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Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

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Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#251

Post by tzone »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #17

I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much e…

Which model are you using? There is monumental difference between models. Even between "frontier models". When people tell these stories, it would be great to also add which model you were using.

As an example Opus 5.0 is in completely different class compared to Cursor Grok 4.5 even if the benchmarks don't show such massive difference. Not even talking about regular stuff like Sonnet or Composer or stuff like that.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#252

Post by vlmutolo »

maccard wrote: post #49
glimshe wrote: post #41

A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me or simply don't know how to work with AI. I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. They get mad at Excel for the poor investment returns. At this point, this is such a strawman, it isn't worth counter arguing. I think I'll abandon this discussion and keep using AI qu…

> A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me I feel this way on this topic too. > I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. The problem is; how _should_ I use AI? On a previous thread, I had two replies to the same comment, one saying "provide the LLM all the context it needs and let it go ham", and the other…

It’s a very soft skill that changes as the capabilities of AI change.

But one thing that doesn’t change is the need to specify an end goal correctly and precisely. I think the emphasis of knowledge/information-processing work is going to increasingly be placed on verification mechanisms. This is practically equivalent to precisely defining an end goal.

Spend time deeply thinking about what it means for a solution to be correct. What properties will a correct solution have? What of those properties are testable? Write those things down and tell the agent.

As models get better, agents will be able to target more and more difficult end goals. The strategy just becomes more useful. (It’s useful for people as well.)

For example, if you want an agent to write a photo editor, think about what end properties the editor should have. There are reference images for color space and rendering transformations. That’s a good start.

Sometimes the goal will be fuzzier. “I want a feature like CaptureOne where I provide a reference image and it makes my image look like that.” Well, time to think really hard about what that means. Iterate with AI on how to test for that precisely. Come up with some good metrics/heuristics. Maybe it means local contrast should match. Maybe the overall distribution of colors. Maybe something more complicated.

Then you have a target and you can let an implementation agent work against that. If it fails, it’s either because the agent is bad or your target was incorrect or incomplete. As models get better, the limiting factor becomes your ability to correctly define a problem.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#253

Post by tzone »

maccard wrote: post #49
glimshe wrote: post #41

A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me or simply don't know how to work with AI. I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. They get mad at Excel for the poor investment returns. At this point, this is such a strawman, it isn't worth counter arguing. I think I'll abandon this discussion and keep using AI qu…

> A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me I feel this way on this topic too. > I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. The problem is; how _should_ I use AI? On a previous thread, I had two replies to the same comment, one saying "provide the LLM all the context it needs and let it go ham", and the other…

Latest models like Opus 5.0 work well in both scenarios. You can just give it a goal and let it make a plan, review the plan and then let it go ham.

Or you can also use it piece-meal and have it do parts of work that you want. It works in both ways and works really well.

I don't think there is any model right now that you can use with 0 oversight, but you can do pretty complex stuff without writing single line of code at this point.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#254

Post by jimberlage »

maccard wrote: post #169
hokapo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main cause of different views is just the fact that people have very different products and codebases they're working on. Therefore, the requirements and applicability of AI varies a lot, case-by-case. It would be useful if people always explained their exact use cases when making claims one way or another. I understand it's not feasible for many use cases to reveal exact details, but at least some transp…

> It would be useful if people always explained their exact use cases when making claims one way or another. I understand it's not feasible for many use cases to reveal exact details, It would be useful if people _ever_ explained the use cases. Even Anthropic when they're publishing their materials are hand wavey about this. > Gamedev is a good example of where AI shines, since the risks of fucking things up are not…

AI is great at reading, so give it things to read. Claude will try to throw big markdown docs in your repo, but you don't have to do that. Make it keep docs by the code.

I include a line in AGENTS.md that says "We *always* add docstrings to methods, classes, structs, and namespaces - there should be 100% coverage of docstrings."

It will make better choices about what functions to make or remove if you force it to justify why the function exists.

And when you have to go back and understand, it becomes easier.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#255

Post by surajrmal »

paganel wrote: post #42

A company valued at $4+ trillion based on the recent AI hype alone is touting the benefits of using said AI, and we're supposed to take this shit for granted. I'm wondering what the Alphabet employees still commenting on this forum have to say about it? I guess for the right comps they can keep their mouths shut no matter the high level of idiocy involved.

There is hype, but there are also real tangible wins as well. Analyzing code for bugs is something that works very well. We use it for helping us revert changes that lead to a flaking test and it's dramatically faster than previous techniques. It's great at suggesting duplicate bug reports. It's amazing at scaling an API migration throughout a codebase. It's great at prototyping an idea before you decide to do it properly.

There are many things it's not good at (eg design and architecture), but that doesn't invalidate the things it is good at. Everyone is learning how to best use it and there are growing pains. Ignore the hype and try to find the common patterns in what people say.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#257

Post by conjectures »

heaney-555 wrote: post #144
VBprogrammer wrote: post #17

I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much e…

[flagged]

...and harnesses, routers &c

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#258

Post by QuercusMax »

Gareth321 wrote: post #176
Tade0 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It bothers me that you have to explicitly state this to the agent. Makes me think what else is missing from that file which also needs to be explicitly stated, but I don't know what don't know. "Do a good job"?

This is where the harness shines. It's why products like Cursor have been growing like crazy. If you drop an extremely intelligent person into a problem they've never seen before, the initial context and knowledge-sharing just to get them up to speed is immense. They'll make a lot of mistakes until they're ready to fix your problem. The harness can leapfrog most of that. There is a booming industry in harnesses with…

How does the cursor harness help here compared to something more basic like pi coder? I'm talking specifics.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#259

Post by RGS1811 »

dpark wrote: post #228
cyanydeez wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point is more: are people going to flood the zone with infinite bikeshedding that drowns out the real gains

What is bikeshedding supposed to mean here?

It comes from C. Northcote Parkinson's work, where he calls it "The Law of Triviality". The idea is that people clog up decision-making by introducing a swarm of issues that have little relative impact or importance for the project at hand, leading to a massive misallocation of attention. His example is a $10 million construction project for a Nuclear Reactor where as much time is spent debating the materials to be used for a $3000 bike shed as on the actual reactor buildout. The law of triviality says "the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved."

Source: C. Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration" (1957)

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#260

Post by surajrmal »

goldenarm wrote: post #51

Elephant in the room : how many of these bugs were written by LLMs in the first place ? Because creating 100x more bugs and fixing 100x more isn't something to be proud of.

Look at the git stats for the project. Lines of code submitted haven't changed dramatically. Not everyone is just merging slop into the codebase. There are many ways to use AI, and most established players are not merging vibe coded nonsense.
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