People overestimate faang. There are many talents working there, sure, but a lot of garbage gets pumped into their codebases as well.
Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#132To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…
25% trivial code sounds like a reasonable guess.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#133It’s probably code that was previously machine generated that they’re now calling “AI Generated”.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#134To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…
I wouldn't call it an indictment necessarily, because so much is dependent upon circumstances. They can't all be "deep problems" in the real world. Projects tend to have two components, "deep" work which is difficult and requires high skill and cannot be made up with by using masses of inexperienced and "shallow" work where being skilled doesn't really help, or doesn't help too much compared to throwing more bodies at the problem. To use an example it is like advanced accounting vs just counting up sales receipts.
Even if their engineers were inexperienced that wouldn't be an indictment in itself so long as they had a sufficient necessary amount of shallow work. Using all experienced engineers to do shallow work is just inefficient, like having brain surgeons removing bunions. Automation is basically a way to transform deep work to a producer of "free" shallow work.
That said, the real impressive thing with code isn't in its creation but in its ability to losslessly delete code and maintain or improve functionality.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#135To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…
I suspect that a lot of the hard, google-scale stuff has already been done and packaged as an internal service or library - and just gets re-used. So the AIs are probably churning out new settings dialogs and the like.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#136That explains a lot about Google's so-called "quality".
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#137To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…
I can generate in eclipse pojo classes or their accessor methods. I can let maven build entire packages from say XSDs (I know I am talking old boring tech, just giving an example). I can copy&paste half the code (if not more) from stack overflow.
Now replace all this and much more with 'AI'. If they said AI helped them increase say ad effectivity by 3-5%, I'll start paying attention.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#138Hi, 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…
> We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases.
Considering how terrible and frequently broken the code that the public facing Gemini produces, I'll have to be honest that that kind of scares me.
Gemini frequently fails at some fairly basic stuff, even in popular languages where it would have had a lot of source material to work from; where other public models (even free ones) sail through.
To give a fun, fairly recent example, here's a prime factorisation algorithm it produce for python:
# Find the prime factorization of n
prime_factors = []
while n > 1:
p = 2
while n % p == 0:
prime_factors.append(p)
n //= p
p += 1
prime_factors.append(n)
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#139If we are talking about the boilerplate code and autofill syntax code that copilot or any other "AI" will offer me when I start typing... Then sure. Sounds about right.
The other 75% is the stuff you actually have to think about.
This feels like saying linters impact x0% of code. This just feels like an extension of that.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#140When Google announced their big layoffs, I noted the timing in relation to some big AI announcements. People here told me I was crazy for suggesting that corporations could replace employees with AI this early. Now the CEO is confirming that more than a quarter of new code is created by AI. Can’t really deny that reality anymore folks.