Older Developers Are Down With The Vibe Coding Vibe

For those who thought AI vibe coding was just for the youngsters, newly published research shows that developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to do it.

According to a July survey of 791 US developers from cloud services platform Fastly, around a third of senior developers with more than a decade of experience are using AI code-generation tools such as Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to produce over half of their finished software, compared to 13 percent for those devs who’ve only been on the job for up to two years.

Austin Spires, senior director of developer engagement at Fastly, explained to The Register that the difference doesn’t necessarily mean older coders are slacking off. It’s more a reflection of the demands on a senior developer’s day.

“When you really zoom out and think about what a senior engineer does, they don’t write code all day,” he explained. “So if there’s ways that people can test autonomously or move really quickly to get a prototype out that kind of hits, that visceral, fun dopamine hit that made coding so fun in the beginning. That’s why we’re seeing the pattern from that research.”

In a way, seeing younger coders relying less on AI tools less was “heartening,” he said, showing that those new to the field want to craft code the old-fashioned way. They appear to be looking at AI coding tools as handy, but not a replacement for baking your own software.

A slight majority of older developers say AI tools help them ship software faster, although they do have to spend more time checking it for artificially developed bugs. By contrast, fewer than half of junior developers felt that way.

Spires speculates that this may be down to experience showing its benefits. Senior developers are more likely to be able to quickly scan code and spot flaws, whereas younger workers have a tougher time of software editing. Only 1.8 percent of respondents said they never use AI code generation tools.

Overall, over 70 percent of all developers questioned said that AI tools made their jobs more enjoyable, compared to less than 20 percent who said it made things harder. Over 30 percent of respondents said automatic coding made their work role “significantly more enjoyable.”

One other standout from the survey was the degree to which coders are considering the environmental impact of software they write. Among younger devs, barely half said they considered the energy costs of running new code, but that rose to 80 percent of older programmers. Nearly one in ten respondents admitted they didn’t know how much energy their software requires.

“There’s not a lot of incentive for AI coding tools to disclose what the carbon footprint of these tools are,” Spires said.

“More senior engineers understand the second and third effects of their code in how it relates to users and how it relates to their community. And I think it’s just a matter of time before junior developers start to understand those ramifications a little bit further.” ®

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