Programming

SUMMARY • 66% of respondents have adopted AI tools in production. • 85% are focused on internal engineering use cases. • 59% of respondents feel AI has increased productivity. The tooling landscape Whether overzealous leaders have mandated adoption or allowed engineers to discover these tools themselves, it’s safe to say that AI coding assistants and large language models (LLMs) are firmly part of the software developer’s tool belt today. Two-thirds (66%) of respondents have adopted AI tools or models for at least some use cases, with 20% at a pilot stage, and 13% still exploring. This leaves just 2% who have no plans to use AI tools or models.

Ways to Get Ahead

Three components of fast career growth:

Luck Talent Grit

I do appreciate he put luck first.. as a graduate into the 2008 economic meltdown it certainly felt like bad luck

The reality is. You can’t have it all. There are trade offs. Embrace them and optimize.

_{Quote Citation: Sidwyn Koh, “Work-Life Balance Slows Careers (E9 Engineer, ex-Meta)”, 2024-08-31, https://www.pathtostaff.com/p/work-life-balance-slows-careers-e9}

ANTHROPIC REVOKED OPENAI’S API access to its models on Tuesday, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. OpenAI was informed that its access was cut off due to violating the terms of service.

“Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI’s own technical staff were also using our coding tools ahead of the launch of GPT-5,” Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty said in a statement to WIRED. “Unfortunately, this is a direct violation of our terms of service.”

There is, however, some skepticism around the extent to which AI is truly responsible for layoffs. “As a founder, seeking investments, of a company that’s in a public market that trades stock, you don’t want to rattle the market and say ‘Oh we’re actually in a really tough position because we can’t borrow money cheaply and the economic condition isn’t great,’” said Mr. Vu, “You want to be able to at least try to shape the narrative on why your company’s headcount isn’t growing as quickly as it should, and in fact right now, AI certainly seems like a good reason to attribute that to.”

Companies building AI dev tools report positive results. Cursor calls it “the smartest coding model we’ve used.” Windsurf says it has “half the tool calling error rate” of other models. Vercel praises its frontend capabilities.

Beyond the tool companies, some founders and developers have shared their early experiences. GitHub’s CEO mentioned that GPT-5 shows promise for complex refactoring tasks. Several startup founders have noted improvements in code generation quality, though most emphasize they’re still in early testing phases.

Fast forward to today, and that joy of coding is decreasing rapidly. Well, I’m a manager these days, so there’s that… But even when I do get technical, I usually just open Cursor and prompt my way out of 90% of it. It’s way more productive, but more passive as well.

I’m not sure I agree with this post.. Yes with AI you can be dangerous again and sling some code. But finding Joy in writing functions? No.. find joy in shipping. ABC always be committing..

In short, we are in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of developer tools, and a dizzying array of approaches are currently being tested for their evolutionary fitness. Consider even an abbreviated, absolutely non-exhaustive list of related tools: Aboard, Bolt, Cline, Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT / Codex, Claude / Code, Gemini / CLI, Factory, Lovable, Poolside, Replit, Same.dev, vibes.diy, v0, watsonX and Windsurf. Not all of these will succeed, and indeed some argue that all of these are doomed because the economic footing they’re built on is fatally unsound. That argument is built on two core assumptions, however: that vendor costs will never come down and that user costs can not be raised – neither of which seems entirely safe.

I’m talking about personal goals. Not the corporate version where everyone wants to “develop leadership skills” but real, ambitious, life-changing goals that make people light up when they talk about them.

Rejecting the “up or out” rat race is phenomenal

_{Quote Citation: Stephane Moreau, “The insane privilege of being a manager”, SEP 09, 2025, https://www.blog4ems.com/p/the-insane-privilege-of-being-a-manager}

React is no longer winning by technical merit. Today it is winning by default. That default is now slowing innovation across the frontend ecosystem.

Ember? knockout? vue? I dont know what “let’s use React” is the innovation killer. There is power in choosing a standard coding language everyone understands.

_{Quote Citation: Loren Stewart, “React Won by Default – And It’s Killing Frontend Innovation | Loren Stewart”, 2025-09-16, https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/react-won-by-default/}

I’ve seen so many bugs in real systems due to mixing up integers, strings, or UUIDs that represent different things. Meanwhile, it’s simple to set up types that entirely eliminate this class of bug, even in a language like Go that isn’t known for having a particularly powerful type system. It’s absolutely astounding to me that this technique is not broadly used.

I mean I get it. compiler catch everything. Bob Martin would be proud.