The True Cost of AI Coding

Dr. Courtney Telinski: As you can imagine, it's a variable reward system, which is more like a slot machine, right? Where sometimes you're getting a reward, but most of the time you're not. Right? And And there's this like anticipation build-up that keeps you motivated to continue to press that lever. And that's really what AI is doing because there's this chance that it's going to give you a really perfect solution for what it is that you're looking for, but most of the time it's not going to be perfect. And so, there's this concept of, 'Well, let me just do it one more time. Let me just do it one more time.' And that keeps you hooked because your motivation is to get that perfect solution, and that in turn induces dopamine, which feeds this addictive cycle.

Scott Tolinski: And that like saved effort, as many of us have experienced, doesn't really like come back as saved time or rest or anything like that. It often comes back as like more decisions, more supervision, and higher baseline, right? Like it feels like we're having to answer a thousands of questions a day at rapid fire.

Scott Tolinski: We asked developers, do you feel like your actual coding skills are sharpening, holding steady, or diminishing? 59% put their own skills on the diminishing side of things. As well as how much genuine enjoyment or flow do you get from coding now compared to before you started using AI heavily? 54% said they get less enjoyment out of coding than they used to. And those two things aren't separate findings, by the way. In the data, it's mostly the same people. The ones who felt like their skills were slipping were the ones enjoying it the least.

Scott Tolinski: Healthy prompting it can't be carried by personal discipline alone, right? The worker, the workplace, all of these things matter in which like stopping working on time is even possible. I mean, even pre-AI there's been jobs where I've had to work major overtime to ship, and I've been pushed well beyond past the limit in which I wanted to continue working, and it did affect me negatively in my mental health. So, this is obviously nothing new with AI, but the data definitely shows that people feel like they need to produce more now than ever.