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

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

#231
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the documentation is out of date, such that it doesn't help, this doesn't bode well for the training data of the AI helping it get it right, either?

AI can presumably integrate all of the forum discussions talking about how people really use the code. Assuming discussions don't happen in Slack, or Discord, or...

And all the code on which it was trained...

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

#233

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…

> 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;…

We are sorely lacking a "Make Computer Science a Science" movement, the tech lead's blurb is par for the course, talking about "SWE productivity" with no reference to scientific inquiry and a foundational understanding of safety, correctness, verification, validation of these new LLM technologies.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically a non-answer. Measuring "productivity" is a well known hard problem, and managers haven't really figured it out...

It's not a non-answer. Good managers need to figure out what metrics make sense for the team they are managing, and that will change depending on the company and team. It might be new features, bug fixes, new product launch milestones, customer satisfaction, ad revenue, or any of a hundred other things.

I heard lines of code is a hot one.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not necessarily. If 25% of the code is written by AI but that code isn't very interesting or difficult, it might not be making the devs 25% more efficient. It could even possibly be more but, either way, these are different metrics.

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

#237
I was a luddite about the generative LLMs at first, as a crusty sysadmin type. I came around and started experimenting. It's been a boon for me.

My conclusion is that we are at the first wave of a split between those who use LLMs to augment their abilities and knowledge, and those who delay. In cyberpunk terminally, it's aug-tech, not real AGI. (and the lesser ones code abilities and simpler the task, the more benefit, it's an accelerator)

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically a non-answer. Measuring "productivity" is a well known hard problem, and managers haven't really figured it out...

It's not a non-answer. Good managers need to figure out what metrics make sense for the team they are managing, and that will change depending on the company and team. It might be new features, bug fixes, new product launch milestones, customer satisfaction, ad revenue, or any of a hundred other things.

I would want a specific example in that case rather than "the good managers figure it out" because in my experience, the bad managers pretend to figure it out while the good managers admit that they can't figure it out. Worse still, if you tell your reports what those metrics are, they will optimize them to death, potentially tanking the product (I can increase my bug fix count if there are more bugs to fix...).

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow This bothers me. I completely understand the conversational aspect - "what approach might work for this?", "how could we reduce the crud in this function?" - it worked a lot for me last year when I tried learning C. But the vast majority of AI use that I see is...not that. It's just glorified, very expensive search. We are willing to burn far, far more fuel t…

we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search Traditional search (at least on the web) is dying. The entire edifice is drowning under a rapidly rising tide of spam and scam sites. No one, including Google, knows what to do about it so we're punting on the whole project and hoping AI will swoop in like deus ex machina and save the day.

Maybe it is naive but I think search would probably work again if they could roll back code to 10 or 15 years ago and just make search engines look for text in webpages.

Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah, and about a decade before LLMs were actually usable, they started to sabotage simple substring searches and kind of force this more conversational interface. That’s when simple search terms stopped working very well, and you had to instead ask yourself “hmm how would a very old person or a small child phrase this question for a magic oracle”

This is how we get stuff like: Did you mean “when did Shakespeare die near my location”? If anyone at google cared more about quality than printing money, that thirsty gambit would at least be at the bottom of the page instead of the top.

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

#240

It's Go. 25% of the code is just basic error checking and returning nil.

In Java, 25% of the code is import statements and curly braces

In lisp about 50% of the code is just closing parentheses.
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