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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

#321

Post by dmurray »

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?

Surely yes.

I (not at Google) rarely use the LLM for anything more than two lines at a time, but it writes/autocompletes 25% of my code no problem.

I believe Google have character-level telemetry for measuring things like this, so they can easily count it in a way that can be called "writing 25% of the code".

Having plenty of "trivial code" isn't an indictment of the organisation. Every codebase has parts that are straightforward.

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

#322

Post by uoaei »

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've suspected for a while now that the people who find value in AI-generated code don't actually have hard problems to solve. I wonder how else they might justify their salary.

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

#323

Post by worik »

toasteros wrote: post #144
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…

> 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…

> But the vast majority of AI use that I see is...not that. It's just glorified, very expensive search.

Since the collapse of Internet search (rose tinted hindsight - was it ever any good?) I have been using a LLM as my syntax advisor. I pay for my own tokens, and I can say it is astonishingly cheap

It is also very good.

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

#324

Post by hughesjj »

groestl wrote: post #172
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…

> do they have 25% trivial code? From what I've seen on Google Cloud, both as a user and from leaked source code, 25% of their code is probably just packing and unpacking of protobufs.

I'd bet at least 25% of code attributes to me in gitfarm at Amazon was generated by octane and/or bones.

God I miss that, thanks for the other person on HN introducing me to projen. Yeoman wasnt cutting it.

These days I write a surprising amount of shell script and awk with LLMs. I review and adapt it, of course, but for short snippets of low context scripting it's been a huge time saver. I'm talking like 3-4, up to 20 lines of POSIX shell.

Idk. Some day I'll actually learn AWK, and while I've gotten decent with POSIX shell (and bash), it's definitely been more monkey see monkey do than me going over all the libraries and reference docs like I did for python and the cpp FAQ.

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

#325

Post by xyst »

I remember Google used to market "lines of code" for their products. Chrome at one point had 6.7 LoC. Now the new marketing term is: "product was made with 1M lines of AI generated code (slop)!11!". Or "Chrome refactored with 10% AI" or some bs

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

#326

Post by motoxpro »

People talk about how AI is bad at generating non-trivial code, but why are people using it to generate non-trivial code?

25% of coding is just the most basic boilerplate. I think of AI not as a thinking machine but as a 1000 WPM boilerplate typer.

If it is halucinating, you're trying to make it do stuff that is too complex.

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

#327

Post by rubyfan »

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.

AI will make the problem of low quality, fake, fraudulent and arbitrage content way worse. I highly doubt it will improve searching for quality content at all.

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

#328

Post by hughesjj »

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…

I remember in like 5th grade rural PA schools learning about Boolean operators in search engines and falling in love with them. For context, they were presenting alta vista and yahoo kids search as the most popular with Google being a "simple but effective new search platform" we might want to check out.

By the time I graduated highschool you already couldn't trust that Boolean operators would be treated literally. By the time I graduated college, they basically didn't seem to do anything, at best a weak suggestion.

Nowadays quotes don't even seem to be consistently honored.

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

#329

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

This subtly wrong thing happens maybe 10% of the time in my experience and asking it to generate unit tests or writing your own ahead of time almost completely eliminates it.

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

#330

Post by [deleted] »

justinpombrio wrote: post #256
Twirrim wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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