Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 1001 posts

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

#221

Post by notyourwork »

skrebbel wrote: post #127

To 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…

To your point, I don't buy the truth of the statement. I work in big tech and am convinced that 25% of the code being written is not coming from AI.

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

#222

Post by solumunus »

rpcope1 wrote: post #186
skrebbel wrote: post #127

To 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 don't get it either. People will say all sorts of strange stuff about how it writes the code for them or whatever, but even using the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet or whatever variant of GPT4, the moment I ask it anything that isn't the most basic done-to-death boilerplate, it generates stuff that's wrong, and often subtly wrong. If you're not at least pretty knowledgeable about exactly what it's generating, you'll be stuc…

Supermaven is an incredible intellisense. Most code IS trivial and I barely write trivial code anymore. My imports appear instantly, with high accuracy. I have lots of embedded SQL queries and it’s able to guess the structure of my database very accurately. As I’m writing a query the suggested joins are accurate probably 80% of the time. I’m significantly more productive and having to type much less. If this is as good as it ever gets I’m quite happy. I rarely use AI for non trivial code, but non trivial code is what I want to work on…

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

#223

Post by cybrox »

skrebbel wrote: post #127

To 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…

Depends if they include test code in this metric. I have found AI most valuable in generating test code. I usually want to keep tests as simple as possible, so I prefer some repetition over abstraction to make sure there's no issues with the test logic itself, AI makes this somewhat verbose process very easy and efficient.

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

#224

Post by fwip »

UncleMeat wrote: post #105
reverius42 wrote: post #89

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.

At scale you can do this in a bunch of interesting ways. For example, you could measure "amount of time between opening a crash log and writing the first character of a new change" across 10,000s of engineers. Yes, each individual data point is highly messy. Alice might start coding as a means of investigation. Bob might like to think about the crash over dinner. Carol might get a really hard bug while David gets a r…

There's lots of stuff you can measure. It's not clear whether any of it is correlated with productivity.

To use your example, a user with an LLM might say "LLM please fix this" as a first line of action, drastically improving this metric, even if it ruins your overall productivity.

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

#225

Post by slibhb »

skrebbel wrote: post #127

To 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…

Most programming is trivial. Lots of non-trivial programming tasks can be broken down into pure, trivial sections. Then, the non-trivial part becomes knowing how the entire system fits together.

I've been using LLMs for about a month now. It's a nice productivity gain. You do have to read generated code and understand it. Another useful strategy is pasting a buggy function and ask for revisions.

I think most programmers who claim that LLMs aren't useful are reacting emotionally. They don't want LLMs to be useful because, in their eyes, that would lower the status of programming. This is a silly insecurity: ultimately programmers are useful because they can think formally better than most people. For the forseeable future, there's going to be massive demand for that, and people who can do it will be high status.

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

#226

Post by randomNumber7 »

wvenable wrote: post #181
skrebbel wrote: post #127

To 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…

> Or do they have 25% trivial code? We all have probably 25% or more trivial code. AI is great for that. I have X (table structure, model, data, etc) and I want to make Y with it. A lot of code is pretty much mindless shuffling data around. The other thing is good for is anything pretty standard. If I'm using a new technology and I just want to get started with whatever is the best practice, it's going to do that. If…

Yes but then it would be more logical to say "AI makes our devs 25% more efficient". This is not what he said, but imo you are obviously right.

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

#227

Post by cybrox »

eco wrote: post #207
skrebbel wrote: post #127

To 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'd be terribly scared to use it in a language that isn't statically typed with many, many compile time error checks. Unless you're the type of programmer that is writing sabots all day (connecting round pegs into square holes between two data sources) you've got to be very critical of what these things are spitting out.

If you use it as advanced IntelliSense/auto-complete, it's not any worse than with typed languages.

If you just let it generate and run the code... yeah, probably, since you won't catch the issues at compile time.

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

#229

Post by randomNumber7 »

gerash wrote: post #177
Twirrim wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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;…

I believe most people use AI to help them quickly figure out how to use a library or an API without having to read all their (often out dated) documentation instead of helping them solve some mathematical challenge

I think that too but google claims something else.
Post reply on HN