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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

#251

Post by Reason077 »

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…

A good farmer isn’t likely to complain about getting a new tractor. But it might put a few horses out of work.

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

#252

Post by randomNumber7 »

hitradostava wrote: post #95
ntulpule wrote: post #88

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…

I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements. The direction of travel is very clear - LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies. I don't think this is a bad thing - if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss and everyone has examples of LLMs producing buggy or ridiculou…

Because there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding producing a lot of nonsense.

Of course LLMs are a fantastic tool to improve productivity, but current LLM's cannot produce anything novel. They can only reproduce what they have seen.

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

#253

Post by cyanydeez »

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.

If only google was trying to solve search rather than shareholdet values.

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

#254

Post by louthy »

atomic128 wrote: post #219
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a prime-number factorization function is hardly "leetcode".

Empirical testing (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293522 ) has established that the people on Hacker News tend to be junior in their skills. Understanding this fact can help you understand why certain opinions and reactions are more likely here. Surprisingly, the more skilled individuals tend to be found on Reddit (same testing performed there).

I’m not sure that’s evidence; I looked at that and saw it was written in Go and just didn’t bother. As someone with 40 years of coding experience and a fundamental dislike of Go, I didn’t feel the need to even try. So the numbers can easily be skewed, surely.

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

#255

Post by dietr1ch »

anon1243 wrote: post #244
rcarmo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, I simply stopped using it, which means they won.

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

#256

Post by justinpombrio »

Twirrim wrote: post #138
ntulpule wrote: post #88

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;…

> Can you spot all the problems?

You were probably being rhetorical, but there are two problems:

- `p = 2` should be outside the loop

- `prime_factors.append(n)` appends `1` onto the end of the list for no reason

With those two changes I'm pretty sure it's correct.

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

#257

Post by Kiro »

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…

You're doing circular reasoning based on your initial concern actually being a problem in practice. In my experience it's not, which makes all your other speculations inherently incorrect.

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

#258

Post by atomic128 »

louthy wrote: post #254
atomic128 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empirical testing (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293522 ) has established that the people on Hacker News tend to be junior in their skills. Understanding this fact can help you understand why certain opinions and reactions are more likely here. Surprisingly, the more skilled individuals tend to be found on Reddit (same testing performed there).

I’m not sure that’s evidence; I looked at that and saw it was written in Go and just didn’t bother. As someone with 40 years of coding experience and a fundamental dislike of Go, I didn’t feel the need to even try. So the numbers can easily be skewed, surely.

Only individuals who submitted multiple bad solutions before giving up were counted as failing. If you look but don't bother, or submit a single bad solution, you aren't counted. Thousands of individuals were tested on Hacker News and Reddit, and surprisingly, it's not even close: Reddit is where the hackers are. I mean, at the time of the testing, years ago.

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

#259

Post by afavour »

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?

If anything that's probably an underestimate. Not to downplay the complexity in much of what Google does but I'm sure they also do an absolute ton of tedious, boring CRUD operations that an AI could write.

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

#260

Post by adriand »

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…

> 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 think that’s exactly right. I used to have to create the puzzle pieces and then fit them together. Now, a lot of the time something else makes the piece and I’m just doing the fitting together part. Whether there will come a day when we just need to describe the completed puzzle remains to be seen.

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