Ask HN: Why aren't more developers using AI tools?

4 dawie 2 8/14/2025, 10:00:10 PM

I’ve worked in both corporate and startup settings and keep noticing that many talented developers I meet don’t use AI tools at all — not even for small things like boilerplate code, tests, or docs.

Why? Concerns about security or IP? Don’t trust the quality? Slows you down instead of helping? Just don’t see the value?

If you don’t use AI tools (or tried and stopped), I’d love to hear your reasons. If you do use them, what convinced you?

Comments (2)

daemonologist · 19s ago

Corporate forbids AI tools due to IP concerns. When I Google for syntax or something I do sometimes look at the AI result though.

On personal projects I usually use AI (Zed Zeta) for tab completion, although sometimes I get annoyed by it interfering with the UI or my cursor and turn it off. Every couple of months I try the current hotness for a small or greenfield project; if I stick with the project for more than a few days I inevitably find the AI can't do anything except the most common possible thing, and turn it off.

I think the disconnect is in my ability to explain to the model in English what I want it to create. If it's something common, I can give it the gist and its assumptions as to the rest will be valid, but if it's something difficult my few paragraphs of instruction and outlining probably just doesn't provide enough specificity. This is maybe the same problem low-code tools run into: the thing that fully defines what I want to happen is the code itself; any abstraction you build on top of that will be _at least_ as complex, unless I happen to want all the defaults.

marssaxman · 1h ago

My productivity is not significantly limited by my ability to generate code, so I see little value in tools which offer to accelerate the process. (I don't use autocomplete, either; I type quickly, and prefer my editor to stay out of the way as much as possible.) I spend far more time reading, discussing, testing, and thinking than I do writing.

The people who rave about AI tools generally laud their facility with the tedious boilerplate involved in typical web-based business applications, but I have spent years steering my career away from such work, and most of what I do is not the sort of thing you can look up on StackOverflow. Perhaps there are things an AI tool could do to help me, and perhaps someday I will be curious enough to try; but for now they seem to solve problems I don't really have, while introducing difficulties I would find annoying.