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

businessinsider.com

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

#241

Post by johannes1234321 »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #226
wvenable wrote: post #181

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.

The benefit doesn't translate 1:1. The generated code has to be read and verified and might require small adaptions. (Partially that can be done by AI as well)

But for me it massively improved all the boilerplate generic work. A lot of those things which are just annoying work, but not interesting.

Then I can focus on the bigger things, on the important parts.

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

#242

Post by gorjusborg »

slibhb wrote: post #225
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 programm…

> Most programming is trivial

That's a bold statement, and incorrect, in my opinion.

At a junior level software development can be about churning out trivial code in a previously defined box. I don't think its fair to call that 'most programming'.

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

#243

Post by lambdasquirrel »

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…

I’ve already had one job interview where the applicant seemed broadly knowledgeable about everything we asked them during lead-in questions before actual debugging. Then when they had to actually dig deeper or demonstrate understanding while solving some problem, they fell short.

I’m pretty sure they weren’t the first and there’ve been others we didn’t know about. So now I don’t ask lead-in questions anymore. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference and I don’t need to get burned again.

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

#244

Post by anon1243 »

rcarmo wrote: post #97
dietr1ch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss old memegen, but it got ruined by HR :/

I am reliably told that it is alive and well, even if it’s changed a bit.

Memegen is there but unrecognizable now. A dedicated moderator team deletes memes, locks comments, bans people for mentioning "killing a process" (threatening language!) and contacts their managers.

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

#245

Post by contravariant »

malfist wrote: post #114
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually sparked an idea for me. Could code complexity be measured as cumulative entropy as measured by running LLM token predictions on a codebase? Notably, verbose boilerplate would be pretty low entropy, and straightforward code should be decently low as well.

Code complexity can already be measured deterministically with cyclomatic complexity. No need to use an AI fuzzy logic at this. Especially when they're bad at math.

There's nothing fuzzy about letting an LLM determine the probability of a particular piece of text.

In fact it's the one thing they are explicitly designed to do, the rest is more or less a side-effect.

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

#246

Post by aorloff »

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…

Its been a while since I was really fully in the trenches, but not that long.

How people deal with this is they start by writing the test case.

Once they have that, debugging that 25% comes relatively easily and after that its basically packaging up the PR

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

#248

Post by skissane »

chongli wrote: post #169
toasteros wrote: post #144

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.

I personally think a big problem with search is major search engines try to be all things to all people and hence suffer as a result.

For example: a beginner developer is possibly better served by some SEO-heavy tutorial blog post; an experienced developer would prefer results weighted towards the official docs, the project’s bug tracker and mailing list, etc. But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later.

One positive about AI: if an AI is doing the search, it likely wants the more advanced material not the more beginner-focused one. It can take more advanced material and simplify it for the benefit of less experienced users. It is (I suspect) less likely to make mistakes if you ask it to simplify the more advanced material than if you just gave it more beginner-oriented material instead. So if AI starts to replace humans as the main clients of search, that may reverse some of the pressure to “dumb it down”.

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

#249

Post by contravariant »

tylerchilds wrote: post #8

if the golden rule is that code is a liability, what does this headline imply?

Well, either they just didn't spend as much time writing the code or they increased their liability by about 33%.

The truth is likely somewhere in between.

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

#250

Post by ta_1138 »

solumunus wrote: post #222
rpcope1 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

This is all about the tooling most companies choose when building software: Things with more than enough boilerplate most code is trivial. We can build tools that have far less triviality and more density, where the distance between the code we write and business logic is very narrow.. but then every line of code we write is hard, because it's meaningful, and that feels bad enough to many developers, so we end up with tools where we might not be more productive, but we might feel productive, even though most of that apparent productivity is trivially generated.

We also have the ceremonial layers of certain forms of corporate architecture, where nothing actually happens, but the steps must exist to match the holy box, box cylinder architecture. Ceremonial input massaging here, ceremonial data transformation over there, duplicated error checking... if it's easy for the LLM to do, maybe we shouldn't be doing it everywhere in the first place.

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