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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

#681

Post by hyperpape »

onion2k wrote: post #670
NotAnOtter wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at google (until last Friday). Agree with what you said. My thoughts are 1. This quote is clearly meant to exaggerate reality, and they are likely including things like fully automated CL/PR's which have been around for a decade as "AI generated". 2. I stated before that if a team of 10 is equally as productive as a team of 8 utilizing things like copilot, it's fair to say "AI replaced 2 engineers", in my…

no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" That's only worth doing if you're trying to cut costs though. If the company has unmet ambitions there's no reason to shrink the headcount from 10 to 8 and have the same amount of output when you can keep 10 people and have the output of 12 by leveraging AI.

Almost all the big tech companies have had layoffs over the past several years. I think it’s safe to say cost cutting is very much part of their goal.

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

#682

Post by andyjohnson0 »

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.

Visual Studio "intellisense" has always been pretty good for me. Seemed to make good guesses about my intentions without doing anything wild. It seemed to use ad hoc rules and patterns, but it worked and then got out of the way.

Then it got worse a couple of years ago when they tried some early-stage AI approach. I turned it off. I expect that next time I update VS it'll have got substantially worse and it will have removed the option for me to disable it.

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

#683

Post by Jyaif »

avsteele wrote: post #470

Everyone here is arguing about the average AI code quality and I'm here just not believing the claim. Is Google out there monitoring the IDE activity of every engineer, logging the amount of code created, by what, lines, characters, and how it was generated? Dubious.

> Is Google out there monitoring the IDE activity of every engineer, logging the amount of code created, by what, lines, characters, and how it was generated

A good chunk () of their code goes in a centralized repo, and is written via a centralized web IDE. So measuring everything you mentioned is not hard.

() Android, Chrome, and other similar projects are exceptions.

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

#684

Post by almostgotcaught »

zifpanachr23 wrote: post #665
almostgotcaught wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that Google is a for-profit business and not a university? Did you know that most places where people work on software are the same?

So are most medical facilities. Somehow, the vibes are massively different.

That's rich? Never heard of the opioid crisis? Or the over-prescription of imaging tests?

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

#685

Post by almostgotcaught »

calf wrote: post #664
almostgotcaught wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that Google is a for-profit business and not a university? Did you know that most places where people work on software are the same?

Did you know that Software Engineering is a university level degree? That it is a field of scientific study, with professors who dedicate their lives to it? What happens when companies ignore science and worse yet cause harm like pollution or medical malpractice, or in this case, spread Silicon Valley lies and bullshit??? Did you know? How WEIRD. How about you not harass other commenters with such arrogantly ignorant…

> Did you know that Software Engineering is a university level degree? That it is a field of scientific study, with professors who dedicate their lives to it?

So is marketing? So finance? So is petroleum engineering?

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

#686

Post by mewpmewp2 »

JimDabell wrote: post #676
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that? You are creating this false sense of expectations and hype yourself. I am going to argue contrary. If AI increases productivity 2x, it opens up as much new usecases that previously didn't seem worthy to do for its cost. So overall there will just be more work.

> I am going to argue contrary. If AI increases productivity 2x, it opens up as much new usecases that previously didn't seem worthy to do for its cost. So overall there will just be more work. This is the entire history of the computing industry. We’ve been automating our work away for decades and it just creates more demand.

Yeah, this is only side projects, but I've been spending pretty much all of my free time now on side projects, largely because I feel much faster building them with LLMs and it has a compounding motivational effect. I also see so many use cases and work left to do, even with AI, the possibilities almost overwhelm me.

Well I do freelancing as well besides my usual day to day work, and that's also where direct benefits apply, and I'm getting more and more work, overwhelmingly so.

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

#687

Post by [deleted] »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #122
latexr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality That’s a huge “if”, and by your own admission not what’s happening now. > other LLM agents reviewing code, feeding in compile errors, letting other LLM agents interact with the produced code, etc. What a stupid future. Machines which make errors being “corrected” by machines which make errors in a death spiral. An unbelievable waste of figurative and lit…

> What a stupid future. Machines which make errors being “corrected” by machines which make errors in a death spiral. An unbelievable waste of figurative and literal energy. Humans are machines which make errors. Somehow, we got to the moon. The suggestion that errors just mindlessly compound and that there is no way around it, is what's stupid.

[deleted]

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

#690

Post by miki123211 »

nlehuen wrote: post #660
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…

I also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering. However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript. One thing the system is already pretty good at is wri…

This is a good idea even outside of Google, with tools like copilot and such.

Often when I don't know exactly what function / sequence of functions I need to achieve a particular outcome, I put in a comment describing what I want to do, and Copilot does the rest. I then remove the comment once I make sure that the generated code actually works.

I find it a lot less flow-breaking than stackoverflow or even asking an LLM.

It doesn't work all of the time, and sometimes you do have to Google still, but for the cases it does work for, it's pretty nice.

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