Published on 2026-01-27. Modified on 2026-01-30.
To some developers AI seems to be the best thing since sliced bread, while to others, AI is more or less useless. I set out to investigate a little about why there is such a big difference in opinion among developers. This is just some my observations.
Amateur developers
Amateur developers, which in this article covers both inexperienced developers (of all age groups) and developers who, despite having coded for a longer period of time, are not particularly good at programming, tend to love AI. The main reason for their fondness is the "pre-made" code the AI can produce. A few prompts and they have what seems to be working code.
The amateur developer cannot see the problems the code contain because of a lack of knowledge and/or experience. Bugs which haven't been triggered yet, security issues, and other issues which lies hidden in the code, it's all "invisible".
As we all know, everyone struggles a bit when we're inexperienced and this is all a normal and healthy part of the learning process. As we gain a deeper understanding, issues are more easily grasped and handled, etc. However, with AI this process has taken a wrong turn. The learning process is almost stalled. Rather than study (by other means than the AI), reading documentation, trying to understand the technology better, the inexperienced developer just keeps pounding at the AI to produce better results, without knowing anything about what's going on under to hood. Now it works!
, he yells in rejoice when the AI finally gets the program running again - still without understanding anything. If asked, "Why don't you look in the documentation and try to understand this or that option?", the answer is, "Nah, I'll just use the AI."
The amateur developer doesn't know when the explanations and examples provided by the AI is nonsense and he or she often neglects to fact-check any provided sources, which more often than not, are wrongly cited, hallucinated, or simply wrong.
All the Big Tech public AIs, whether it's Claude, Co-Pilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any of others, make serious mistakes in code, almost all the time. When things just seem to work, it's often because the code is too basic, the AI misses vital validation steps, vital security steps, it sometimes hallucinates code that does nothing in the program, etc. So, the code "works", but the program is really bad. The amateur developer is oblivious to all of this.
All of this makes AI a dangerous and a problematic tool in the hands of the amateur developer, but the amateur developer loves AI.
Lazy, but experienced developers
Some experienced developers are lazy. They do not want to write code if it can be avoided. Getting the AI to produce as much of the code as possible is considered a great time saver.
The lazy, but experienced developer do not suffer from the same problems as the amateur developer because he or she is capable of understanding the code, correcting and fixing mistakes, etc.
The lazy developer, like the amateur developer, is very happy about AI.
Artisan programmers
Artisan programmers are people who associate programming with skill, mastery and craftsmanship. They take pride in the work they do. They try to understand the technology on a much deeper level and by being meticulous in their work.
When the artisan programmer sees the results the AI produces, he or she mostly sees slop. While the person can be impressed by the technology itself, because parts of it is certainly impressive, the quality of the code that the AI produces is not impressive.
To an artisan programmer the hassle with weeding out all the problems the AI has generated, usually takes longer than doing it right by yourself from the beginning. As such, an artisan programmer can perhaps use AI for hobby projects, for things that isn't important, a small shell script there, some piece of code there, but only when the code is not important.
Also, the artisan programmer considers the usage of public AI as yet another step in the wrong direction of further and deeper dependence on Big Tech.
The artisan programmer generally does not like AI.
Big Tech, and the impact on the environment
The developers mentioned above who "love" AI, seem to mostly turn a blind eye to the negative impact AI datacenters has on the environment, both in regard to water consumption, extraction of minerals for production of components, energy usage, etc. They downsize the problems or just ignore them.
This is in steep contrast to people who already "hate" AI because from their perspective, since AI mostly produce garbage anyway, the environmental problems related to running AI is hardly justified, and the compromises people make by using Big Tech in general, is repulsive.
My personal opinion
I completely agree with the artisan programmers. I also see the same type of problems in other fields that interests me as well. In my opinion and experience, AI is only superficially useful. As such, you cannot use AI unless you already master the field.
I can understand why the amateur developer finds AI great, but in many cases it's going to bite one in the ass later when even more time is needed to solve the problems.
Depending on the level of integration and also on the specific type of work, the deeper an AI is integrated into the workflow of a company, the more problems they eventually will have.
Many companies haven't even realized the problems yet. They have just blindly trusted the hype and frantically integrated AI in order to save money or in the fear of loosing out.
All the bad that the AI technology is causing is NOT IN ANY WAY outweighed by the usefulness.
I highly recommend reading Dan Mcquillan's blog about AI and his book Resisting AI - An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.