How much time is actually spent writing code? [LWN.net]

How much time is actually spent writing code?

Posted Feb 16, 2026 20:40 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Why poison text? by excors
Parent article: Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine

> a human developer would probably spend more time chasing bugs and rewriting poorly-designed code than if they started from scratch.

I'm afraid even AI-haters keep missing the biggest elephant in the room: _even before/without AI_, which fraction of the time is actually spent writing a first, incomplete prototype compared to all the rest? That is: testing it, debugging it, fixing it, reviewing it, discussing it, evolving it, throwing away most of it and starting again? For high-profile and successful, long-lasting projects, I bet it's less than 10%.

It's like people claiming AI will produce software have never read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month or anything like it.

I think this time distortion happens because this is a fun part. It's like spending 95% of your time + a fraction of your sleep on parenting chores but the emotions you experience during 5% of the time make it all worth it.

Back to AI writing code and the harsh reality of the wall clock, what happens _economically_ when you make ten times faster something that... lasted only 10% of the total time? And increased the cost of most other phases? And removed all the fun from the job? Assuming an actually competitive market (not a given...), I have a prediction.

Granted, there is a lot of Visual Basic etc. that has never been written by more than one person, read by less than one and that person's main job is not software engineering. Maybe not engineering at all. I think _this_ is where AI-generated code might have value.

Also, AI has many other applications than writing code, including non-generative AI applications. These get much less hype and capital: probably because they promise much less and deliver a lot more :-)

to post comments

How much time is actually spent writing code?

Posted Feb 16, 2026 22:24 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

Granted, there is a lot of Visual Basic etc. that has never been written by more than one person, read by less than one and that person's main job is not software engineering. Maybe not engineering at all. I think _this_ is where AI-generated code might have value.

I fall squarely into the category of people who program for work only occasionally, and I'm skeptical that AI would help that much. The hard part for me has always been understanding the problem I'm trying to solve in enough detail to figure out what a solution looks like. Actually implementing whatever solution I come up with is usually pretty easy in comparison. In practice, understanding the problem in enough detail is an iterative process, where I think I've solved it only to discover there was an unexpected corner case I hadn't known enough to consider when I started out. I think that gets back to something Fred Brooks said in TMMM: a lot of debugging is actually debugging the specification. An AI coding assistant might be nice, but it isn't going to debug the specification for me.

How much time is actually spent writing code?

Posted Feb 16, 2026 22:48 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> I think that gets back to something Fred Brooks said in TMMM: a lot of debugging is actually debugging the specification. An AI coding assistant might be nice, but it isn't going to debug the specification for me.

It is well-known that "the customer never knows what they want" and that a large part of the work and value of IT consultants is to "extract" it from them.

AI fans will immediately tell you that of course LLMs can have that sort of discussion - for a MUCH cheaper price.
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

I have no idea.

How much time is actually spent writing code?

Posted Feb 17, 2026 8:40 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

It is also not as if you write the prototype to have a prototype, you write it so you figure out the things you need to pay attention to in the architecture of the later full implementation.

How much time is actually spent writing code?

Posted Feb 17, 2026 9:41 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Granted, there is a lot of Visual Basic etc. that has never been written by more than one person, read by less than one and that person's main job is not software engineering. Maybe not engineering at all. I think _this_ is where AI-generated code might have value.

And given my experience working currently as a "VBA Engineer", I'm not sure I agree with you ... in any company of any size, you need specialist end users, "Subject Matter Experts" as we call them, and any AI written code needs reviewing. In my only experience of doing so, I think I reduced about 100 lines of AI code to about 10 lines of company-standards-compliant code.

Cheers,
Wol