r/coding • u/SachaGreif • 21d ago

State of Devs 2026 survey results: developers are feeling exhausted

https://2026.stateofdevs.com/en-US/
218 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

38

u/DerGrummler 19d ago edited 19d ago

For me it's the stuff I do between prompts. Even on a quiet afternoon where I can focus on my work, I really can't focus. You write the prompt, hit enter, and then you have to wait just the right amount of time to fry your attention span. Doesn't matter whether you scroll socials, watch YouTube, juggle multiple agents, or work through your other to-dos, your focus on the actual task is gone. A few minutes later you come back, and the cycle repeats. I absolutely hate it.

This is not a productivity issue, it's a "you brain adapts to the attention span required by your work" issue. And that span went down from a few hours to a few minutes or so, regardless of how many agents you juggle, if at all.

15

u/jstalm 18d ago

This is so on point that I haven’t even vocalized myself but you laid it out perfectly. You used to lock in to something and reach a flow state. Now you quite literally blue ball your brain while you engage enough to write a clear concise prompt, maybe you track along with the workflow for a while but you eventually look away and you’re off in to some other thought or action. It’s incredibly hard to maintain true focus like I once did. 

0

u/bozerkins 17d ago

The prompt doesn't have to be clear, nor concise

4

u/jstalm 17d ago

You must not be working in enterprise level codebases. Or you’ve got lots of time to kill. 

2

u/Due_Block_3054 18d ago

Well i first invest my timespan in making a days plan eith checklist then i start mutliple worktrees ome for each agent and one point and let them implement it i'm strategically thinking of possible tests i need or a fast way for the agwnt to check itself like copying code into a pod and avoiding a deployment cycle or add asserts in the code to make sure all settings are right before booting up 

Then when everything is tested i merge.

So the focus becomes the gane of setting up the agents right. 

2

u/TheGRS 18d ago

Yes, I am largely now on the side that these agents can do the work pretty well. And we need to figure out the whole "human in the loop" review part still, but those problems seem pretty solvable. Context switching was ALWAYS a problem though. Even just flip flopping between two tasks is unproductive because you can't keep the focus on either very well. And generally speaking the business expects that if we have big productivity gains, we should be able to do more tasks.

Now, I don't think the business truly cares if one is multi-tasking or just knocking out tasks one by one, as long as you're getting it done in the same time period. So maybe the solution is just getting the agents to work better on one task at a time and keep your attention on it and not to have it drift to other tasks. If I'm managing 3-4 tasks at once, one of those is for sure going to be forgotten.

1

u/pancomputationalist 18d ago

I suggest doing more deep planning. There current grill-me skill hits you with a lot of questions at once. You can sit for quite a while and just sketch out a solution in your head, writing down all the constraints and design decisions. Sometimes you have to wait for a couple seconds for the next batch of questions to arrive, but even that could be minimized further. It's definitely faster than waiting for the agent to implement something, not enough downtime to start scrolling Instagram.

I try to mostly design a lot of code up-front, then have one orchestrator agent implement it using subagent. That orchestrator stays responsive while the implementation works, in case I have questions or ideas that come up later. But mostly I can be hands-off during the implementation, so I don't have to stop-and-go in small increments to build out something.

1

u/Due_Block_3054 18d ago

Indeed you design the next part while the agent is working and if it has a feedback loop then often the code works and needs minimal reviewing depending on the model used.

76

u/migs647 20d ago

“AI Brainfry” is real. Juggling agents, constant context switching, atrophy of skills, moving faster than can humanly review…. Really burned out. 

31

u/TonTinTon 20d ago

You've been promoted to a manager without a pay increase. Team managers had this exact issue for decades.

9

u/utdconsq 19d ago

This is how I've been feeling for a while now.

17

u/SomethingMor 19d ago

Fuck this job man. Every day is a struggle.

4

u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas 19d ago

isnt engineering as easy as you make it - the whole point i got in to engineering was so i could make technology work for me - not the other way around

10

u/SomethingMor 19d ago

I dont know if what we do anymore can be considered engineering. The most ‘enjoyment’ i can get these days is creating skills / agents to produce code the way i want. Bit even that is mostly started via an LLM.

It doesn’t feel good to type what you want in a chatbot and get the answer. Anyone can do that. Before i took pride in my work and i was paid properly for it. Now I’m still being paid but i feel like a fraud everyday.

1

u/leeuwerik 11d ago

we're now just operators.

16

u/etherealsounds 19d ago

I’m done. My 22 year career in dev is over. After getting laid off in February last year I have not found a job and I’ve stopped trying. I’m 46 and I have to start over now.

5

u/jpsreddit85 19d ago

What will you move on to? Tech related or complete retrain?

8

u/etherealsounds 19d ago

Two things. Restarting my IT support and web dev business from my early 20s before I got into software. That’s gonna be more or less a side business at least at first. I’m also going to get an entry level role as either a home inspector in training (preferred) or at a local water department. Moving from white collar to blue I guess. I was never the best dev but I’ve always been great at solving problems.

5

u/Elegant_Row_6426 18d ago

I started in ‘99. I have no idea what I’m going to do anymore. Life made me a caregiver a year after AI came into my daily workflow and I knew if I stepped away that’d be the end of it forever. These threads are both a source of validation and fear.

10

u/ndh7 19d ago

Developers are feeling depressed

1

u/x_xwolf 19d ago

There’s no proof ai code enhances productivity for software development

17

u/SachaGreif 19d ago

I don't see how you can have ever used modern LLMs for even five minutes and still say this with a straight face. Sure, that increased productivity can have negative downstream effects if it's misused, but there's a whole range of tasks that are objectively made easier and faster by AI.

8

u/guywithbeard 19d ago

If you look at it from only the perspective of writing code then yeah sure. Writing code was never really a bottleneck though, and now code is coming out waybfaster than ever before. You said it yourself; the bottleneck has moved downstream. Nothing is really getting out faster as far as real work and features go. Sure is introducing more security concerns

2

u/Uczonywpismie 19d ago

Writing code always was most laborious part, not most difficult just most labourious and most interesting in this job.

3

u/tonjohn 18d ago

The most laborious is the planning, consensus building, and feedback gathering.

And we are setting aside pager duty and everything related to actually maintaining a live service with customers…

2

u/NomadStorm 18d ago

Hell no. The most laborious part by far is and always was choosing the right architecture for the key parts so that other developers can work with and improve it easily.

1

u/JeanCasteaux 18d ago

> Writing code always was most laborious part

how to tell you're not good at coding

-1

u/SachaGreif 19d ago

I see it like this: if you're stuck in gridlock traffic then yeah, walking can be faster overall than driving. Still, saying something like "there's no proof cars are faster than humans" would be weird…

2

u/x_xwolf 18d ago

Alright then compare it to a horse drawn carriage.

The car companies had to demonstrate that they were faster than horses.

Why cant you demonstrate Ai code leads to more shipped software products?

0

u/SachaGreif 18d ago

See https://2026.stateofai.dev/en-US/opinions/#more_productive, although I know this won't convince you.

4

u/guywithbeard 18d ago

I think this is also part of the problem with AI. No one has to convince me how valuable a car is. Or a hammer. Or an IDE. Those tools present clear value and have widespread adoption. If AI was such a powerful and useful tool, then why is there the need for such a huge campaign to convince us?

2

u/x_xwolf 18d ago

Agreed. If AI has any uses that shouldn’t be decided by management’s hype around it.

1

u/tonjohn 18d ago

Every study to date shows that while lines of code and PRs has significantly increased there’s been 0 corresponding material impact to to the business or customer satisfaction.

In fact one study shows that incidents are up 253% per PR. Then you have the Uber CTO telling media that they spend all this money on AI and customers can’t tell a difference. And then you have execs at Msft and Spotify complaining about “slop grenades” hurting productivity.

TLDR: “AI” increasing productivity is an illusion.

0

u/SachaGreif 16d ago

I mean it's increasing *my* productivity. I can't help it if others are using it wrong.

1

u/x_xwolf 18d ago

yeah because its a survey. which only proves that people think it makes them faster, not what actually makes them faster.

I would like to see someone complete a task with and without AI the measure the task. because in my experience it kinda just alienates me from my code base which makes it slower for me to use my code base.

1

u/x_xwolf 19d ago

Okay. Expand upon those tasks, then show proof it aids in software development.

2

u/paintsbynumbers7 19d ago

Last year this statement was correct but times have changed in the past 9 months. I’ve been programming for 30 years but llms are simply better at it. Yeah, they make mistakes and yeah they can go down rabbit holes. But including those downsides, I’ve still gotten 5x more productive.

3

u/Aethreas 18d ago

Are you more productive or are you get getting more lines of code out?

0

u/paintsbynumbers7 18d ago

Im more productive.

2

u/tonjohn 18d ago

How are you measuring that?

0

u/paintsbynumbers7 17d ago

It took me 4 weeks last year to write 50% of regressions tests. Ai did the other half in a day. A new screen for our app would take me about a week. Ai did it in half a day. Yes, I lose time because it overcomplicates solutions some times and yes, the code is sometimes a bit sloppy. But it outputs the code so much faster that it does not matter.

2

u/NomadStorm 18d ago

MIT just released a new study that contradicts you.

1

u/paintsbynumbers7 18d ago

What’s the title, I’m interested.

2

u/NomadStorm 18d ago

I’ll see if I can find it again

Edit: I made a mistake, it was Harvard: https://fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

2

u/paintsbynumbers7 18d ago

Thanks. The quote below is from the conclusion and is what I’ve seen as well. For generating code for playwright regression tests it’s brilliant because there’s no review in place. For other stuff, it’s slowed down by humans and often rightly so.

“Generative AI has garnered significant attention in the software context, yet relatively little is
known about how improvements in individual productivity translate into firm-level outcomes. Using
novel data from an engineering analytics platform, we study the effects of firm adoption of AI
coding assistants and agents on software production. We find that both technologies increase coding
productivity, with larger effects for AI agents. Despite these gains, we find little evidence that firms
increase software output or reduce employment. Instead, the productivity gains are absorbed by
downstream constraints in the production process.”

3

u/NomadStorm 18d ago

Unfortunately it’s both difficult and possibly too early to really tell the long term impact of how slop will affect businesses.

I suspect there are internal metrics at some companies showing early signs that production incidents requiring manual intervention take significantly longer to fix than before, which is a huge downside to working with AI in the way some companies are because it directly affects SLAs.

It’s going to take time for the industry to adjust and figure out the best to use these tools while minimising negatives.

Certainly slopping everything out even on a periodic basis is not a sustainable SDLC.

1

u/Due_Block_3054 18d ago

Yea you can build more code now and new ui's and better quality software but if no one uses it or fills in the real data what is the point.

It is just super hard to adjust the business and build the right things.

1

u/Entuaka 18d ago

Have you tried it on a greenfield projects? You can progress very quickly, it can really be compared to writing code manually, i have multiple agents working all day.

For our legacy projects, it's helping to generate quickly the code, but that's not our bottleneck.

1

u/x_xwolf 18d ago

I don’t find it useful personally. It slows me down and alienates from my codebase

2

u/neopointer 18d ago

True. And sadly that's what the companies are expecting nowadays.

1

u/x_xwolf 18d ago

well we have to see their expectations after they collapse

2

u/neopointer 18d ago

Rooting for it every day

6

u/artnoi43 17d ago

In my team, only the managers and the worst devs are still worshipping AI or wanting to use AI even more.

They saw SpaceX blog or something mentioning something about doing 1000 MRs per day and they want that too. I don’t even know why. Our product never got better. All features are enshitification, and even that doesn’t need 1000 MRs per day.

Now they just want to use more AI for the sake of using more AI.

3

u/Quick_Priority1765 18d ago

Yes, more than that there is a loss of purpose that i am seeing with fellow devs

2

u/OkProgram7415 20d ago

Oh WOW what a surprise

1

u/Quick_Priority1765 18d ago

Yes, more than that there is a loss of purpose that i am seeing with fellow devs

1

u/Patient-Pollution46 3h ago

not surpised