{"id":449686,"date":"2026-01-31T14:25:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T14:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/449686\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T14:25:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T14:25:12","slug":"developers-say-ai-coding-tools-work-and-thats-precisely-what-worries-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/449686\/","title":{"rendered":"Developers say AI coding tools work\u2014and that’s precisely what worries them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Software developers have spent the past two years watching AI coding tools evolve from advanced autocomplete into something that can, in some cases<\/a>, build entire applications from a text prompt. Tools like Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code and OpenAI\u2019s Codex can now work<\/a> on software projects for hours at a time, writing code, running tests, and, with human supervision, fixing bugs. OpenAI says<\/a> it now uses Codex to build Codex itself, and the company recently published<\/a> technical details about how the tool works under the hood. It has caused many to wonder: Is this just more AI industry hype, or are things actually different this time?<\/p>\n

To find out, Ars reached out to several professional developers on Bluesky to ask how they feel about these tools in practice, and the responses revealed a workforce that largely agrees the technology works, but remains divided on whether that\u2019s entirely good news. It\u2019s a small sample size that was self-selected by those who wanted to participate, but their views are still instructive as working professionals in the space.<\/p>\n

David Hagerty, a developer who works on point-of-sale systems, told Ars Technica up front that he is skeptical of the marketing. \u201cAll of the AI companies are hyping up the capabilities so much,\u201d he said. \u201cDon\u2019t get me wrong\u2014LLMs are revolutionary and will have an immense impact, but don\u2019t expect them to ever write the next great American novel or anything. It\u2019s not how they work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roland Dreier, a software engineer who has contributed extensively to the Linux kernel in the past, told Ars Technica that he acknowledges the presence of hype but has watched the progression of the AI space closely. \u201cIt sounds like implausible hype, but state-of-the-art agents are just staggeringly good right now,\u201d he said. Dreier described a \u201cstep-change\u201d in the past six months, particularly after Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5<\/a>. Where he once used AI for autocomplete and asking the occasional question, he now expects to tell an agent \u201cthis test is failing, debug it and fix it for me\u201d and have it work. He estimated a 10x speed improvement for complex tasks like building a Rust backend service with Terraform deployment configuration and a Svelte<\/a> frontend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Software developers have spent the past two years watching AI coding tools evolve from advanced autocomplete into something…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-449686","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}