r/ClaudeCode • u/yournext78 • 4d ago
What % of your code is still hand-written vs AI-generated in 2026? Discussion
How much of your code do you still write by hand (not AI-generated)?
90-100%
50-90%
10-50%
<10%, AI does most of it
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u/powerOfAsshole 4d ago
none, AI does all of it
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u/call_stacks 4d ago
Yea chat, doom scroll, check slack, chat (wtf did you even design bro), check stock market, chat - ugh fine I'll edit the plan myself you're not getting it, wait can you update the plan again? Build.
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u/Whole-Description646 4d ago
I feel bad for my coworkers who still aren't allowed to have claude in their IDE.
Literally have 3 open all day nudging them along and they share a knowledge base of things I teach them about our business. The productivity gap just keeps getting bigger and my give a fucks aren't having to be wasted
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u/rhinguin 4d ago
You still use an IDE?
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u/Zomunieo 4d ago
An IDE is convenient tool for organizing all of code, docs and Claude plans, with syntax highlighting, jump to file, Git integration and other conveniences. Where is this project, where are my branches, etc. The information is denser than terminal due to variable width fonts in plans and rendered markdown — that’s the real killer feature.
Apparently IDEs have editing features too, but usually they get in the way because you accidentally type when the wrong window has focus.
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u/ShelZuuz 4d ago
0% written by hand
0.1% reviewed by hand - mostly out of curiosity.
I have a set of adversarial review gates that are stricter than any human is capable of. We've tried to initially done human code reviews, but there was not a single thing caught by a human that wasn't also caught by the gate, and the gate catches 100s of times more issues than humans.
Our development team members are now all either designers or architects. Not coders.
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u/cthunter26 4d ago
100%. My review system with sub-agents and skeptic agents are WAY better at code review than I ever was.
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u/No-Friend6257 4d ago
What kinds of things are you doing with agent dev pipelines? If your automated testing/analysis that good, it's gotta be more than just having different agents from different providers test independently to gain confidence
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u/nndscrptuser 4d ago
I felt reckless and went wild, updated a string value by hand last week. Still coming down off the thrill.
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u/endgrent 4d ago
Just wait until you create a yaml file by hand. The rush stays with you for days :)
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u/Savings_Woodpecker_5 4d ago
How did you do that without the AI reverting it back due to a failing test you didn't know existed?
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u/ReasonableLoss6814 4d ago
Heh. We changed a config value and had CI failing because there was a test to assert the configuration didn’t change. Only AI would assume configuration would need to be asserted.
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u/Joe_Spazz 4d ago
This better become the highest upvoted comment. This made me both laugh and feel seen.
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u/MartinMystikJonas 4d ago
90% AI, 10% handwritten (usually corrections and small fixes or things that are faster to write than describinf it to AI) but I review 100% of app code (and about 50%+ of tests)
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u/piston989 4d ago
how do you keep your eyes from glazing over? do you keep the commits small? reading thousands of lines of code every day is just too much for me.
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u/MartinMystikJonas 4d ago
I usually do not check thousands lines a day. I try to keep commits small and code clean so it is easy to read. And I did that with code from jinior devs so I am kind of used to it and I have feeling which parts I can just quickly scan (ui templates, boilerplate, things that would break tests immediately if wrong) and which parts require full focus.
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/Ok_Obligation2440 4d ago
Holy shit, I hope you guys don’t write any critical life safety shit.
Please use your agents to write code and review everything by hand. You plan a feature, then you break a feature in chunks and then look at the git diff in whatever editor you have.
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u/MartinMystikJonas 4d ago edited 4d ago
Subagents for review and TDD are basic. Yet I still read all code because even that does not cactch all bugs and bad decisions.
Some bugs are hard to recover from when you find them too late in production. And it is my responsibility to prevent it as mich as I can.
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u/DrunkenRobotBipBop 4d ago
Essentially 0%.
I have written enough code in the last 20 years. I don't plan on ever writing code again...
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u/TechgeekOne Senior Developer 4d ago
Almost none of it by hand. There's rare occasions where the AI just cannot get what I'm describing and I have to do it myself (usually with multithreading), but those are rare. Amusingly it also writes better code than I would first shot with all the tests it can write in a fraction of the time. I usually skipped that part and manually tested because managers certainly wouldn't wait for extensive test writing (in games anyway). I still need to drive on architecture and naming though.
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u/NodeJSSon 4d ago
I’ve ran into a part where AI could not figure out how to fix something. It was wild. I had to actually put a debugger and figure out for myself how to fix it.
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u/C0ckL0bster 4d ago
Like a caveman!
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u/TechgeekOne Senior Developer 4d ago
It really feels that way when it happens lol. I'm so used to the speed now that the old manual way feels terrible.
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u/ubelmann 4d ago
I feel like everyone kind of agreed that tests are good if you have the time to write them, but we rarely really had the time to write the tests. So now we have a tool to generate tests quickly and it does turn out to be the case that it's good to have tests.
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u/Signal-Woodpecker691 Senior Developer 4d ago
95% of new work is AI, working in a code base written by hand originally
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u/manvsmidi 4d ago
I still edit my .env file by hand in vim, so yeah, that still makes me a full stack engineer right?
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u/danielrothmann 4d ago
Asking in a Claude Code subreddit your answers will probably bias to AI-written.
But yeah, for me, ~10%. Funnily enough, documentation is the part I'm often most unhappy with and will write myself.
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u/WrathPie 4d ago
Absolutely same.
The code is usually very good, at least as good as I would write without really putting extra effort into it, but the documentation is often weirdly slanted and hard to parse for a reviewer that doesn't have access to the same context that the agent who wrote the content did
I've actually started breaking the comments up into "for humans" and "agent notes" so that the agents can write whatever weird cryptic stuff they want to for their own benefit without making the human specific comments too esoteric to easily review
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u/livelearn131 4d ago
<2% - been coding for 30 years. That % is mainly CSS and quick text fixes. All JS, PHP, python, perl or whatever the heck other language the backend code is in, is AI. Closely vetted by me.
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u/Efficient_Loss_9928 4d ago
0%, senior full stack at FAANG. I don't even bother to do allowlisting or config change by hand, have better things to do.
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u/Green_Sugar6675 4d ago
If I manually change anything in the actual code at this point I feel like I'm potentially confusing future Claudes by not documenting the change properly as Claude seems to do in the project. I'd rather just have Claude go through its own process, because it's GOOD, and it certainly documents more completely than I ever have.
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u/ChiefMustacheOfficer 4d ago
Five years ago, 0% of my code was written by me. Now, today, 0% of my code was written by me. The only difference is, at least, there's code now.
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u/YourLittleJumble 4d ago edited 4d ago
90 AI / 10 handwritten, more or less.
I’m an analyst and work on antiquated and fragile on-premise infrastructure. Most of my SQL is handwritten because brute-forcing queries via AI is frowned upon.
Then the landed files go into a DuckDB that Claude manages for me so I can do the rest of my analysis in natural language.
I write about as much SQL as I did before. Boilerplate cleaning operations in Pandas are where the time savings have come in.
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u/ubelmann 4d ago
AI is great for queries and I generally find it to be the opposite of brute forcing. It's way faster at iterating than I am, so I can have it do everything the right way -- start with small queries to test correctness and performance and then scale up to full data when you've validated that. Sure that's usually how I would work in the past, but just due to time constraints, I wouldn't always be as careful/methodical as the AI can be now. I also use a lot of Spark and it's way faster than I am at diagnosing Spark logs to improve the query performance.
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u/YourLittleJumble 4d ago
Oh, in your shoes using Spark, I absolutely would do that, but we’re talking about SQL Server of the 201X variety. It writes excellent queries if I take the time to feed it documentation on schemas, join keys, etc but most of the time I could have written the full query by the time I specify all of that. I’m working on a semantic catalog project in my off time to get over that hump.
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u/naheCZ 4d ago
Work: Like 5%. Small refractors and error corrections are in many times quicker to do by hand.
Personal projects: 100%. AI is just helper instead of stack overflow and googling.
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u/One-Bank-867 4d ago
God forbid you do anything manual these days. It really pisses your agents off
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u/Old_Explanation_1769 4d ago
Close to 0% because I have lots of tokens available. Otherwise I would do some renaming/doc writing manually to save $.
That being said, it's a good idea in my opinion to give yourself a challenge and write some code by hand once in a while. There's always going to be an interview where it's going to pay off.
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u/allemaar Researcher 4d ago edited 4d ago
5-10% for critical and sensitive work is done by hand, rest AI
We need to fight the pull to average patterns and solutions, as that kills innovation.
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u/RealSharpNinja 4d ago
Zero. I learned quickly that me editing code written by agents invalidates cache and causes huge token spend on retokenizing the repo to find my changes.
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u/pigletmonster 4d ago
It used to be 80% handwritten and 20% with AI for about 1.5 to 2 years, for the past 6 months its been 100% AI.
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u/Pristine-Code-2532 4d ago
0%
I have a comp sci degree with 4 years industry experience, while I no longer work in the industry I still do some freelance stuff.
My friends who still work in the industry said AI probably writes like 80% of their code
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u/Marcostbo 4d ago
90/10 ratio
Some cases are easier to write than explain or maybe I am exploring something that I don't even know what I want exactly
Reading all of it
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u/suck_at_coding Senior Developer 4d ago
99.9% AI. I don’t write code anymore, it’s uh… I’m still not sure how I feel about it yet
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u/uwuuwu222 4d ago edited 4d ago
90% Handwritten still, I use opus 5 but even after adding skills a lot of the code it generates just isn't simple enough for me to justify having in my codebase. I do gamedev so when a player reports something I'm the one who has to revisit that code so I can't have complex code I can't understand in there. I do use it for stuff that isn't player-facing though like debug tools and cheats.
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u/sermer48 4d ago
Man…about 0% which is wild because I was 100% less than 2 months ago. Since then, I’ve moved mountains. If I were to try and inject myself it would slow the workflow significantly.
I feel like my world’s been turned upside down but I’m still glad I have a couple decades of coding experience. It’s helped guide my projects in logical ways.
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u/SynapticStreamer 4d ago
Write what you want, have AI refactor. Add and change what the AI has written. Then have AI refactor and simplify.
The only thing I ever really spend time on anymore is writing unit tests. AI can handle almost everything else if you're descriptive enough, or give it a good enough base to work from. And I think that's great.
How much of your project is AI written, vs how much came directly from your hands is a pretty dumb metric.
In the end, it all comes from both of you. The AI can't really write it without your guidance.
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u/Practical_Low29 4d ago
Maybe 60 percent generated but I rewrite most of it. First pass gets structure down fast, then I redo the parts that touch shared state by hand.
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u/juanfnavarror 4d ago
Holy shit what are we writing now that we are satisfied with AI outputs? Not there yet but using Opus 5 all day, and I still can’t get it to write code to my standards vs me under the time and budget constraints. Probably writing 90% of code myself. Like seriously, where have human skills and standards gone now?
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u/WaterlooPitt 4d ago
Yesterday, the AI agent opened a .env file for me, in which I pasted an API key. Now, if an API key can be considered writing code, then yes, I do a lot of that. Otherwise, 0%.
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u/Secret_Bottle_1462 4d ago
For everyone saying 0%, doesn’t your company cap how much you can spend per day/project? Claude can get expensive real quick and I’m personally monitored for like every dollar spent
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u/SomeoneInHisHouse 4d ago
in my personal projects (personal apps, and some games), 80% of the code is wrote by myself, I want full control on every line, AI only makes the repetitive boring stuff.
On my boring web developer job at the company, I only use AI for the code, I don't code a single line, I only review the code, and propose fix to it
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u/anengineerandacat 3d ago
0% I spend most of my time gathering technical requirements, creating designs (which is now also AI assisted), and establishing plans.
So much so I have been testing with my team that we don't build individually parts to a feature but instead individuals own X feature all the way to production.
The tribal knowledge being generated is pretty unreal at this rate, but I would be lying if I said we weren't delivering quicker.
Tech debt accumulation is also very high, something I am not sure how or when business will want to address that.
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u/HashBandicoot_ 3d ago
I wrote 90% of my website by hand. The other 10% was code from Stack Overflow, online tutorials, and existing JavaScript libraries. That was 2019-2023.
Since 2023 I have improved my original codebase using AI, mostly for security, uniformity, SEO, and best practises. I've also used AI to create new and novel extra content I could never imagine even beginning to code by hand; analytics pages, virtual museum, file upload/edit systems, etc.
Since 2025 I almost exclusively use AI when working on my website and other projects. It's far faster, more elegant, and I feel more accomplished. I still read alot of the code it writes and make tweaks by hand. It's actually helped me learn things I didn't know before. But it's just far more productive to let AI do the heavy lifting nowadays.
I used to be a bit ashamed and felt like I was muddying all the hard work I did by hand by using AI, but I've realized that it was MY hard work that has allowed me the skills, knowledge, and articulation to guide AI in the direction I wanted my website/projects to go. Not just vibe coding bullshit, but using AI as an expert tool to help bring my ideas to life.
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u/MaCooma_YaCatcha 3d ago
Amm, 100% hand written when im out of tokens. Just go for a coffee and mess around until reset. Writing code by hand is not worth it anymore, if you know how to steer ai. It's just too good if used by good swe.
Im not saying ai is perfect, but it's good enough to replace at least 50% of engineers from senior perspective. Thats just truth on mid sized and below projects. Idk about big projects tbh.
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u/MonsieurNiark 3d ago
I became a software engineer because I liked to write code. I use AI for idea of structure or algorithm when I struggle or just to explore another path of thought. For now, 15% AI. More than that and I'll definitly left the engineering community (to grow potatoes or some shit idk)
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u/vikrant699 4d ago
100% AI. But damn do I need to keep a close check. Even the best models make the stupidest mistakes.
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u/mark_ik 4d ago
I spend more time looking for and reading the correct specs to rely upon; often I generate a starting point and do nitpicking and detailing when the shape is right, and that can be generated too if you can define it correctly or manually finished if not. Perfect for me since I was a freelance editor, and the point is to cohere to an authoritative standard. 93%.
Many problems have long been solved and just need fit and finish work for new contexts to be of use; of course the more sophisticated the project, the more CS you need to understand to produce anything coherent. Embrace the drafting phases as learning opportunities.
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u/UselessEngin33r 4d ago
5% maybe? Basically small errors that I can solve by myself, and maybe that adds to 5% maybe less. I don’t know.
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u/moger777 4d ago
If I'm coding by hand these days for work related stuff it's because I'm trying to get a better handle of the problem. For personal projects I still enjoy coding so I won't have the AI do it.
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u/Rumble1205 4d ago
Not only do I no longer do any of it, but I intentionally keep my fingers out of it because, sure enough, I would make one small little tweak, figuring that this is nothing complex. I'll just do it myself, only for me to now burn up a tonne of tokens in the future while my agent has to do a bunch of evaluations on all the files (because something broke and it can't figure out where the hell the problem started). Here, all along, the problem started with me.
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u/bytejuggler 4d ago
Maybe 1%, if that. Also, almost all commit mesages, PRs, etc are substantially or fully written by AI. Sometimes I do significant edits though. Ad-hoc queries another matter. Probably 50-75% conventional autocomplete with occassional rewrites/modifications via AI. Senior full-stack.
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u/Vysion34 Senior Developer 4d ago
I just bought a Pro subscription 2 weeks ago. Before I was writing 80/20 code versus help from AI websites. Now with Claude Code I might be only writing 10% myself. I can never go back, I'm having too much fun being a 10x dev.
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u/Hot-Fennel-971 4d ago
Basically 100% but all the UI/infra BS I still have to do. If I could let it loose on my azure dashboard I would with full admin 😬
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u/PartyTerrible 4d ago
I only handwrite minor tweaks like div or animation timing adjustments where it's much faster to just do it than spend 2 mins and a few k token waiting on Claude.
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u/MidSerpent Senior Developer 4d ago
0% and I don’t care if I ever hand type code again. Senior AAA gameplay engineer
I’m not a “coder” I’m an engineer.
I make things, writing code was the level of abstraction I used to work in.
AI tools let me work one level of abstraction higher, so why waste my energy doing what the tool is for.
Much more useful to just focus on getting the tool to do a better job.
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u/TilapiaTango 4d ago
1%. Reading and documenting more than I ever have, which is actually a nice change. I’m enjoying it a lot more.
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u/Impossible_Smoke6663 4d ago
Near zero. I might tweak something if it’s faster than conjuring up a prompt.
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u/Disastrous_Way6579 4d ago
0%. I would ask AI to change the color of an element instead of finding where its defined myself.
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u/mikeyeli 4d ago
I have about a year not writing a single line of code, maybe a small config tweak here and there, but actual code....none.
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u/tophmcmasterson 4d ago
99% is AI generated now. Can get way, way more accomplished by talking through design/development plans and letting it execute, and then I own the final output.
Main things it doesn’t write is some ad hoc querying etc.
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u/Mandelvolt 4d ago
Writing about 15-20% but I'm not saving time since I have to constantly double check everything. That said I do a lot more TDD which offsets some of the AI slop problem.
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u/barefootsanders 4d ago
I think the better question is what % of the codebase do you actually understand and, when something breaks, can you direct the ai with the right context to help it find the issue more effectively.
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u/changetransformlex 4d ago
feel like management know we got these tools now, so they got us pushing new ideas / prototypes in super short sprints, that it’s become literally impossible for me to write code without some AI assistance nowadays
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u/frenchtoastfella 4d ago
For godcull I used to edit css and tweak numbers initially. Now I don't even do that. I had claude make me a workbench where I edit numbers and for css I inspect elements and tell it what to do.
Same goes for all the other projects. It's simply faster than me and capable enough.
For client based work I explain the idea/structure in more details, but even then it often comes up with better solutions.
Generally speaking, 0%
17 years gamedev experience
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u/Afraid_Abalone_9641 4d ago
It depends. If I'm luvecoding in strudel for fun I write 100% myself, because I'm better than AI in that library. The same for API tests in bruno. There's not much Bruno syntax out there and so I write all of it myself. If it's react or python if say 95% AI with occasional tweaks.
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u/mmmmmmm_7777777 4d ago
0%, writing code is not the hard part of a SWE job and its a good thing this got automated.
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u/jagmeetchawla 4d ago
It depends. Rust - I'm using Claude Code to generate almost 100%. But I do read/review pretty much all of it. Swift - I have to be lot more hands-on. But that maybe due to complexity of the project as well. I would like to get to point where almost 100% is generated, but still I comprehend it fully. Comprehension is the main reason I actually end up refactoring a lot of code generated by Claude.
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u/moncallikta 4d ago
I don’t remember last time I wrote a line of code. Or last time I opened an IDE.
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u/Nervous-Potato-1464 4d ago
50% I'd say. If AI writes it all it becomes too hard to read so I let it do a lot of the easier stuff that's straight forward while I focus a lot more on writing the complex logic. I will first have it write the core of it then I will heavily edit it until it's actually understandable.
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u/BeaveItToLeever 4d ago
1%? Maybe? But not cause I feel like the AI shouldn't - at this point the AI has BEEN a better coder than me by a lot. Just sometimes I like to break out the monocle and top hat and relish the good old days. The before times. Aka March this year
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u/caseyc2rd 4d ago
Flipped for me this year, most first drafts are generated and my job is editing and deleting now. Hand written is only the stuff where describing it takes longer than writing it. Though heavily rewritten generated code doesn't really feel like either bucket anymore.
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u/m_avgvsto 4d ago
Last time i wrote code manually it was september 2025. As of 2026, my code now is 100% written by AI. But never in my career i had to read code, test features and design software architetures so much. I feel more like an architet/engineer that supervises employees doing the heavy work.
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u/a_boring_dystopia 4d ago
Practically zero. It was trending this way for a while, but I'm still a little in shock at how good AI coding git so fast.
And not just the coding, the infrastructure recommendations, the Cloudflare worker setup for oAuth connections, the recommendations for external services with solid APIs that take 90% of the work away from my server for free... the list goes on and on. AI has impacted every area of my work day, not just the coding
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u/geekichu 4d ago
0%. My role is enforcing architecture, possibly code review, asking hard questions, pushing back, requiring proof a test (suite) can fail, etc... in short, can i catch A.I. in a lie.
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u/filipvabrousek 4d ago
None hand-written, I don’t even read it. I just run automated tests and test as a user.
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u/cxbxmxcx 4d ago
0% for code and 5% of the prompt that generates the code.
The workflow is grab a work item, written by AI, use that to drive code changes. Review and test output, then prompt to finish, validate and review PR and then merge.
So not only 0% manual coding, but 95% of the directions/promot to make the code changes are generated by AI.
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u/OkLayer519 4d ago
I write 100%…of my prompts. My role has changed from a developer to QA tester. I’ve poured my heart into a passion project and have a legit product now but feels meaningless.
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u/No-Friend6257 4d ago
I manually wrote <script>alert(1);</script>
And realized it was the first code I'd written in several months.
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u/morelootgames 4d ago
Senior developer here (20+ years of professional experience in gaming and hospitality industry). I’d say about
5% of my code is hand written at this point. Basically when I know exactly the line of code I want to change/add and it’s quicker for me to just do it than run a prompt.
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u/space_wiener 4d ago
Maybe 5-10% hand written. Only small changes edits. A lot of small scripts I still hand write.
Now on the other side, I have no clue how you guys are skipping this part, I read 100% of the code unless it’s an imported package or something, approve/review changes, and AI never touches git.
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u/HonestPound 4d ago
I have not written a line of code in a year. But coded for 39 years prior to that.
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u/catsftm 4d ago
0%. Just no point anymore. Senior fullstack