AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead • Hacker News Board

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#241

Post by whywhywhywhy » Sun, Jun 09, 2024, 11:10 PM UTC

mistrial9 wrote: post #181

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clippy was on the right path at the wrong time, the issue wasn't the concept of an assistant that watches your work and provides help, the issue was it could detect a letter, offer help but the help it gave you was just a bunch of shallow formatting suggestions without context to the actual work. An actual assistant that can preempt what you need and create it before you get there with a 95% success rate will not fee…

Clippy from MSFT? this is where the techies really lose perspective.. you see, its not just a computer, a computer company, and a user.. Real life includes social systems with social contract, and the relationship of the user's logs, records and autonomy to the "master" of the economic relationship. Microsoft has made it clear that surveilling the user and restricting autonomy is as valuable or more valuable from a b…

>Clippy was a direct marketing response to Apple getting "cool" ratings with innovative GUI elements

Honestly think Clippy predated that, came out in 1996 for Office 97, Macs were only on System 7.5 back then while I think you're thinking of the early MacOS X era which was was 6-7 years later.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#242

Post by pquki4 » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 11:05 AM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #227

pquki4 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you are well past the right time to leave Well, that's easy for you to say. People have family to feed, right?

> We all have unique circumstances, but I can almost guarantee you that you'll be absurdly happier elsewhere. Thanks for your insightful contribution - I read the post again and found this right after what you found, like, right after. I hope this helps clarify

> I can almost guarantee

Guarantee with what? Personal money? I know people who have more than 3+ years of experience having trouble with getting an offer after months of searching these days. What can you offer to guarantee the "happiness" "elsewhere"?

Such a ridiculous, out of touch comment.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#243

Post by danpalmer » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 1:03 PM UTC

vitus wrote: post #187

danpalmer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it mean for code suggestions to be non-optional? Like, you can't edit the code file yourself but have to talk to a chatbot to ask it to make the edits for you? I think that's fairly obviously a ridiculous notion.

I could envision some point in the future where the tooling is good enough that if you reject the suggestion, you had better have a very good reason for doing so. We're already there on the formatting front, as well as the widely-enabled clang-tidy checks (e.g. pessimizing moves). Once a tool consistently meets that high bar, it's irrelevant whether its suggestions are derived from static analysis or a LLM. As far as…

I see your point, and maybe you're right, but I do think formatting tools are materially different. You can define correctness for a formatting tool and they're understood to be about enforcing a consistent style. That doesn't apply to code more generally where there's more open to interpretation, other "style" to consider, program behaviour, etc.

Also I would say that automatic formatters weren't popular until the mid 2010s from what I've experienced, despite being technically possible since pretty much the advent of programming. I even remember having to push hard for adoption of them in ~2018. Even if the AI tools were at the level (and they're definitely not yet, any of them), it could easily take a decade for it to become the norm or for it to be mandated.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#244

Post by throwanem » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 11:35 PM UTC

rishabhjain1198 wrote: post #127

throwanem wrote: post #5

If there's anything in this press release to justify how "characters added by AI" is more true a reflection of quality than commit count is of productivity, I didn't see it. It's a short release and I read it twice, so if it was there I feel like I'd have noticed.

In its current state, I look at it as just a much smarter coding auto-complete, which is still very useful. With that perspective, "characters added by AI" is an ok metric to track.

I haven't found it particularly smart, at least in its GitHub Copilot incarnation.

Per the metrics I added to the integration when I began to trial it, I accepted about 27% of suggestions.

I didn't track how many suggestions I accepted unmodified, because that would have been orders of magnitude more difficult; I would be fascinated to see Google's solution to the same problem documented, but doubt strongly that I will. I'm sure it's entirely sound, though, and like all behavioral science in no sense a matter of projection, conjecture, interpretation, or assumption.

I turned off the Copilot integration months ago, when I realized that the effort of understanding and/or dismissing its constant kibitzing was adding more friction on net to my process than its occasions of usefulness alleviated.

I do still use LLMs as part of my work, but in a "peer consultant" role, via a chat model and a separate terminal. In that role, I find it useful. In my actual editor, conversely, it was far more than anything else a constant, nagging annoyance; the things it suggested that I'd been about to write were trivial enough that the suggestion itself broke my flow, and the things it suggested that I hadn't been about to write were either flagrantly misguided for the context or - much worse! - subtly wrong, in a way that took more time to recognize than simply going ahead and writing it by hand in the first place would have.

I've been programming for 36 years, and it's been well more than two decades since I did any other kind of paying work. The idea that these tools are becoming commonplace, especially among more junior devs without the kind of confidence and discernment such tenure can confer, worries me - both on behalf of the field, and on theirs, because I believe this latest hype bubble ill serves them in a way that will make them much more vulnerable than they should need to be to other, later, attacks by capital on labor in this industry.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#245

Post by Lonota » Thu, Jun 13, 2024, 2:01 AM UTC

thomashop wrote: post #140

irrational wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they learning? Or are they just accepting the results, as long as it appears to more or less do what they want, and moving on? The danger seems to be code that is syntactically correct and compiles without errors, but is logically incorrect.

One data point: In our startup we are short on frontend software engineers. Our project manager started helping with the UI using an IDE (cursor a VS-code fork) with native ChatGPT integration. In the span of six months, they have become very proficient at React. They had wanted to learn basic frontend coding for multiple years but never managed to pass the initial hurdles. Initially, they were only accepting suggest…

Sounds like a great learning tool.

Not gonna fault people for learning, think the FUD is more so in the vein of being ignorant while working.

Yea, you dont really need to know how transistors work to code, but you didnt need that for 2 generations. Personally think (and hope), LLM code tools replace google and SO, more so than writing SW itself.

I got my start on a no-code visual editor. Hated it because the 5% of issues it couldn't handle took 80% of my time (with no way to actually do it in many cases). See LLM auto generation as the same, the problems that the tool dosent just solve will be your jobs, and you still need to know things for that.