Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

111–120 of 1001 posts

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

#111
post #109
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can - but not on the level of a single developer and you cannot use those measures to manage productivity of a specific dev. For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics. You shouldn’t really compare teams but it also is possible if you know what teams are doing. If you are some disconnected manager that thinks he can make decisions or improvements reducing things to single numbers - yea…

> For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics. How? Which metrics?

That is what we pay managers -to figure out- for. They should find out which and how by knowing the team, familiarity with domain knowledge, understanding company dynamics, understanding customer, understanding market dynamics.

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

#112
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the most interesting part of this is the claim that you can accurately and meaningfully measure software engineering productivity.

You can come up with measures for it and then watch them, that’s for sure.

when metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric. when discovered how it works developers will type the first character immediately after opening the log.

edit: typo

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

#113

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 assume the amount of monitoring effort is less than the amount of effort that would be required to replicate the AI generated code by humans, but do you have numbers on what that ROI looks like? Is it more like 10% or 200%?

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

#114
post #3

i would be may more impressed if LLMs could do code compression. more code == more things that can break, and when llms can generate boatloads of it with a click you can imagine what might happen

This actually sparked an idea for me. Could code complexity be measured as cumulative entropy as measured by running LLM token predictions on a codebase? Notably, verbose boilerplate would be pretty low entropy, and straightforward code should be decently low as well.

Code complexity can already be measured deterministically with cyclomatic complexity. No need to use an AI fuzzy logic at this. Especially when they're bad at math.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 25% of your code is boilerplate, you have a serious architectural problem. That said, I've seen even higher ratios. But never in any place that survived for long.

Depends on how you define "boilerplate". E.g. Terraform configs count for a significant number of the total lines in one of my repos. It's not really "boilerplate" in that it's not the exact same everywhere, but it is boilerplate in the since that setting up, say, a pretty standard Cloud SQL instance can take many, many lines of code just because there are so many config options.

Terraform is verbose.

It's only boilerplate if you write it again to set almost the same thing again. What, granted, if you are writing bare terraform config, it's probably both.

But on either case, if your terraform config is repetitive and a large part of the code on an entire thing (not a repo, repos are arbitraty divisions, maybe "product", but it's also a bad name). Than that thing is certainly close to useless.

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

#118

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…

Seems like everything is working out without any issues. Shouldn't you be a bit suspicious?

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

#119
post #109
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can - but not on the level of a single developer and you cannot use those measures to manage productivity of a specific dev. For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics. You shouldn’t really compare teams but it also is possible if you know what teams are doing. If you are some disconnected manager that thinks he can make decisions or improvements reducing things to single numbers - yea…

> For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics. How? Which metrics?

My company uses the Dora metrics to measure the productivity of teams and those metrics are incredibly good.

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

#120
post #3

i would be may more impressed if LLMs could do code compression. more code == more things that can break, and when llms can generate boatloads of it with a click you can imagine what might happen

This actually sparked an idea for me. Could code complexity be measured as cumulative entropy as measured by running LLM token predictions on a codebase? Notably, verbose boilerplate would be pretty low entropy, and straightforward code should be decently low as well.

> Could code complexity be measured as cumulative entropy as measured by running LLM token predictions on a codebase? Notably, verbose boilerplate would be pretty low entropy, and straightforward code should be decently low as well.

WinRAR can do that for you quite effectively.

Post reply on HN