31–36 of 36 posts
With so many projects abandoned, is code speed really an issue for google? Has there been any novel or interesting code written or is this code block completion that saved people keystrokes?
It could also be they're using AI to propose and do large-scale refactor code mods, but that would be a smart use-case for it.
Google is a big company which buys other companies to grow. Does this AI actually improve their M&A somehow? Does it allow them to AI-write new software instead of buying it? I don't get it.
One thing that worries me about AI-generated code is that if there's an obscure bug that pops up later, there's no engineer to think "ok hang on, I remember something strange happening when I first wrote that code... let me have a look." Instead, there are only engineers who reviewed the code, which is of course a lot different from writing it.
How common is this situation? While it's nice to look at the history of some line of code and contact the person who wrote it, in a company with a lot of turnover or promotion, that person isn't going to be available or want to help you.
When vim shows me where a matching paren/bracket goes, is that AI that put them there?
When we use code validators like lint or Purify, is that AI code review from the 1980s?
It sounds like a boastful lie for stock reasons, but if not, the AI overlords may decide to write algorithms creating effectively a social credit service and not tell any humans.
In unrelated news, Amazon's CEO boasted that AI saved the company 4,500 years of engineering effort during a JDK upgrade.