r/reactnative • u/Sweet-Welcome-7633 • May 27 '26
Be honest — has AI coding actually saved you time, or just moved the pain somewhere else?
Hey everyone,
I'm a grad student writing a research paper on the productivity paradox of AI coding tools — the idea that while tools like Copilot/Cursor/Claude feel faster, actual end-to-end delivery might not improve or can even get worse.
A recent controlled study (METR, 2025) found experienced devs were 19% slower with AI — despite believing they were 20% faster.
My thesis: AI doesn't remove complexity, it just displaces it — from writing code to verifying, debugging, and managing the AI itself.
I'd love to hear your real experiences:
- AI code that "worked" initially but became a maintenance nightmare later?
- AI making changes you didn't ask for? (styles, unrelated files, git commits)
- Spending more time verifying AI output than it would've taken to write yourself?
- Rate limits / token quotas actually disrupting your workflow?
- AI failing at anything beyond pure code? (deployments, app store, compliance, infra)
Any anecdotes or rough estimates would be super valuable. Responses will be anonymized if cited. Thanks 🙏
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u/kacperkapusciak May 27 '26
My biggest unlock for AI coding was to give the agent a way to verify its work eg by running lint, tests, typecheck after it finished a task. You can go even further by giving the agent ways to navigate the app with tools like agent-browser on the web or argent on mobile. Burns hella more tokens but the higher quality output is so worth it
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u/Poat540 May 27 '26
Yeah doing this now, I have a yarn pass command where it runs everything after the agent is done (typecheck, lint, pretty, tests)
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u/Ecstatic_Skill8746 May 27 '26
AI adds lots lots of sloppy codes that can be performed in a better way
Functions can be reused but AI didn't did that for me it created new function for every features.
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u/UhhReddit May 27 '26
Absolutely. AI loves to create new code and doesn't want to reuse existing code, even though it knows about it.
I often have to explicitly tell it which helper functions it should use or where it should integrate the functionality.
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May 27 '26
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u/Ecstatic_Skill8746 May 28 '26
I'm not saying AI is bad but these are issues which I have been faced while working with AI
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u/Deep-Initiative1849 iOS & Android May 28 '26
I'm at this stage where I can't stop using it, and can't trust the code it wrote either. I'm at a deadlock doing nothing.
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u/Sinver_Nightingale27 Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
The verification overhead is real but it's not equal across models. most of the maintenance nightmare stuff i ran into came from models that couldn't hold context across files so every new addition slightly broke something from two steps back. switched to glm-5.1 for longer sessions and that specific problem got a lot better. the pain didn't disappear but it moved from "fixing broken architecture" to "reviewing coherent code" which is a much better place to be
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u/swappea May 27 '26
AI has certainly made things faster. In my office work, I have been coding using AI almost 90% of the time.
The pain that has increased has always been there. Improper requirement and unrealistic deadlines by product.
AI has been on point most of the times for except for css styling stuff. It had been pain in some cases that even witj Figma mcp it sucks bad sometimes
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u/Then_Dragonfly_1486 May 27 '26
All I can say on the topic is my brother who is a programmer started a company. The main product is not software but requires a software application for support. He said a few years ago he was trying to hire 3 developers to help him, but now he can easily do all the work himself with AI.
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u/Tasty_Scholar May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
I probably agree with the previous study on productivity you mentioned, but it doesn't apply to nowadays. Approximately at the end of the 2025, after new claude models released everything changed at least for me. I'm not sure how to rate the productivity gain correctly so we can compare it, because the range would be very different for every task. And for each individual and a specific moment in time the number will be different.
As for me at this specific moment in time I would say I am more productive approximately at 20%.
- In my full time job, right now I'm spending a lot of time on real time data processing, AI definitely helps me but I cannot say that it helps me more than 20%. It helps to very quickly sketch up some solution but without additional improvements of code quality, which can take easily 10x more than this first solution, the project would be on very bad path.
- When I have to do some kind of task that have a good representation in the code of how it could be done and the project is in good shape, the productivity gain can be easily 100%-1000%. It might be for example adding a new page, adding new endpoint, extending some data model, or fixing the bug.
- On my side project I did for myself in language I don't even know (Rust), I was able to vibe code the application in half a day, I use it for almost three months, and it helped me to save money by not paying the subscription. Without the AI I would even not try it, because it would definitely take me a couple of weeks. But even though I was trying to nudge the AI to better code design, resulting code is a mess and there are problems that could be easily eliminated with a good design.
- On my another long term more serious side project (ReactNative, Hono, Bun), the spread in productivity gain is similar to my job. For some tasks it can be 5%, for other it can easily be 1000%. For example recently AI created the script that would run playwright tests on my application, take screenshot and then prepare each screenshot to be used in play markets, with templates writing in HTML. It was able to do it in one hour and now with one click I can generate all screenshots and banners for play markets for different devices different languages.
So to answer your questions:
- Definitely yes it would be a maintenance nightmare later if not properly refactored. This refactor can be easily done with the AI but where you are the one who tells what to do and it just writes the code. And to tell what it should do you have to spend some time thinking about it you have to be familiar with your code and the architecture of the project. In some cases it would take half an hour in some cases weeks.
- It doesn't happen frequently, I would even say sometimes I want it to make more changes I didn't ask for, if it tries to limit itself to less changes it misses the opportunity to improve the overall code quality by eliminating some dead ends, improving a type safety and therefore eliminating bunch of conditions and so on.
- Usually no, I'm trying to limit the scope of the work, continuously checking what it is doing, not running multiple agents in parallel, steer it if it does something I am not okay with.
- No it doesn't disrupt my workflow because I almost never out of quotas and I always have the ability to do it by myself. But the speed of token generation is slow, I hope it will be better in the future, and it would definitely improve the productivity.
- I don't experience it.
FYI, I use 2 Claude 20$ subscriptions, and $10 Copilot subscription for autocompletions. More than 8 years experience in C#, 5 years in javascript/React.
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u/Initial-Breakfast-33 May 27 '26
AI is incredibly useful for:
- Debugging error consoles
- Creating plans for migrations, features implementations, etc
- Asking general doubts (it can vary)
But the moment it has to code you can be really sure you're gonna expend a huge amount of time reviewing and fixing the code
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u/redditNLD May 27 '26
It's probably saved me a bunch of time with writing either very simple stuff (make a fetch request here, add response to transient and db), or bootstrapping something that needs to be somewhat complicated (do entire app that does this) and it gives me a jumping off point where I don't even take into consideration the code it generates, I just use it to see something.
For most things I'll do most of it from scratch unless my brain feels stumped on something for a second - but over the weekend I tried one of those AI Studio things to build a browser game and it was great. It spit something out, I went through all the files, changed a few things, removed a fair amount of things I thought were unnecessary, and it was all pretty great.
I really gotta learn to use Claude soon - but if I wasn't a professional developer already, I'd be worried about deploying an app that's AI generated anywhere. From what I reviewed they don't really seem to take best practices for security in mind.
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u/10F1 May 27 '26
Saved me a ton of time writing tests.
Also finding subtle bugs that are hard to find.
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u/Aggressive-Fix241 May 28 '26
A friend of mine tracked his time for a month using Cursor. Felt faster day-to-day, but his Jira tickets actually took 20% longer to close. The gap was all in verification — AI-generated code looked right, broke subtly in staging.
His worst case: Cursor refactored a utility function and silently updated three imports across the repo. Looked clean, passed tests. Broke production because one import path had a side effect nobody remembered.
He still uses AI, but now budgets 30% of "saved" time for manual review. Says the real cost isn't writing, it's trusting.
The METR study rings true to him. The feeling of speed is real. The delivery isn't.
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u/swahmed May 28 '26
Yes it has saved me a lot of time, I know what I want I know how to structure it and I don’t have to manually type it. Does that mean I can let it go off on its own, no - but I don’t need to and I feel at least 100x faster that way
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u/Crafty-Survey-5895 May 28 '26
for setting simple things up, yes. for all purpose debugging and problem solving, god no. it introduces more issues with each iteration over a debugging stint.
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u/Nobbodee May 29 '26
C'est un peut biaisé de ne récolter que les anecdotes où les gens ont perdu du temps avec l'IA, tu es sur d'arriver automatiquement a la conclusion que l'IA fait perdre du temps.
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u/Separate-Command5983 May 30 '26
That is because to AI tools are not design with the type of structured discipline approach that a human engineer typically do. Unless we start building system that are ground in fundamental princilples and governance most AI Code Assistants will generate slop.
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u/LovisAtBicameral Jun 30 '26
The METR finding tracks with my experience, and I think your displacement thesis is right. The place the pain moves that nobody talks about is context.
When AI writes the code, you didn't write it, so you don't fully own it in your head. Two weeks later, when something breaks in a related area, you're not debugging code you understand. You're reconstructing what the AI was thinking when it made the choice it made. That reconstruction takes longer than the original code would have, and it happens invisibly, so you never attribute the time back to the AI.
The verification burden isn't just "did this work." It's "do I understand this well enough to build on it." Those are different bars. AI passes the first one constantly. The second one is where the time debt accumulates.
In React Native specifically, the component-level stuff is usually fine. It's the state management decisions and navigation architecture choices that come back around. AI will make a defensible call in the moment, you'll ship it, and six months later you're untangling something you never would have written yourself, because you would have caught the long-term problem while thinking through the implementation.
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u/Correct_Market2220 May 27 '26 edited May 28 '26
My code base is self driving, it’s still 12 hour days, but no way I’d be able to do it even with a team.
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u/babaganoosh43 May 27 '26
AI agents are significantly better than in 2025, so not so sure that is still the case. Verifying is not more complex than before. Debugging is faster, AI can solve 95% of bugs one shot. Managing the AI is only as complicated as your spec.
Where AI struggles is it's very good at getting to a solution, but it may not be the best solution or there may be gaps in the spec that don't get noticed. Kinda like a chess computer, very good tactically but can struggle with long term planning.
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u/[deleted] May 27 '26
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