Google is now mass-producing techdebt at rates not seen since Martin Fowler’s first design pattern blogposts.
We've now entered the age of exponential tech debt, it'll be a sight to behold
Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#262While I get the MBA-speak of lines-of-code that AI is now able to accomplish, it does make me think about their highly-curated internal codebase that makes them well placed to potentially get to 50% AI-generated code. One common misconception is that all LLMs are the same. The models are trained the same, but trained on wildly different datasets. Google, and more specifically the Google codebase is arguably one of th…
Is the public gemini code gen LLM trained on their internal repo? I wonder if one could get it to cough up propriety code with the right prompt.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'.
Probably overloading of the term "programming" is the issue here. Most "software engineering" is non-programming work. Most programming is not actually typing code.
Most of the time, when I am typing code, the code I am producing is trivial, however.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#264Earlier 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).
How is that thing testing?
Is it expecting a specific solution or actually running the code?
I tried some solutions and it complained anyways
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#265To 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…
From my perspective, writing out the requirements for an AI to produce the code I want is just as easy as writing it myself. There are some types of boilerplate code that I can see being useful to produce with an LLM, but I don't write them often enough to warrant actually setting up the workflow.
Even with the debugging example, if I just read what I wrote I'll find the bug because I understand the language. For more complex bugs, I'd have to feed the LLM a large fraction of my codebase and at that point we're exceeding the level of understanding these things can have.
I would be pretty happy to see an AI that can do effective code reviews, but until that point I probably won't bother.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#266Earlier 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…
I don't think that is the signal that I think most people are hoping for here.
When I hear that most code is trivial, I think of this as a language design or a framework related issue making things harder than they should be.
Throwing AI or generates at the problem just to claim that they fixed it is just frustrating.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#267> 80% at Reasonote
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#268When Google announced their big layoffs, I noted the timing in relation to some big AI announcements. People here told me I was crazy for suggesting that corporations could replace employees with AI this early. Now the CEO is confirming that more than a quarter of new code is created by AI. Can’t really deny that reality anymore folks.
Who claims that he is speaking the truth and not some marketing jargon?
People who have replaced 25% of their brain with ai.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#269While I get the MBA-speak of lines-of-code that AI is now able to accomplish, it does make me think about their highly-curated internal codebase that makes them well placed to potentially get to 50% AI-generated code. One common misconception is that all LLMs are the same. The models are trained the same, but trained on wildly different datasets. Google, and more specifically the Google codebase is arguably one of th…
> that realistically could easily replace any entry-level or junior developer.
This is a massive, unsubstantiated leap.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#270It's quite amusing to me because I am old enough to remember when Copilot emerged the HN mainthought was that it was the death sentence for big corps, the scrappy independent hacker was going to run circles around them. But here we see the predictable reality: an organization that is already in an elite league in terms of developer velocity gets more benefit from LLM code assistants than Joe Hacker. These technologies serve to entrench and empower those who are already enormously powerful.