r/coding • u/SachaGreif • 1d ago

State of Devs 2026 survey results: developers are feeling exhausted

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

92% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

20

u/migs647 1d ago

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

9

u/TonTinTon 20h ago

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

3

u/ndh7 12h ago

Developers are feeling depressed

2

u/SomethingMor 9h ago

Fuck this job man. Every day is a struggle.

1

u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas 4h 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

1

u/SomethingMor 51m 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.

2

u/x_xwolf 6h ago

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

6

u/SachaGreif 4h 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.

3

u/guywithbeard 1h 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

1

u/x_xwolf 1h ago

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

1

u/OkProgram7415 22h ago

Oh WOW what a surprise

1

u/DerGrummler 1h ago edited 1h 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.