Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 165 posts

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#141

Post by marcosdumay »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #60
tudorw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having played a bit with coding with AI I like this view, it's powerful, but context will always be an issue, turning real world problems into working code is a skill in it's own right, that will not change, superpowered yes, for me it's all the 'dull' parts of typing stuff out that I look forward to missing, from an early study on impact in the workplace, using a 2 year study of a call centre, the result was large i…

Jesus, this just triggered another nightmare scenario I should have thought of earlier. People are going to have it write and/or comment a function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward. It will be not or imperfectly checked that the comment actually says what it should and the functionality matches. There will be no indication of what was written by AI, so the only option is to guess that both were w…

> function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward

Nah. It will just be tons and tons of trivial, straight forward code, calling other trivial code, that calls more trivial code.

Yes, some of it will be created manually, but if you go with "the IA created it" you will get it right 99% of the time. And obviously, the more code, the more it will fail; but people always try to fix this with more code.

Remember the times of Enterprise Java?

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#142

Post by mark_l_watson »

I saw this announcement a few days ago and I am enthusiastic. Even though I only use Colab 3 or 4 hours a month, it is a good product and so I happily pay $10/month for it. I hope Codey is available on the $10 plan.

I have been using CoPilot for about a year (mostly in Emacs, sometimes in VSCode) and I find it very useful, so I am especially excited to see what Google offers.

I also find myself using Bing+ChatGPT a lot for writing short functions in a variety of programming languages. All of these tools, at least for me, eliminate most of the tedium in my programming projects.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#143

Post by neilv »

> Colab will use Codey,

"OK, team. With our founding cash cow threatened, we're at a critical juncture that could preserve or break us. If we're to survive, we must make the most of every factor of success at our disposal. This includes branding, and that's why we hire you, some of the best in the world at it. First major disruptive tech up for branding is a code LLM. Brainstorm now."

"Codey McCodeface!"

"Looks like we can go home early."

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#144

Post by rurp »

adventured wrote: post #57
brigadier132 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a different 10-year prediction. AI will become good enough to be useful for programmers but not good enough to run on its own and will remain an assistant. Given that there is a shortage of programmers, more software will be written than ever. More software will beget more software engineers. Because the output of software engineers will rise, each individual software engineer will become more valuable to thei…

10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case. Those people have nowhere to go to match what they're earning now. Maybe support review roles (which won't pay particularly well), where they approve decisions by the AI that are held up for human approv…

> 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case.

The only prediction I feel is easy to make is that nobody can accurately predict the effects of an emerging technology 10-15 years down the line. That is a long time, and prognosticators almost always get it wrong. Coding will absolutely change, but I'm very skeptical that anyone can predict how with any sort of specificity.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#145

Post by cperry »

reaperducer wrote: post #36
cperry wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we debated this; this is going to be a sequential rollout based on availability/capacity, and it seemed better to broadcast it was coming earlier b/c we're not going to have a "launch event" moment.

So it's a soft opening. Like an out-of-town preview.

I like the way you think

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#147

Post by cperry »

assane101 wrote: post #70
nlstitch wrote: post #37

Yeah something about being vendor locked by Google into the "Democratisation of ML" does not sound appealing at all.

How is it vendor locking if you are writing Python code you can pull out any time ?

+1 all Colab files are the standard Jupyter .ipynb extension: we very much want to avoid any notion of lock-in. We bundle them all into a folder for you in Drive: it takes you like a second to take all of your work to any competitor.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#148

Post by cperry »

nailer wrote: post #87
cperry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not yet available; it'll roll out sequentially in the coming weeks as we sort out capacity and polish.

How far away is the VS code plugin?

Which one? If you're talking Palm 2, I couldn't say, I spend my days trying to convince everyone at Google to prioritize and support ME first ;)

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#149

Post by cperry »

miohtama wrote: post #126

Hopefully the AI knows how to update Colab to newer Python versions!

We had a couple SWEs move us from 3.7 to 3.10 over the past six months, removing years of tech debt. This comment is dead wrong. We'll upgrade to 3.11 when they push their final regular bug fix release in April 2024.

Make fun of my stupid blog post all you want, but my eng partners are awesome!

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#150

Post by cperry »

balls187 wrote: post #9

The animated gif for the first example leaves a lot to be desired. The UX: Click a button, type in a prompt, click another button. The speed just to generate 2-3 lines of code. And AI generated code with no basic error handling.

gotta start somewhere. we're in a sprint this week working on different UX patterns.
Post reply on HN