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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

#161
post #16

How many of those automated fixes were reverted? How many introduced a new bug? What's the false positive rate on the finding agents? The post has counts for everything that went right and nothing for what could go wrong.

They also don’t really provide an explanation for the big uptick in bugs found M146+ in the first place.

Is that better testing? Or more bugs were being introduced in the first place?

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

#162
post #11
post #5

Not that I don't believe its possible to fix a lot of bugs, I also wonder what the actual dynamic was. Were the people in team working much more than usual as well? Given its Google, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an "internal push" to fix more bugs over next X sprints so that they can publish this blog and some manager can show impact and AI adaption to his superior.

More likely just getting ahead of the AI attacks before they hit. The threat risk increase caused by AI has gone off the chart.

Exactly this. And there are few bigger targets than Chrome when it comes to finding exploits (OSes and network equipment are probably on par). I'm sure they have devoted large compute resources and human staffing at making sure that they find and fix these issues before anyone else does.

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

#163
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that makes it work really well is to make sure it has all the tooling to verify its hypotheses. If you allow it to run the full lifecycle in loops you will be surprised how well it works.

What tooling makes this go?

I'm convinced this is why there's a bifurcation in old-hand/new-hand results: the old hands include the steps they'd do and the tools they'd use, and the new-hands never learned those tools.

That'll get RL-d in, eventually.

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

#164

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…

You have to learn to use your tools, not try whatever intuitively made sense to you at first (expecting the tool to do all the work) and then whining on Hacker News when it doesn’t work out for you.

We're reliving the early day Google era. It's an objectively simple tool to use, but some people just refuse to put any effort to learn.

I'm thinking the issue is probably that LLMs/harnesses are too easy to use? It crossed the thin line between magic and tooling and blur the mental model. If Claude Code were as hard to use as, say, ComfyUI, perhaps there would be less programmers having absurd expectation of it.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my company there's a lot of discussion about AI and complaints that people run out of tokens within a day, but zero results are shown. No measurable (or measured) gains. Or nothing that people are willing to talk about, in any case.

At my company the performance improvements channels has been exploding, with people claiming giant improvements in latency, throughput, and decreased cost of the services. The cost decreases itself is order of magnitude more (at annualized run rate) more than we pay for tokens. YMMV.

I hope to see more of this across the industry.

I definitely make use of AI but in my experience I almost always could have done it better myself, the places where I threw AI at the problem I didn't care about the results being good, only good enough.

When we see memory and compute requirements for version x+1 of software decrease instead of increase I will happily say AI is the oracle people proclaim it to be.

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

#166
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…

This (fixing bugs, making code better, refactoring), is the best fit for AI.

I think a lot of us were excited that we will finally be able to polish our old software.

Many of us were never given the opportunity and were tasked to produce new features at an ever increasing pace. Depending on where you landed you can be either elated or jaded.

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

#167
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…

I agree with you.

> I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you.

However this is how it’s marketed. C-suite is telling people eventually you won’t need to read code, frontier labs saying programmers won’t exist etc.

The reality is like you said, a tool to accelerate you.

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

#168
Worrying. Extrapolating a (speculative) future, this means (Google will feel) that soon the chromium base will no longer need the crowd-sourced bug hunting that is open-source. I expect Google to eventually stop working on chromium (in the open) and all current chromium-flavours will become de-facto forks of the last published version of chromium. These forks won't be equally easy to maintain given that the groups running them do not have access to the same level of subsidy as Chrome does with Gemini.

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

#169
post #154
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 so big

I couldn't disagree more. I run an engineering team in GameDev, and AI is great at making a gigantic mess. It's great for generating a lot of code, but the minute that doesn't do what you want it to, you now need to go back and learn _everything_ that it's generated. And IME, doing that is as bad as having just written it yourself in the first place.

> he main problem is that there's so much stuff to review, and maybe 98% of it is fine. It's then very boring to try to spot the 2%. I don't have good solutions for that yet, and idk if anyone does.

I tentatively agree here, except I've found about 50% of it is "fine", 40% of it is "this works but isn't really what I want to put into my product" and 10% is "absolutely not".

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