Working software developers of the Fedi, what's your relationship with AI coding (like Claude Code)?
I wonder what the distribution will look like if we get to 100-200+ votes.
My hypothesis is that the more casual Fedi users are more likely to use AI coding in some way.
Update:
- Started at 28% some sort of AI Coding use at ~60 votes.
- 36% at 336 votes.
@mayintoronto I'm just absolutely astounded that there's this many professional coders who *aren't* required to use it in some form for work yet.
The enterprise-grade/enterprise-cost tools are far better than the basic stuff.
We have a monthly per-dev credit budget so literally on a prompt by prompt basis I have to decide which model to send it to, based on what I'm doing and how much budget I have left.
Claude Opus 4 is definitely the best. If I get all the context loaded right and give an essay-length prompt full of requirements, it will usually get something I can send out for code review with little corrections. It is also the most expensive by far.
Claude Sonnet and Claude Haiku are not worth using.
GPT-5 Codex High is next best and gets you 90% of what Claude does but at 1/3 the cost. I usually reach for it as my primary model.
GPT-5 Codex Medium is half the cost of High and I use it for simpler tasks or fixing up other models minor mistakes.
The whole gemini family is infuriating. It often does the right thing on the first prompt but when it gets things wrong it does it in the most infuriating, non-obvious way and once you see it, it absolutely refuses to take correction.
@dalias @lackthereof A lot of serious businesses are adopting it too across the size spectrum. As silly as the Claude Code source looks, there are some super legit use cases in even legacy enterprise type software. (Especially while the prices are hyper deflated to get people hooked on it.)
Is it still legit when they have to charge profitable prices? Probably not.
@mayintoronto @lackthereof I'm highly skeptical of the claim that there are "legit use cases".
If you're talking about using the models to find patterns correlated with bugs/vulns, that indeed is a good use for statistical models, but having a chatbot interface that gives randomly perturbed answers, rather than a deterministic grep-for-bugs using the statistical model, is just gratuitous badness aimed at exploiting cognitive weaknesses in the user to sell your product, not making best use of the tech.
If you're talking about anything generative, even boilerplate, I don't buy that it's legit. Even in boilerplate, you have to *check* that the slop it vomited is actually correct. You could write scripts to do that, but you could just as easily write the scripts to generate the boilerplate, and have it be deterministic and reproducible and non-planet-burning.
@dalias @lackthereof No, it's doing a rough pass scanning legacy code answering questions about the 300 custom packages that you've inherited and no one left has the institutional knowledge to know how they're all connected.
Doesn't need to be perfect. There are so many cases where you don't necessarily need the right answer, but it gets you on the right path to having the answers to build the right things.
@mayintoronto @lackthereof Yes, it very much is. The summaries you'll be reading are of the form of the cognitohazard.
For things like this I *really* wish there were a mode on these things to *not* have them pretend to be human, but to output very mechanical looking documents to remind the reader that they are not conversing with a thinking being.
My workplace is an old stodgy multinational megacorp. My team produces rack-scale infrastructure appliances. The file I was working on on Friday had a git history dating to 2004 (partially imported from CVS).
We're not making app-of-the-week stuff, we're definitely not chasing VC funding. But management seems absolutely terrified that if we don't adopt LLM driven development practices, like, yesterday, we're going to be left in the dust by all our competitors who have.
@lackthereof @dalias @mayintoronto
I would argue that if you started in 2004 or before and you're still around and you make IT infrastructure related devices... you're doing something right and you should probably just keep doing what you're doing.
The fact that this is lost on techbro VPs and CEOs is a mystery to me.
Haha no mystery, they're frequently quite stupid.
Like your sales Dept. should run campaigns like "STILL FUCKING WORKS PROPERLY." or "100% Enshittification Free"
@lackthereof @mayintoronto
I'm required to use it. I don't use it.
I just spend the amount of tokens they want me to.
No one cares.
@kwazekwaze im probably going to be "required" to use it shortly, which is unconditionally not going to happen
@erisceleste @lackthereof @mayintoronto
Morally it's no better than using it "for real" but I'm not about to submit in spirit just to make my job even more tooth grindingly tedious.
I absolutely see it as complying in advance though to accept these mandates at face value and go online to say "Yeah I use it, it works, but it's miserable to use".
They just want to see the token burn. It's an even more nightmarish LOC. No one actually cares.
@kwazekwaze tbh im just desperately trying to think of any other job i can do that would cover rent, at this point
fuck programming.
fuck tech.
@kwazekwaze and utterly fuck the people who destroyed the only thing in my life
@samir I'm hearing it everywhere in my product circles. We can't get away from it in product management, and it's even worse for our dev counterparts.
@samir @lackthereof And you can see from the poll, 23% of devs on the fedi are essentially forced to use this. ~40% use it in some form at work.
Spend any amount of time job searching and "AI-enabled [your job here]" is now a minimum requirement, whatever that means. I don't know how long teams can push back for.
@mayintoronto @samir @lackthereof one question is whether the true cost of the "code assistant" models is currently being hidden by VC subsidies, and whether executive opinions change once they're having to pay the true cost of the service.
But I'm worried.
@mcc I'm probably one of the very few people to ever talk about operational risk in software, and yes, I'm deeply concerned. Prices are going to go up 2 orders of magnitude. That sticker shock is going to be huge.
@mayintoronto @mcc @samir @lackthereof
I think it's basically a game of high-stakes chicken based on the assumption "it's computers — costs will naturally come down by orders of magnitude, as they do" leading to: whoever can survive until then will win.
@mayintoronto @lackthereof I’m hearing this too, and your poll definitely shows that it’s happening, I am just not surprised it’s not that common. Perhaps it’s a regional thing. Or maybe the kind of people who socialise around their work (like you and me) are more likely to be in this kind of environment.
Personally, if my manager told me to use a different editor, it would be a reason to start looking for a new job. (I have turned down jobs because of an operating system.) Same goes for any kind of code generator, LLM-based or not.
@samir @lackthereof @mayintoronto I see it with clients in tech. The mandate is top-down, baked into performance reviews, all the way down the org chart. So "who requires it" is the lead doing one's performance review. In some places, it seems usage is tracked.
The effect is toxic, for some. I've had a client in tears. The message is: use LLM or go. Folks with mortgages & families* know the job market is terrible, and feel trapped. It's sad.
*Edit: & esp. health insurance needs, in the US.
@deborahh @lackthereof @mayintoronto But where are they headquartered? Who’s in management or executive positions? If they’re funded, who by?
In other words, what is the culture that leadership/management are coming from? There’s no global culture.
@samir @lackthereof @mayintoronto you're right. But there's an argument to be made that there is a beyond-national tech-bro culture. It's a thing in itself - often largely informed by US "cowboy" culture, I think.
Edit: "Metanational": https://www.insead.edu/faculty-research/publications/book-chapters/encyclopedia-international-strategic-management-0
Edit: see also: "TESCREAL" 😖
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2026/03/tescreal-the-ideology-of-the-tech-titans/
@deborahh @lackthereof @mayintoronto Absolutely! I saw it a lot in London. It’s common here in Zürich in the blockchain startups but not really elsewhere. I would still suggest that this kind of management attitude will be tolerated differently in different cultures.
I work for a German “scale-up” that has its share of tech bros, but it’s not pervasive at all, and in fact actively resisted. We have Claude licenses but they are opt-in.
@samir @lackthereof @mayintoronto I'd expect Swiss-culture companies to be even more resistant to coercing "AI" use than German ones, based on your political system.
But a multinational company's home office may not lead the culture worldwide any more.
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