'I can't stop': 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Programmers find AI tools addictive, but exhausting.
• Coding speed can be lost due to delays in fixing AI-written code.
• AI programming tools can lead to programmer workaholism and burnout.

Yes, yes, we get it. Thanks to GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, whatever the hot new AI tool is for developers, you can get more work done than ever before as a programmer. But even as developers use them ever more to generate boilerplate, explain unfamiliar code, draft tests, refactor modules, and troubleshoot errors, many are also finding that the same tools can be pains in the rump.

AI-induced workaholism

That's because, as Quentin Rousseau, CTO and co-founder of the AI-powered incident report company Rootly, described in a LinkedIn post, "It's 2:47 a.m... I'm not debugging an outage. There's no deadline. I'm just watching Claude Code refactor...

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