Can we also see the stats for how much code used to come from StackOverflow? Probably 25%
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
#342Earlier 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'.
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Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#343Sometimes I wonder why we would want LLMs spit out human readable code. Wouldn’t be a better future where LLMs generate highly efficient machine code and eventually we read the “source map” for debugging? Wasn’t source code just for humans?
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#344Earlier 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.
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Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#345I use it all the time for work. Not much for actual code that goes into production, but a lot for "tell me what this does" or "given x, how do I do y". It speeds me up a ton. I'll also have it do code review when I'm uncertain about something, asking if there's any bugs or inefficiencies in a given chunk of code. I've actually found it to be more reliable about code than more general topics. Though I'm using it in a fairly specific way with code, versus asking for deep information about history for example, where is frequently gets facts very wrong.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#346To 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'll just answer here, but this isn't about this post in particular. It's about all of them. I've been struggling with a team of junior devs for the past months. How would I describe the experience? It's easy: just take any of these posts, replace "AI" with "junior dev", done. Except of course AI at least can do spelling. (Or at least I haven't encountered a problem in that regard.) I'm highly skeptical regarding LLM…
Isn't the whole point of hiring a junior dev that they will learn and become senior devs eventually?
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#347To 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…
A better analogy is a self driving car where you need to keep your hands on the wheel in case something goes wrong.
For the most part, it drives itself.
Yes, the majority of my code is trivial. But I've also had ai iterate on some very non trivial work including writing the test suite.
It's basically autocomplete on steroids that predicts your next change in the file, not just the next change on the line.
The copy paste from stack overflow trope is a bit weird, I haven't done that in ten years and I don't think the code it produces is that low quality either. Copy paste from an open source repo on GitHub maybe?
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#348To 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…
They are useful, but so far, I haven't seen LLMs being obviously more useful than stackoverflow. It might generate code closer to what I need than what I find already coded, but it also produces buggier code. Sometimes it will show me a function I wasn't aware of or approach I wouldn't have considered, but I have to balance that with all the other attempts that didn't produce something useful.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And Bing is google.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll just answer here, but this isn't about this post in particular. It's about all of them. I've been struggling with a team of junior devs for the past months. How would I describe the experience? It's easy: just take any of these posts, replace "AI" with "junior dev", done. Except of course AI at least can do spelling. (Or at least I haven't encountered a problem in that regard.) I'm highly skeptical regarding LLM…
> replace "AI" with "junior dev", done. Damn, that’s a good way of putting it. But I’ll go one further: replace "AI" with "junior dev who doesn’t like reading documentation or googling how things work so instead confidently types away while guessing the syntax and API so it kind of looks right”
I've been saying it's like an intern who has an incredible breadth of knowledge but very little depth, is excessively over confident in their own abilities given the error rates they commit, and is anxious to the point they'll straight up lie to you rather than admit a mistake.
Currently, they don't learn skills as fast as a motivated intern. A stellar intern can go from no idea to "makes relevant contributions to our product with significant independence and low error rate" (hi Matt if you ever see this) in 3 months. LLMs, to my understanding, take significantly more attention from super smart people working long hours and an army of mechanical Turks, but won't be able to independently implement a feature and will still have a higher error rate in the same 3 months.
It's still super impressive what LLMs can do, but that same intern is going to keep growing at that faster rate in skills and competency as they go from jr->mid->sr. Sure the intern won't have as large of a competency pool, and takes longer to respond to any given question, but the scope of what they can implement is so much greater.