This paper presents a developer-centered empirical mixed-methods study to investigate how professional developers engage with Generative AI in their natural work environment, and proposes a rule-of-thumb for selecting an interaction type based on task characteristics.
Abstract
With the growing adoption of AI-powered coding assistants, organizations and developers are increasingly seeking to optimize their interaction with these tools. Prior research has largely focused on output quality and productivity gains, with limited attention paid to developers'well-being and interaction experiences. This paper presents a developer-centered empirical mixed-methods study to investigate how professional developers engage with Generative AI (GenAI) in their natural work environment. Controlled data collection sessions are combined with natural work periods. Results show that developers are generally satisfied with GenAI, particularly for monotonous, repetitive, and structured tasks, and report perceived efficiency and productivity gains. Copilot interaction type preferences differ by task type and complexity: While both in-code suggestions and chat-based prompting independently improve task efficiency and reduce perceived workload, combining these interaction types within a single task diminishes benefits. We propose a rule-of-thumb for selecting an interaction type based on task characteristics. During development-heavy tasks, results indicate that perceived cognitive load arises from AI interaction, while perceived productivity depends on AI output quality. Participation in this study positively influenced developers'awareness and intentional use of GenAI tools. These findings demonstrate the value of real-world, mixed-methods study designs to understand GenAI tools and developers'experiences with them.
Prompt engineering has emerged as a critical yet undertaught skill for software developers, one that traditional learning approaches are ill-equipped to support given its evolving, interactive, and context-dependent nature. In this paper, we introduce Prompt Coach (PC), an agentic tutor that helps developers learn how to craft high-quality code-generation prompts through Socratic guidance embedded in-flow within their IDE. PC evaluates prompt quality across multiple dimensions and surfaces targeted questions to guide self-correction, grounded in the developer's codebase and the behavior of the target LLM. We present an early empirical study with 15 professional developers combining quantitative prompt quality scoring with qualitative perception measures. Participants showed statistically significant improvements after a single 60-minute session, with the largest gains across dimensions commonly overlooked by developers. They also reported strong trust, high adoption readiness, and unanimous agreement that PC improved their prompt-writing skills.
Rohit Mehra, Kapil Singi, Vikrant S. Kaulgud et al.· 0 citations
Generative AI is increasingly permeating software engineering, enabling developers to generate functions, files, and even entire applications from natural language specifications. AI systems are also becoming more personalized, adapting outputs based on inferred user characteristics and interaction history. While personalization may improve the development experience, it raises concerns that generated software could be shaped by attributes of the developer rather than by task requirements alone. Prior work has shown that generative AI can produce biased software artifacts, but little is known about how developer identity can bias generated code. We characterize three dimensions through which inferred developer attributes can influence generated artifacts: interface design, template content, and code structure. First, through controlled experiments on 800 AI-generated websites, we find that age- and gender-related signals produce significant differences across all three dimensions. Second, we conduct an observational study and follow-up interviews with 20 participants who used AI to create a personal website to both examine how personalization impacts software artifacts in practice, and also to understand how programmers perceive the boundary between personalization and bias. Together, our results show that developer attributes can meaningfully influence generated software beyond stated requirements, highlighting a previously underexplored tension between personalization and fairness in AI-assisted programming.
AI coding assistants are now widely used in professional development, yet they offer only limited ways for developers to control how they behave. In this paper, we investigate what kinds of configurations experienced developers want in coding assistants, how they prioritize different types of configuration needs, and which interface mechanisms they prefer. We first synthesize product documentation and prior research on trust and personalization to compile a list of 33 configuration options, grouped into four categories: Code suggestions, System & policies, Human-assistant interaction, and Users & their personal context. We then conduct a survey with 56 professional developers and 7 design sessions in which participants arrange configurations into their perfect control board and talk about their needs and experiences in more depth. Developers report strong interest in configurability: 72.6% of usefulness ratings are positive, while only around a third indicate that the corresponding configuration is known to participants in their tools. Demand is particularly high for task-related controls such as minimum confidence thresholds, visibility of suggestion quality, and response length, whereas many persona-related configurations are seen as unnecessary. In this paper, we discuss the implications for designing more unified and discoverable configuration surfaces for future coding assistants.
It is concluded that AI meaningfully augments developer productivity but does not yet demonstrably improve satisfaction or earnings, and that a hybrid human-AI model, supported by governance and training, remains the most defensible direction for application development.
Perseus Bhavnagri· International Journal for Re...· 0 citations
Objective: to investigate how the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools affects the early stages of a career in software development, from the perspective of the newcomers themselves. Method: thirteen interns and junior developers were interviewed individually, by videoconference. Interviews were analyzed using the six phases of Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis, with inductive coding and a semantic approach. Results: sixteen themes emerged, organized around a central concept: verification-conditioned use. Across the study's four research questions (usage patterns, learning, autonomy, and market entry), the criterion that most often decides between AI and manual work is not deadline or task complexity, but the ability to check the result. Two themes expose tensions in newcomers'self-perception: the autonomy paradox (feeling more capable yet less in ownership of the result) and the first-person denial of dependence. Together, these findings point to a theoretical contribution, the formative paradox: the shallow learning that AI induces makes it harder to build the very critical-judgment competence that, according to participants, the market has begun to demand. Conclusion: what makes AI use sustainable, from participants'own point of view, is not the tool itself but the individual practice of reviewing before accepting, refusing to use AI without understanding it, asking the tool for explanations, and keeping deliberate practice outside of AI-assisted work.
Pedro Henrique Andriotte, Danilo Monteiro Ribeiro· 0 citations
