--- title: What a new survey reveals about AI coding: productivity... description: A survey and roundup of research on AI coding tools finds mixed results: 84% of surveyed engineers report higher productivity, but the share reporting worse... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/what-a-new-survey-reveals-about-ai-coding-productivity-gains-mental-health-costs-and-myths-that-n-muk4uxxip twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: What a new survey reveals about AI coding: productivity gains, mental health costs, and myths that need to die | daily.dev og:description: A survey and roundup of research on AI coding tools finds mixed results: 84% of surveyed engineers report higher productivity, but the share reporting worse... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/what-a-new-survey-reveals-about-ai-coding-productivity-gains-mental-health-costs-and-myths-that-n-muk4uxxip og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/MuK4uxxiP.png og:image:alt: What a new survey reveals about AI coding: productivity gains, mental health costs, and myths that need to die og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # What a new survey reveals about AI coding: productivity gains, mental health costs, and myths that need to die **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A survey and roundup of research on AI coding tools finds mixed results: 84% of surveyed engineers report higher productivity, but the share reporting worse developer experience nearly doubled from 14% to 27%, driven by declines in flow state and cognitive load. A September 2025 Toronto Metropolitan University study found GitHub Copilot's Code Review feature often misses serious vulnerabilities like SQL injection and XSS while flagging minor style issues, underscoring the continued need for manual security audits. Separately, an Epoch AI/METR benchmark showed Claude Opus 4.6 autonomously reimplementing a ~16,000-line Go bioinformatics toolkit and passing 2,001 end-to-end tests without seeing the original source, illustrating that agentic tools like Claude Code and Codex CLI have moved well beyond simple autocomplete. ## Content The AI coding backlash has a name now: the "vampire effect." Gergely Orosz put it bluntly: "Software engineers burning out thanks to using AI coding tools is becoming a major problem I don't see anyone talk about all that much. There's some vampire effect in these tools, and it drains a lot of devs." That line, tied to a Syntax.fm video from Scott Tolinski, is the thing everyone's passing around this week, and Wes Bos called it "the best video Syntax has put out all year." The core complaint isn't that AI writes bad code. It's what constant AI use does to the person reviewing it. Donny Wals described a slot-machine dynamic: "the more I let agents work on my code, the more I feel distanced from the code and the project. Makes it harder and harder to keep truly caring about the outcome." A separate essay, "Token Maxxing," is even starker: a developer admitting to sacrificing sleep and gym time to burn through Codex and Claude token limits before they reset. That's not a productivity story, that's compulsive behavior with a subscription meter attached. The data backs up the vibe shift. One writeup cites a survey where 84% of engineers report productivity gains, but the share reporting a worse developer experience nearly doubled, from 14% to 27%, concentrated in flow state and cognitive load. Laura Summers' conference talk frames the job change directly: developers are now full-time ## Questions this post answers ### What percentage of engineers report a worse developer experience despite using AI coding tools? A survey found the share of engineers reporting a worse developer experience nearly doubled, rising from 14% to 27%, even as 84% of engineers reported productivity gains overall. The decline concentrated in flow state and cognitive load, suggesting AI tools boost output metrics while eroding the subjective quality of the work itself. _Developers weighing AI tool adoption against burnout risk can follow this debate on daily.dev._ ### What is the vampire effect in AI coding tools? The vampire effect describes how heavy reliance on AI coding agents drains developers psychologically even while boosting output, a term popularized by Gergely Orosz commenting on a Syntax.fm video from Scott Tolinski. The concern is not code quality but reviewer fatigue and emotional detachment from work developers no longer feel ownership over. _Anyone tracking AI coding tool trade-offs can follow ongoing developer discussion on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 19 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-09-13). **TL;DR:** Discussion largely agrees the pain described stems from letting an agent produce one giant diff instead of breaking work into small, reviewable, TDD-driven increments; some also found the closing interactive visualization ironic given the essay's anti-AI-vibes stance. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 55% mixed · 30% skeptical **The case for** - Using structured skill scaffolding (e.g. TDD, planning docs, mermaid diagrams) with agents reportedly produces much better structured, reviewable commits. - One commenter reports genuinely positive results applying best practices with an LLM. - One commenter argues it's still twice as fast as the manual estimate and possibly better tested. **The pushback** - Several argue the root problem was letting the agent produce one massive diff instead of small stacked PRs reviewed incrementally. - Some find it ironic/hypocritical that the author complains AI vetting is exhausting yet used AI to casually generate the closing visualization. - One commenter notes reviewing large amounts of smart-but-flawed AI code carries a higher burnout multiplier than reviewing a human teammate's work because all ownership falls on the reviewer. - One commenter felt the interactive dashboard itself was confusing and would work better as a plain essay with explained quadrants. - Frontier labs are criticized for not baking good engineering practices (small diffs, TDD, DRY) into their harnesses/model training by default. **By community** - lobsters (mixed): Most argue the burnout was avoidable via smaller stacked diffs and skill scaffolding, while others sympathize with the author and note some found the visualization ironic given the essay's premise. - hackernews (mixed): No comments were provided, so no discernible discussion sentiment. **Hottest debate:** Whether the reviewing burnout is fundamentally avoidable by breaking work into smaller, incrementally reviewed diffs, or whether it's an irreducible cost of vetting large amounts of AI-generated code regardless of chunking. **Open questions** - Would breaking the work into smaller stacked diffs and using skill scaffolding have actually prevented the burnout in this specific case? - Is the exhausting part fundamentally about diff size, or about the psychological burden of sole ownership over reviewing AI-authored code versus human teammate code? **Highlights** > > about a week to comprehend the massive diff it produced It is insane to me that models aren't better trained on this and the harnesses don't default to better practices. But you **do not need to have one massive diff**. There are skill plugins [like superpowers](https://github.com/obra/superpowers) that attempt to let these models/harnesses make use of good practices like TDD, DRY, etc and they actually do improve the quality output in a remarkable way and give you much better structured commits. Most people I know who use AI *somewhat* successfully in their workflow have had to spend A LOT of time putting up a ton of skill scaffolding and other instructions before they got to that point. Some of that comes down to project specific idiosyncrasies but a majority from what I have seen is the same sort of stuff as the superpowers skill set, trying to get these things to follow basic fundamental software development practices. As I said, it is borderline insane to me that *none* of the frontier labs includes those practices themselves in their harnesses or model training to any significant degree as far as I can tell. They all seem to focus on the sort of quick idea to code type development that works for prototypes but falls apart for larger projects. And to be extra clear, even with these skills in place it still is exhausting to me to use agentic coding with harnesess like claude code. But if your work requires you to use them or you want to actually trial them, do yourself a favor and at least try and use something like superpowers to get some semblance of sanity in the flow. Now to get back to the article. I find the contrast between *"using AI is extremely exhausting"* and *"Also, here is an interactive representation I had the AI make"* pretty hilarious to be honest. > — [creesch on lobsters · 9 points, 4 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/os20fa/vetted_ai_code_is_hard_justify#c_7b244j) > The problem that I am seeing is less that the feature cannot be broken into smaller pieces, and more that reviewing a nontrivial amount of smart-but-sometimes-very-flawed code has a high burnout multiplier. It feels genuinely different than a human teammate because all of the ownership falls on me, versus being shared with the teammate. > — [amoffat on lobsters · 1 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/os20fa/vetted_ai_code_is_hard_justify#c_ns9ypy) > This is a nice way to partition LLM-assisted work into segments based on practical and psychological toll but I find the "dashboard" to be confusing. It's hard to understand all of the sliders without mousing over the tooltips and it's not clear what's happening when you drag one of the sliders and (e.g.) the y-axis scale shifts. I believe the piece would be stronger as a longer essay without the interactive bit. Perhaps you could write brief paragraphs explaining the different ~quadrants~ regimes (I don't know the actual number) that the reader now has to search for by manually searching the 4-dimensional parameter space. > — [n1000 on lobsters · 4 points](https://lobste.rs/s/os20fa/vetted_ai_code_is_hard_justify#c_ardfao) > > Now to get back to the article. I find the contrast between "using AI is extremely exhausting" and "Also, here is an interactive representation I had the AI make" pretty hilarious to be honest. To me it reads like a contrast between having LLMs implement something to the author's production standard — and having an LLM one-shot vibecode a sketch, with no care for precision because all numbers are purely vibes from the beginning. > — [k749gtnc9l3w on lobsters · 2 points](https://lobste.rs/s/os20fa/vetted_ai_code_is_hard_justify#c_duwb6t) > > about a week to comprehend the massive diff it produced I mean here's your problem. Instead of having the LLM crap out one massive change, spend some time breaking the task up. Then have the LLM produce small focused deliverables as pull requests, and review them individually. This is no different from how you'd work on a feature on a team as well I might add. Nobody wants to see massive PRs that conflate a bunch of features together. There's absolutely no reason to let the agent churn out a bunch of code before you look at it. > — [Yogthos on lobsters · 2 points, 2 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/os20fa/vetted_ai_code_is_hard_justify#c_lblktf) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/os20fa/vetted_ai_code_is_hard_justify) · 20 points · 19 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329292) · 2 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [“I started to lose my ability to code”: developers grapple with the real cost of AI programming tools](https://daily.dev/posts/i-started-to-lose-my-ability-to-code-developers-grapple-with-the-real-cost-of-ai-programming-tool-2ysnnh7pi) · The New Stack · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-assisted-engineers-are-burning-out-is-this-fine-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blog-w6iuvhp9x) · Martian Chronicles · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The AI Vampire](https://daily.dev/posts/the-ai-vampire-qwh8nwgz6) · Tech Lead Digest · 43 upvotes · 3 comments - [Developers won’t work without AI anymore. The research says it might be making them worse.](https://daily.dev/posts/developers-won-t-work-without-ai-anymore-the-research-says-it-might-be-making-them-worse--ujuzny6kv) · The Next Web · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#github](https://daily.dev/tags/github), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code), [#code-review](https://daily.dev/tags/code-review) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/what-a-new-survey-reveals-about-ai-coding-productivity-gains-mental-health-costs-and-myths-that-n-muk4uxxip) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"What a new survey reveals about AI coding: productivity gains, mental health costs, and myths that need to die","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/what-a-new-survey-reveals-about-ai-coding-productivity-gains-mental-health-costs-and-myths-that-n-muk4uxxip","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/what-a-new-survey-reveals-about-ai-coding-productivity-gains-mental-health-costs-and-myths-that-n-muk4uxxip"},"datePublished":"2026-08-14T13:16:28.525Z","dateModified":"2026-09-13T20:01:49.002Z","description":"A survey and roundup of research on AI coding tools finds mixed results: 84% of surveyed engineers report higher productivity, but the share reporting worse...","image":"https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPr3RiBWYAAkHTd.jpg","thumbnailUrl":"https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPr3RiBWYAAkHTd.jpg","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Collections","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Collections","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--fk_6ycEi--/f_auto,q_auto/v1780996001/logos/collections?_a=BAMAMiWQ0","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/what-a-new-survey-reveals-about-ai-coding-productivity-gains-mental-health-costs-and-myths-that-n-muk4uxxip","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"github,productivity,ai-coding,claude-code,code-review","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Collections","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"What a new survey reveals about AI coding: productivity gains, mental health costs, and myths that need to die"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/what-a-new-survey-reveals-about-ai-coding-productivity-gains-mental-health-costs-and-myths-that-n-muk4uxxip#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What percentage of engineers report a worse developer experience despite using AI coding tools?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"A survey found the share of engineers reporting a worse developer experience nearly doubled, rising from 14% to 27%, even as 84% of engineers reported productivity gains overall. 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