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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

#301

Post by Aeolun »

er4hn wrote: post #283
slibhb wrote: post #225

Earlier 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…

It's reasonable to say that LLMs are not completely useless. There is also a very valid case to make that LLMs are not good at generating production ready code. I have found asking LLMs to make me Nix flakes to be a very nice way to make use of Nix without learning the Nix language. As an example of not being production ready: I recently tried to use ChatGPT-4 to provide me with a script to manage my gmail labels. Th…

I find a recurring theme in these kind of comments where people seem to blame their laziness on the tool. The problem is not that the tools are imperfect, it’s that you apparently use them in situations where you expect perfection.

Does a carpenter blame their hammer when it fails to drive in a screw?

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

#302

Post by grepLeigh »

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…

I have a whole "chop wood, carry water" speech born from leading corporate software teams. A lot of work at a company of sufficient size boils down to keeping up with software entropy while also chipping away at some initiative that rolls up to an OKR. It can be such a demotivating experience for the type of smart, passionate people that FANNGs like to hire.

There's even a buzzword for it: KTLO (keep the lights on). You don't want to be spending 100% of your time on KTLO work, but it's unrealistic to expect to do done of it. Most software engineers would gladly outsource this type of scutwork.

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

#303

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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.

There's no way the search AI will beat out the spamgen AI.

Tailoring/retraining the main search AI will be so much more expensive that retraining the spam special purpose AIs.

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

#304

Post by Aeolun »

thfuran wrote: post #285
ta_1138 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

>but then every line of code we write is hard, because it's meaningful, and that feels bad enough to many developers, I don't know that I've ever even met a developer who wants to be writing endless pools of trivial boilerplate instead of meaningful code. Even the people at work who are willing to say they don't want to deal with the ambiguity and high level design stuff and just want to be told what to do pretty cle…

That, but boilerplate stuff is also incredibly easy to understand. As compared to high density, high meaning code anyway. I prefer more low density low meaning code as it makes it much easier to reason about any part of the system.

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

#305

Post by layer8 »

photonthug wrote: post #239
chongli wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it is naive but I think search would probably work again if they could roll back code to 10 or 15 years ago and just make search engines look for text in webpages. Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah…

> just make search engines look for text in webpages.

Google’s verbatim search option roughly does that for me (plus an ad blocker that removes ads from the results page). I have it activated by default as a search shortcut.

(To activate it, one can add “tbs=li:1” as a query parameter to the Google search URL.)

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

#306

Post by JohnDone »

chongli wrote: post #278
masfuerte wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google results are not polluted with spam because Google doesn't know how to deal with it. Google results are polluted with spam because it is more profitable for Google. This is a conscious decision they made five years ago.

because it is more profitable for Google Then why are DuckDuckGo results also (arguably even more so) polluted with spam/scam sites? I doubt DDG is making any profit from those sites since Google essentially owns the display ad business.

Ddg is actually Bing. Search as a service.

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

#307

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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 quick to jump to the assertion that AI only generates SO style utility code to do X, but it can also be used to generate boring mapping code (e.g. to/from SQL datasets). I heard one ex Google dev say that most of his job wat fiddling with Protobuf definitions and payloads.

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

#308

Post by bluerooibos »

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…

At what point are people going to stop shitting on the code that Copilot or other LLM tools generate?

> how trivial the problems they solve are

A single line of code IS trivial. Simple code is good code. If I write the first 3 lines of a complex method and I let Copilot complete the 4th, that's 25% of my code written by an LLM.

These tools have exploded in popularity for good reason. If they were no good, people wouldn't be using them.

I can only assume people making such comments don't actually code on a daily basis and use these tools daily. Either that or you haven't figured out the knack of how to make it work properly for you.

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

#309

Post by quickthrowman »

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.

Google could fix the problem if they wanted to, but it’s not in their interests to fix it since the spam sites generally buy ads from Google and/or display Google ads on their spam websites. Google wants to maximize their income, so..

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

#310

Post by ZiiS »

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…

Yes 25% of code is trivial; certainly for companies like Google that have always been a bit NIH.
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