A double-edged sword: AI use by software developers – a netnography study

At present, software developers are widely using various AI tools for their development tasks, including code generation, debugging and test case generation. While the general understanding of AI use is beneficial for developers, there’sa limited understanding of how AI impacts the professional identity of software developers. Using AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini can result in identity enhancements and threats, leading to adapt their identities in response to AI use. Therefore, this study explores these changes in developer identity and how they respond to AI use, with a special focus on extrapolating towards the future based on the current changes. By adopting a netnography approach, this study collected 27,751 online data blocks and analysed them using topic modelling. We identified five impact categories and four AI-identity influence modes on professional role identity and different responses, which will also help to comprehend the future of software developers.