Stack Overflow is following up its recent Developer Survey with a follow-up survey of 800+ developers to find out which development tasks are causing them the most frustration.
The original survey found that 84% of developers use or planned to use AI in their development workflows, but that they often were frustrated when AI gives incorrect solutions, inspiring Stack Overflow to find out where developers are wasting time or getting frustrated, with or without AI. The company predicted that the frustration comes not from the AI tools themselves, but that tasks relying on good documentation have become more time consuming and frustrating.
According to the results, developers are spending most of their time writing code; variable amounts of time on CI/CD pipelines, working on business use cases, and learning codebases; and the least amount of time is spent on deployments, documentation, catching up on messages, and task management systems.
Stack Overflow noted that the area where developers are spending their time also coincides with where they are using AI. The original report found that 59% of developers were using AI for writing code, 47% were using it for debugging, and 33% for learning about a codebase. Deployments and documentation were not areas that developers planned to use AI for; around 40% of developers said they wouldn’t use AI to help with code documentation.
The company also found an inverse relationship between time spent and frustration. Developers spend most of their time coding, and find the least amount of frustration from coding. Learning a codebase is a task they spend less time on, but leads to more frustration.
Other areas where developers are spending little time but experiencing higher than average frustration include deployments, support ticket systems, and reading through company errata.
“Central to all of these tasks is the lack of time spent on daily code documentation, which when done well can improve the execution of these tasks and lead to less frustration,” the company wrote in a blog post.
The research also revealed a disparity in frustration levels based on experience. For instance, experienced developers find low levels of frustration compared to newer developers when doing similar amounts of coding. They believe this is because newer developers are more likely to need documentation, and will find it frustrating to write code when it isn’t well documented.
“The latest survey results about developer work shows that time spent writing code is not the source of problems for developers,” Stack Overflow concluded. “However, the relationship between the lack of time spent on documentation shows that tasks such as learning a code base or interacting with support ticket systems are likely made more frustrating due to the small amount of time spent on documentation by early career and experienced developers. Many developers are using AI assistance daily, and frustrations persist not necessarily because of AI failures but rather due to lack of foundational and reliable knowledge captured in documentation.”
