The Psychological Costs of Artificial Intelligence Adoption in Software Engineering

arXiv:2609.03456 · cs.SE, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-03 · Read on arXiv

cs.SE, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-03

Updated: 2026-09-03

Terminology

• Accountability — 59× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 47× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Artificial Intelligence — 28× in this paper
• Cognitive Load — 25× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 12× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 11× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative AI — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Conservation of Resources — 7× in this paper
• Self-Determination Theory — 6× in this paper
• Epistemic Uncertainty — 4× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
• AI Integration — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Frustration — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptive Response — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Transferability — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Causal Inference — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Explainability — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Human-in-the-Loop — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Nadia — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Structured Prompting — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Engagement in Code Review: Emotional, Behavioral, and Cognitive Dimensions in Peer vs. LLM Interactions
• Developers' Experience with Generative AI Beyond Productivity Assessment -- Insights from an Empirical Mixed-Methods Field Study
• The Impact of AI Coding Assistants on Software Engineering: A Longitudinal Study

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