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

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

701–710 of 1001 posts

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

#701

Post by Aachen »

miki123211 wrote: post #690
nlehuen wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 L…

Why remove the comment that summarises the intent for humans? The compiler will ignore your comment anyway, so it's only there for the next human who comes along and will help them understand the code

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

#702

Post by pawelmurias »

rantallion wrote: post #637
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.

The problem being that the time spent fixing the bugs in that 25% outweighs the time saved. Now that tools like Copilot are being widely used, studies are showing that they do not in fact boost productivity. All claims to the contrary seem to be either anecdotal or marketing fluff. https://www.techspot.com/news/104945-ai-coding-assistants-do...

The AI tap complition is >100000% better than the coding assistants, it just saves you typing and doesn't introduce new bugs you need to fix instead of writting buggy shitty code from a text description.

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

#703

Post by pawelmurias »

atoav wrote: post #537
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…

So this is basically the google CEO saying "a quarter of our terminal inputs is written by a glorified tab completion"?

[flagged]

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

#704

Post by Aachen »

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 type of not having to think about the implementation, especially in a language that we've by now well-established can't be written safely by humans (including by Google's own research into Android vulnerabilities if I'm not mistaken), at least with the current level of LLM, worries me the most

Time will tell whether it outputs worse, equal, or better quality than skilled humans, but I'd be very wary of anything it suggests beyond obvious boilerplate (like all the symbols needed in a for loop) or naming things (function name and comment autocompletes like the person above you described)

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

#705

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

NotAnOtter wrote: post #653
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 (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"

Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general.

This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer". They may leave such a language for closed meetings with potential customers during sales pitches though.

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

#706

Post by simne »

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.

Looks like model is not trained well. From my exp, after make few projects (2 looks enough), oldest XCode managed to give good suggestions in much more than 50% cases.

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

#708

Post by gtirloni »

_kidlike wrote: post #616
OnionBlender wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is it. I have a picture in my mind and then it puts 10 lines of code in front of me and my brain can't ignore. When I'm done reviewing that, it's already tainted my idea.

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

#709

Post by cryptonym »

Aachen wrote: post #701
miki123211 wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 L…

Why remove the comment that summarises the intent for humans? The compiler will ignore your comment anyway, so it's only there for the next human who comes along and will help them understand the code

Next human will put the code in a prompt and ask what it does. Chinese Whispers.

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

#710

Post by submeta »

Pandora‘s box has been opened.

Some say „this is mere tab completion“, some say „it won’t replace the senior engineer.“

I can remember how many fiercely argued 2 years ago that GenAI and Copilot are producing garbage. But here we are: These systems improve the workflow of creating / editing code enormously. You seniors might not be affected, but there are endless many scenarios where it replaces the junior who‘d write code to transform data, write scripts, write one-off scripts, or even write boilerplate, test code and what not.

And this is only after a short time. I cannot even imagine what we‘ll have ten years from now where we can propably have much larger context windows where the system can „unterstand“ the whole code base, not just parts.

I am sorry for low level engineering jobs, but I am super exited as well.

With GebAI I have been writing super complex Elisp code to automate workflow in Emacs, or VBA scripts in Excel, or Bash scripts I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to write, or JavaScript, or quickly write Python code to solve very tricky problems (and I am very high level in Python), or even React code for web apps for my personal use.

The future looks exiting to me.

Post reply on HN