Things That Senior Programmers Never Do with AI
Using AI to boost productivity without ruining your programming profession
Shalitha Suranga
Shalitha Suranga
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6 min read
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20 hours ago
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Photo by Dean Pugh on Unsplash
The growth of AI has positively and negatively affected so many technical professions, including programming. AI innovations, especially generative AI tools, redefined what we knew as programming by motivating programmers to hyper-automate their programming workflows using AI-based code generators, programming assistants, code editors, code reviewing tools, and various decision-making tools. Following the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022, thousands of AI tools entered the software industry to automate every aspect of the software development life cycle (SDLC).
Most developers apparently use AI tools nowadays, but according to the Stack Overflow 2025 survey, senior programmers hesitate to use AI tools to push the programming process to the vibe-coding approach since they truly understand the hidden issues of generative AI and the side effects of vibe-coding software projects:
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Only 2.5% of senior programmers highly trust AI tools, a screenshot of the Stack Overflow 2025 survey results
Let’s explore things that senior programmers never do with AI, and why, even if most junior programmers tend to use AI tools to save many developer hours, hyper-automating programming!
They don’t vibe code, but generate and use code snippets using AI tools
Every generative AI-based code generator emits source code for a specific prompt using a limited pre-trained dataset, so the probability of getting invalid or low-quality code is not negligible. Junior programmers who don’t critically think about this aspect use AI agents to fully automate the coding process and eventually create low-quality, unstable, dying codebases.
Using AI to boost productivity without ruining your programming profession
Shalitha Suranga
Shalitha Suranga
Follow
6 min read
·
20 hours ago
Listen
Share
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Photo by Dean Pugh on Unsplash
The growth of AI has positively and negatively affected so many technical professions, including programming. AI innovations, especially generative AI tools, redefined what we knew as programming by motivating programmers to hyper-automate their programming workflows using AI-based code generators, programming assistants, code editors, code reviewing tools, and various decision-making tools. Following the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022, thousands of AI tools entered the software industry to automate every aspect of the software development life cycle (SDLC).
Most developers apparently use AI tools nowadays, but according to the Stack Overflow 2025 survey, senior programmers hesitate to use AI tools to push the programming process to the vibe-coding approach since they truly understand the hidden issues of generative AI and the side effects of vibe-coding software projects:
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Only 2.5% of senior programmers highly trust AI tools, a screenshot of the Stack Overflow 2025 survey results
Let’s explore things that senior programmers never do with AI, and why, even if most junior programmers tend to use AI tools to save many developer hours, hyper-automating programming!
They don’t vibe code, but generate and use code snippets using AI tools
Every generative AI-based code generator emits source code for a specific prompt using a limited pre-trained dataset, so the probability of getting invalid or low-quality code is not negligible. Junior programmers who don’t critically think about this aspect use AI agents to fully automate the coding process and eventually create low-quality, unstable, dying codebases.
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Summary
AI impact on programming: Senior programmers are cautious about using AI tools due to concerns over quality and stability, as shown in the Stack Overflow 2025 survey. They avoid vibe-coding, instead generating and manually using code snippets via AI tools. This approach reduces the risk of