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Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

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Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#42
post #4

When I was there, way more than 25% of the code was copying one proto into another proto, or so people complained. What sort of memes are people making now that this task has been automated?

I miss old memegen, but it got ruined by HR :/

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#43

[flagged]

I don’t think the public cares wether their code is written by machines or real people as long as the product works.

Just today, Google Calendar asked me whether I wanted the "easy" or "depressed" colour scheme.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#44
post #3

i would be may more impressed if LLMs could do code compression. more code == more things that can break, and when llms can generate boatloads of it with a click you can imagine what might happen

meh - the LLM code I'm seeing isn't particularly more verbose. And as others have said, if you want tighter code, just add that to the prompt.

fun story: today I had an LLM write me a non-trivial perl one-liner. It tried to be verbose but I insisted and it gave me one tight line.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#45

Google is now mass-producing techdebt at rates not seen since Martin Fowler’s first design pattern blogposts.

Not really technical debt when you will be able to regenerate 20K lines of code in a minute then QA and deploy it automatically.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#46
post #4

When I was there, way more than 25% of the code was copying one proto into another proto, or so people complained. What sort of memes are people making now that this task has been automated?

I am very interested in how this 25% number is calculated, and if it's a lot of boilerplate that in the past would have been just been big copy-paste jobs like a lot of protobuffers work. Would be curious if any Googlers could comment.

Not that I'm really discounting the value of AI here. For example, I've found a ton of value and saved time getting AI to write CDKTF (basically, Terraform in Typescript) config scripts for me. I don't write Terraform that often, there are a ton of options I always forget, etc. So asking ChatGPT to write a Terraform config for, say, a new scheduled task for example saves me from a lot of manual lookup.

But at the same time, the AI isn't really writing the complicated logic pieces for me. I think that comes down to the fact that when I do need to write complicated logic, I'm a decent enough programmer that it's probably faster for me to write it out in a high-level programming language than write it in English first.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#47

[flagged]

Well, the article has a paywall so it might go into this.

I'm not sure this stat is as important as people point it out to be. If I start of `for` and the AI auto-completes `for(int i=0; i<args.length; i++) {` then a lot more than 25% of the code is AI written but it's also not significant. I could've figured out how to write the for-loop and its also not a meaningful amount of time saved because most of the time is figuring out and testing which the AI doesn't do.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#48
post #18
post #11

I would hope a CEO, especially a technical one, would have enough sense to couple that statement to some useful business metric, because in isolation it might be announcement of public humiliation.

The elitism of programmers who think the boilerplate code they write for 25% of the job, that's already been written before by 1000 other people before, is in fact a valuable use of company time to write by hand again. IMO it's only really an issue if a competent human wasn't involved in the process, basically a person who could have written it if needed, then they do the work connecting it to the useful stuff, and h…

you probably underestimate the endless miles of verbose code that are possible, by human or machine but especially by machine.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#49
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elitism of programmers who think the boilerplate code they write for 25% of the job, that's already been written before by 1000 other people before, is in fact a valuable use of company time to write by hand again. IMO it's only really an issue if a competent human wasn't involved in the process, basically a person who could have written it if needed, then they do the work connecting it to the useful stuff, and h…

If 25% of your code is boilerplate, you have a serious architectural problem. That said, I've seen even higher ratios. But never in any place that survived for long.

You're probably thinking of just raw codebases, your company source code repo. Programmers do far, far more boilerplate stuff than raw code they commit with git. Debugging, data processing, system scripts, writing SQL queries, etc.

Combine that with generic functions, framework boilerplate, OS/browser stuff, or explicit x-y-z code then your 'boilerplate' (ie repetitive, easily reproducible) easily gets to 25% of code you're programmers write every month. If your job is >75% pure human cognition problem solving you're probably in a higher tier of jobs than the vast majority of programmers on the planet.

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