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AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

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Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#101

Post by danpalmer »

endisneigh wrote: post #23
danpalmer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Google, this stuff is available, entirely optional, and in fact the most recent stuff is still something you have to sign up for and get on an opt-in basis in return for providing feedback/answering surveys.

This is not true. You can’t even disable AI entirely in critique (AI suggested edits), not to mention cider. Certain aspects can be disabled but you cannot entirely remove all AI affordances. It’s force feeding. It will eventually all be opt-out. This is obvious to anyone who works at google. Again, same as force feeding of gen AI search

I have AI suggested edits turned off. It's the 4th setting down in the settings menu. AI suggestions in Cider can be disabled. And all of these things are web apps for which googlers have a rich history of creating Chrome extensions to change things they don't like or disagree with.

I don't feel it's obvious at all that this will become forced. What would that even mean – you don't get to edit code anymore but can only interact via chat with an AI which edits the code for you? I think it's obvious that's not going to happen.

Will there be a day when you can't turn off AI suggestions for something? Maybe, but suggestions aren't requirements, no one is forced to use them so at worst they're a minor UI annoyance.

I'm interested to hear why you have such a negative take on it? I don't particularly enjoy most AI implementations in products (not Google specific), but they're almost entirely optional everywhere, and ignoring them really isn't much of a problem.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#102

Post by danpalmer »

Tao3300 wrote: post #45
danpalmer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Google, this stuff is available, entirely optional, and in fact the most recent stuff is still something you have to sign up for and get on an opt-in basis in return for providing feedback/answering surveys.

> entirely optional Optional. I'll bet.

What would it mean for code suggestions to be non-optional? Like, you can't edit the code file yourself but have to talk to a chatbot to ask it to make the edits for you? I think that's fairly obviously a ridiculous notion.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#103

Post by elboru »

jprete wrote: post #6
trybackprop wrote: post #2

From the blog post: > We observe that with AI-based suggestions, the code author increasingly becomes a reviewer, and it is important to find a balance between the cost of review and added value. We typically address the tradeoff with acceptance rate targets. In the past year since GPT-4 came out, I've also found this to be the case. I'm an ML/backend engineer with little experience in frontend development. Yet, I've…

This isn't a good trend. Reviewers never have the depth of knowledge or understanding of authors.

Sometimes you simply don’t need that knowledge. Not needing to understand something frees your mind.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#105

Post by knallfrosch »

suyash wrote: post #94

So how long till AI will be fully replacing a SWE at Google? That is where the drive for productivity at organizations like Google are leading towards.

Assuming Google has tens of thousands of software engineers (for a lower bound of 10,000) and artificial intelligence increases productivity by at least 0.01%, the first engineer has already been replaced.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#107

Post by runlevel1 »

darby_nine wrote: post #92
runlevel1 wrote: post #12

Humans have limited RAM, so we have to put our ideas into an external medium that can then be refined. I've been finding AI's suggestions -- even when rather wrong -- help me do that initial step faster. Which, I think, jives with their findings here.

> I've been finding AI's suggestions -- even when rather wrong -- help me do that initial step faster. I have no idea how I could even integrate AI into my workflow so that it's useful. It's even less reliable than search is for basic research and can't even cite its sources.... This argument held a lot more weight when it was a search engine playing the role of our memory.

That comment was solely about AI code suggestions.

Generative AI still has a ways to go for other forms of research, and it will never fully replace the utility of a search engine. They're two different tools for different but overlapping tasks.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#108

Post by summerlight »

bigiain wrote: post #14

I'm looking forward to the day that some spicy autocomplete regurgitates an obvious chunk of AGPL code that it's stolen without permission or attribution - and it ends up in some critical part of Googles money printing machine, and the outside world finds out about it. I'm gonna need a _lot_ of popcorn.

I would be very surprised if their training data is not explicitly curated by lawyers.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#109

Post by WalterSear »

jprete wrote: post #6
trybackprop wrote: post #2

From the blog post: > We observe that with AI-based suggestions, the code author increasingly becomes a reviewer, and it is important to find a balance between the cost of review and added value. We typically address the tradeoff with acceptance rate targets. In the past year since GPT-4 came out, I've also found this to be the case. I'm an ML/backend engineer with little experience in frontend development. Yet, I've…

This isn't a good trend. Reviewers never have the depth of knowledge or understanding of authors.

IMHO, review is a misnomer for where software engineering is going. I'm not sure where we are going, but review implies less responsibility for the outcome.

But I do think that we will have less depth of knowledge of the underlying processes. That's the point of having a machine do it. I expect this, however, to be a good trend: the systems will need to be up to a task before it makes sense to rely on them.

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