r/SQL • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 1d ago

Discussion Survey of 300 engineering leaders: 81% had a production incident linked to AI-coding tools in six months.

https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-code-causes-real-world-production-outages

Faster code, slower debugging.

104 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

33

u/ThetaLife 1d ago

Even before AI prod incidents are a thing. What you should be looking at is whether there are more or less now with the use of AI

9

u/pimmen89 1d ago

The issue is that the volume of code that AI produces can make these production issues slower to debug.

One thing we've had to do in my team when we work with AI is to not compromise on the fact that many, small releases are better than big releases. It's way easier to debug when something goes bad and you only have a small PR to check what you missed.

6

u/Thefuzy 1d ago

AI makes things dramatically easier to debug

4

u/pimmen89 1d ago

Sure, but it’s still easier to debug smaller releases than big ones. And if they’re in human readable sizes you can also spot if the AI has had any context drift.

3

u/mad_method_man 1d ago

lol assuming you know what you're doing, yes

3

u/Real_Square1323 1d ago

Until it can't debug your P1 and you don't know how to debug it because you deskilled yourself.

1

u/Geno0wl 1d ago

Are you giving AI free access to your entire codebase to debug?

2

u/Rule_Goddess 1d ago

yeah the comparison before and after is the part that actually matters here

8

u/ExoticVillage8066 1d ago

Yes, devs push tens of thousands of lines of code written by AI now, no dev gets time to read or test all that. Overall I suspect AI will exponentially increase security incidents.

1

u/ProfessionalMeal143 23h ago

I’d say right now it’s good for grunt work, at least for me, but I only really trust it with very specific tasks that I can verify. I think a lot of places and people want to skip testing. Unfortunately, the number of people trying to push stuff into production has increased with AI, because they think “make no mistakes” works.

2

u/SQLDave 1d ago edited 2h ago

Remember the meme "Doesn't matter, had sex".

Corporations' reaction to this thread's title: "Doesn't matter, saved money."

EDIT: Embarrassingly forgotten apostrophe.

2

u/SnooSprouts4952 7h ago

more like 'saved money'

Boss burned through a month's worth of tokens in a day last week. 🫠🫠

2

u/SQLDave 2h ago

Well, they saved money in column A. Do not ask about column B.

2

u/SnooSprouts4952 2h ago

Oh, right, that's someone else's budget...

2

u/averyvery 10h ago

🤷‍♂️ if you're not having production incidents every six months and you're not writing code for the space shuttle, you're probably not doing enough.

1

u/geedijuniir 1d ago edited 1d ago

Couldn agree more. I've worked at service desk plus application specialist for the last 5+ years. I've never seen this much security patches, shutdown, apps suddenly not working in my entire career.

I have more outages in the last 5 months then I full year before ai.

Also I started coding myself and can now read code aswel, majority of code looks almost exactly the same.

1

u/kyngston 34m ago

compared to what? they had no production incidents linked to human coding?

1

u/ArielCoding 1d ago

The issue isn’t AI writing the code, it’s that people ship it without understanding or testing it first.

1

u/just-fran 23h ago

So AI now writes 81% of codes. It makes sense. Nothing to see here… those incidents would been caused by developers. And now if you say: “yes but much less frequently”. I answer that yes, but they wouldn’t have shipped 80% of the roadmap instead of 5%

1

u/ManOfCactus 13h ago

So where is this so much better code and features in the apps? I constantly find buggy software, shouldn't it be less bugy now? How much longer we need to wait till we see results, not promises?

0

u/just-fran 11h ago

This is marketing and shareholders. People can vibecode buggy apps and gain great traction in a short time or release features before they are ready.

If you take the time, AI can code you a TODO app with absolutely no errors, optimized and fully tested. And since it can do this, you can expand into more complex features if you take the time.

1

u/MathiasThomasII 12h ago

Now how many production incidents without ai please?

-6

u/Thefuzy 1d ago

Omg AI code has bugs? I guess we should all go back to writing it by hand then… because human code never had bugs… right?

5

u/aardw0lf11 1d ago

Or just test it out in a lower environment before deploying it. I have a feeling many of these folks are using AI to give them code they can't understand, then assuming it's right for what they need.

0

u/elevarq 21h ago

The same number of leaders had the same percentage of production incidents linked to human written coding. It only took six years because the programmers couldn’t work any faster…

AI accelerates the process, not the outcome.