Stack Overflow is following up its current Developer Survey with a follow-up survey of 800+ builders to seek out out which improvement duties are inflicting them essentially the most frustration.
The unique survey discovered that 84% of builders use or deliberate to make use of AI of their improvement workflows, however that they typically have been pissed off when AI offers incorrect options, inspiring Stack Overflow to seek out out the place builders are losing time or getting pissed off, with or with out AI. The corporate predicted that the frustration comes not from the AI instruments themselves, however that duties counting on good documentation have change into extra time consuming and irritating.
In accordance with the outcomes, builders are spending most of their time writing code; variable quantities of time on CI/CD pipelines, engaged on enterprise use circumstances, and studying codebases; and the least period of time is spent on deployments, documentation, catching up on messages, and job administration methods.
Stack Overflow famous that the realm the place builders are spending their time additionally coincides with the place they’re utilizing AI. The unique report discovered that 59% of builders have been utilizing AI for writing code, 47% have been utilizing it for debugging, and 33% for studying a couple of codebase. Deployments and documentation weren’t areas that builders deliberate to make use of AI for; round 40% of builders mentioned they wouldn’t use AI to assist with code documentation.
The corporate additionally discovered an inverse relationship between time spent and frustration. Builders spend most of their time coding, and discover the least quantity of frustration from coding. Studying a codebase is a job they spend much less time on, however results in extra frustration.
Different areas the place builders are spending little time however experiencing greater than common frustration embody deployments, help ticket methods, and studying via firm errata.
“Central to all of those duties is the shortage of time spent on each day code documentation, which when finished nicely can enhance the execution of those duties and result in much less frustration,” the corporate wrote in a weblog submit.
The analysis additionally revealed a disparity in frustration ranges primarily based on expertise. For example, skilled builders discover low ranges of frustration in comparison with newer builders when doing related quantities of coding. They imagine it’s because newer builders usually tend to want documentation, and can discover it irritating to jot down code when it isn’t nicely documented.
“The newest survey outcomes about developer work exhibits that point spent writing code just isn’t the supply of issues for builders,” Stack Overflow concluded. “Nevertheless, the connection between the shortage of time spent on documentation exhibits that duties resembling studying a code base or interacting with help ticket methods are probably made extra irritating as a result of small period of time spent on documentation by early profession and skilled builders. Many builders are utilizing AI help each day, and frustrations persist not essentially due to AI failures however somewhat because of lack of foundational and dependable data captured in documentation.”
