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

businessinsider.com

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

#611

Post by 0points »

hitradostava wrote: post #95
ntulpule wrote: post #88

Hi, I lead the teams responsible for our internal developer tools, including AI features. We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases. Google has a unique, massive monorepo which poses a lot of fun challenges when it comes to deploying AI capabilities at scale. 1. We take a lot of care to make sure the AI recommendations are safe and…

I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements. The direction of travel is very clear - LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies. I don't think this is a bad thing - if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss and everyone has examples of LLMs producing buggy or ridiculou…

> LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies.

At Google, today, for sure.

I do believe we still are not across the road on this one.

> if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss

So, is it really a smart move of Google to enforce this today, before quality have increased? Or did this set off their path to losing market shares because their software quality will deteriorate further over the next couple years?

From the outside it just seems Google and others have no choice, they must walk this path or lose market valuation.

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

#612

Post by mdavid626 »

OnionBlender wrote: post #528
asdfman123 wrote: post #398

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

Do people find these AI auto complete things helpful? I was trying the XCode one and it kept suggesting API calls that don't exist. I spent more time fixing its errors than I would have spent typing the correct API call.

No, not at all. It’s just the hype. It doesn’t replace engineering.

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

#613

Post by guappa »

OnionBlender wrote: post #528
asdfman123 wrote: post #398

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

Do people find these AI auto complete things helpful? I was trying the XCode one and it kept suggesting API calls that don't exist. I spent more time fixing its errors than I would have spent typing the correct API call.

I suspect that if you work on trivial stuff that has been asked on stackoverflow countless of times they work very nicely.

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

#614

Post by amelius »

Maxion wrote: post #609
remus wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"tab completion good enough to write 25% of code" feels like a pretty good hit rate to me! Especially when you consider that a good chink of the other 75% is going to be the complex, detailed stuff where you probably want someone thinking about it fairly carefully.

For me it's really goddam satisfying having good autocomplete, especially when you are just writing boilerplate lines of code to get the code into a state where you actually get to work on the fun stuff (ther harder problems).

Also if your code gets sent to someone else's cloud?

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

#615

Post by 0points »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #428
kelnos wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that when we humans learn from our errors, we learn how to make them less often. LLMs get their errors fed back into them and become more confident that their wrong code is right. I'm not saying that's completely unsolvable, but that does seem to be how it works today.

That isn't the way they work today. LLMs can easily find errors in outputs they themselves just produced. Start adding different prompts, different models and you get all kinds of ways to catch errors. Just like humans.

> LLMs can easily find errors in outputs they themselves just produced.

Really? That must be a very recent development, because so far this has been a reason for not using them at scale. And noone is.

Do you have a source?

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

#616

Post by _kidlike »

OnionBlender wrote: post #528
asdfman123 wrote: post #398

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

Do people find these AI auto complete things helpful? I was trying the XCode one and it kept suggesting API calls that don't exist. I spent more time fixing its errors than I would have spent typing the correct API call.

I really really dislike the ones that get in your way. Like I start typing something and it injects random stuff (yes in the auto-complete colors). I have a similar feeling to when you hear your voice back in a phone: completely disabling your thought process.

In IntelliJ thankfully you can disable that part of the AI, and keep the part that you trigger it when you want something from it.

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

#617

Post by alienchow »

When setting up unit tests traditionally took more time and LOC than the logic itself, LLMs are particularly useful.

1. Paste in my actual code.

2. Prompt: Write unit tests, test tables. Include scenarios: A, B, C, D, E. Include all other scenarios I left out, isolate suggestions for review.

I used to spend the majority of the coding time writing unit tests and mocking test data, now it's more like 10%.

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

#618

Post by Lio »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #428
kelnos wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that when we humans learn from our errors, we learn how to make them less often. LLMs get their errors fed back into them and become more confident that their wrong code is right. I'm not saying that's completely unsolvable, but that does seem to be how it works today.

That isn't the way they work today. LLMs can easily find errors in outputs they themselves just produced. Start adding different prompts, different models and you get all kinds of ways to catch errors. Just like humans.

I don’t think LLMs can easily find errors in their output.

There was a recent meme about asking LLMs to draw a wineglass full to the brim with wine.

Most really struggle with that instruction. No matter how much you ask them to correct themselves they can’t.

I’m sure they’ll get better with more input but what it reveals is that right now they definitely do not understand their own output.

I’ve seen no evidence that they are better with code than they are with images.

For instance, if the time to complete only scales with length of the token and not the complexity of its contents then it probably safe to assume it’s not being comprehended.

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

#620

Post by 0points »

farseer wrote: post #588
philipwhiuk wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The direction of travel is very clear And if we get 9 women we can produce a baby in a single month. There's no guarantee such progression will continue. Indeed, there's much more evidence it is coming to a a halt.

Its not even been 2 years, and you think things are coming to a halt?

Yes. The models require training data and they already been fed the internet.

More and more of the content generated since is LLM generated and useless as training data.

The models get worse, not better by being fed their own output, and right now they are out of training data.

This is why Reddit just went profitable, AI companies buy their text to train their models because it is at least somewhat human written.

Of course, even reddit is crawling with LLM generated text, so yes. It is coming to a halt.

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