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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

#191

Post by skydhash »

hokapo wrote: post #155
izacus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you think for a second that maybe other people work with other languages, domains, tools and work approaches than you? It's so bizarre that noone realizes that there's a bit of a difference between banging together JavaScript into websites, writing firmware for widgets, herding servers or fixing medical devices?

This right here is the truth. Too often people talk in abstract ways, not disclosing what they're actually working on. And then they tell their experiences as universal facts.

The goal of software development is to eventually be done. Yes there are new incentives or new use cases that come up, but the aim should be towards a stable state where you're barely have to work on the software anymore. It's like an house where you spend a good chunk of money to build it, but afterwards you just maintain it.

That's my main issue with AI hypers. There's often no goal in sight, they're just busy for the sake of being busy. They talk about their process, but not their objectives. It's not about progress for them, it's only about being in motion.

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

#192

Post by insanitybit »

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…

I've consistently found that I see performance issues that the AI misses. It often says "that's not going to be what improves performance, it's noise" and then I get it to do it and it's like a global 30% throughput win lol. I think a lot of performance guidance it'll be trained on is shit - I see devs consistently misunderstand performance too and downplay the impact of anything other than "IO".

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

#193

Post by barrkel »

moron4hire wrote: post #184
herrkanin wrote: post #34

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.

[flagged]

If you run it in a sandbox with no internet access and a read-only role login for the database, and you supervise it, how big is the risk do you reckon?

Of course there's an issue if the data in the database is contractually restricted and you don't have a zero retention endpoint for inference, but the former usually comes with the budget to fund the latter.

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

#194

Post by xXSLAYERXx »

cyanydeez wrote: post #156
jfrbfbreudh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Built exactly this for work a few months ago. Claude has a read-only account to the dev DB and a bunch of python postgres tools, I point it at queries/views and ask it optimize, and it has to: 1) verify identical query results 2) run repeatedly to get average, worst, best, etc duration of runs Sped up so many legacy things that none of us were ever going to bother with.

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

[flagged]

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

#195

Post by TacticalCoder »

dabedee wrote: 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.

> How many introduced a new bug?

I'd say that one is not really an issue. In 2012 the Pinkie Pie exploit chain already required chaining 6 bugs to lead to an exploit [1]. Since then we've seen chains requiring more than 10 bugs (!).

If you fix any one of those bugs, the exploit is non-functional anymore. Sorry out of luck.

So if, say, for every ten bugs you fix, you introduce two new ones then it's still a very net win. Unless of course it introduces a bug so bad it becomes a simple exploit not requiring a long chain of exploits.

But in the case of browsers we've only ever been moving to longer and longer chains of exploits required to pwn a browser.

A great many window of opportunities are closing for dark-side hackers / north korean intelligence etc.: there were probably exploit chains still open for exploitation in April that just got closed by Google.

If anything, besides the supply chains attacks in amateur-land, the world didn't stop working: projects (not just browsers but OSes too) are being hardened left and right.

Using AI to find potential bugs is an amazing use case and there really aren't many downsides.

> The post has counts for everything that went right and nothing for what could go wrong.

I'm not saying there aren't a few downsides but the benefits are just too good to ignore.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/tale-of-two-pwnies-part-1....

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

#196

Post by eviks »

No worries, writing with AIs can improve the speed bugs enter the code base as well. Would be interesting to know the breakdown.

> the “latent security issue.” Code that is safe and robust in isolation can be transformed into a critical vulnerability by an entirely unrelated, minor logic change elsewhere in the tree.

Similarly, you can accidentally fix a bug without discovering/triaging it, so the pointless repeated bug lifecycle is incomplete

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

#197

Post by eviks »

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…

Why are you sidetracked instead of piping that to another AI?

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

#198

Post by douglee650 »

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…

Were you using Fable 5?

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

#199

Post by xacky »

Just admit that Chromium is too complex at this point, we've all seen show HNs doing what could be considered magic in Chromium. We probably need to issue a mortarium in new platform features and focus on a deep clean in bug fixes. I've said that Mozilla is too busy doing redesigns than bug fixes as well.
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