In some ways, he said, it’s “reassuring” to see young programmers relying less on AI tools, indicating that newcomers to the field want to write code the old-fashioned way. They seem to see AI coding tools as useful, but not as a replacement for writing their own software.
A slight majority of older developers say that AI tools allow them to ship software faster, although they have to spend more time checking for artificially developed bugs. In contrast, fewer than half of junior developers feel that way.
Spiers speculates that this may be due to experience demonstrating its benefits. Senior developers are more likely to be able to scan code quickly and find defects, while younger developers have a harder time editing software. Only 1.8% of respondents said they never use AI code generation tools.
Overall, more than 70% of all developers questioned said that AI tools made their job more fun, while less than 20% said that AI tools made their job harder. More than 30% of respondents said that automated coding made their job “significantly more enjoyable.”
Another thing that stood out in this study was the extent to which programmers consider the environmental impact of the software they create. Among younger developers, only half said they considered the energy cost of running new code, but that rose to 80% of older programmers. Nearly 1 in 10 respondents admitted they don’t know how much energy their software requires.
“There’s not much incentive for AI coding tools to reveal their carbon footprint,” Spiers said.
“More senior engineers understand the second and third effects of code, how it interacts with users and how it interacts with the community. And I think it’s only a matter of time before younger developers start understanding those effects a little bit more.” ®
