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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

#371

Post by rmbyrro »

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.

`n` isn't defined

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

#372

Post by shinycode »

slibhb wrote: post #225
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…

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 always harder to build a mental model of the code written by someone else. No matter what, if you trust an LLM on small things in the long run you’ll trust it for bigger things. And the most code the LLM writes, the harder it is to build this mental construct. In the end it’ll be « it worked on 90% of cases so we trust it ». And who will debug 300 millions of code written by a machine that no one read based on trust ?

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

#374

Post by aiforecastthway »

javaunsafe2019 wrote: post #367
aiforecastthway wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided to go into programming instead of becoming an Engineer because most Engineering jobs seemed systematic and boring. (Software Engineers weren't really a thing at the time.) For most of my career, Software Engineering was a misnomer. The field was too young, and the tools used changed too quickly, for an appreciable amount of the work to be systematic and boring enough to consider it an Engineering discipline…

Since when is engineering boring? Stranges ideas and claims u made. I’m an engineer who writes code since 20 years and it’s far away from trivial . Maybe to do web dev for a simple Webshop is. Elsewhere software has often times special requirements. Be them technical or domain wise both make the process complex and not simple IMHO

Boring is the opposite of exciting/dynamic.

Not all engineering is boring. Also, boring is not bad.

A lot of my career has been spent working to make software boring. To the extent that I've helped contribute to the status quo, where we can build certain types of software in a relatively secure fashion and on relatively predictable timelines, I am proud to have made the world more boring!

(Also, complexity can be extraordinarily boring. Some of the most complex things are also the most boring. Nothing more boring than a set of business rules that has an irreducible complexity coming in at 5,211 lines of if-else blocks wrapped in two while loops! Give me a simple set of partial differential equations any day -- much more exciting to work with those! If you're the type of person who enjoys reading tax code, then we just have different definitions of boring; and if you're the type of person doesn't think tax code is complex, then I'm just a dummy compared to you :))

But e.g. in the early naughts doing structural engineering work for residential new build projects was certainly less engaging and exciting work than building websites.

Most engineering works aims for repeatable and predictable outcomes. That's a good thing, and it's not easy to achieve! But if Software has reached the point where the process of building certain types of software is "repeatable and predictable", and if Google needs a lot of that type of software, then if the main criticism of AI code assistants is "it's only good for repeatable and predictable", well, then the criticism isn't exactly the indictment that skeptics think it is.

There is nothing wrong with boring in the sense I'm using it. Boring can be tremendously intellectually demanding. Also, predictable and repeatable processes are incredibly important if you want quality work at scale. Engineering is a good thing. Maturing as a field is a good thing.

But if we're maturing from "wild west everything is a greenfield project" to "70% of things are pretty systematic and repeatable" then that says something about the criticism of AI coding assistants as being only good for the systematic and repeatable stuff, right?

Also: the AI coding assistant paradigm is coming for structural/mechanical/civil engineering next, and in a big way!

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

#376

Post by int_19h »

monksy wrote: post #266
solumunus wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, Google did design Go...

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

#377

Post by signa11 »

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…

``` Like, isn't this announcement a terrible indictment of how inexperienced their engineers are, or how trivial the problems they solve are, or both? ```

there is a 3rd possibility as well: having spent a huge chunk of change on these techniques, why not overhype it (not outright lie about it) and hope to, somewhat recoup the cost from unsuspecting masses ?

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

#378

Post by throwaway106382 »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #269
fzysingularity wrote: post #162

While 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.

I’d take pair programming with a junior over a GPT bot any day.

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

#379

Post by throwaway106382 »

amomchilov wrote: post #352
layer8 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally don’t write those by hand though. I’m pretty sure around 50% of the code I write is already auto-complete, without any AI.

Exactly, you write them with AI

IDEs have been auto completing braces, inserting imports and generating framework boilerplate for decades.

We don’t need AI for this and it’s 10x the compute to do it slower with AI.

LLMs are useful but they aren’t a silver bullet. We don’t need to replace everything with it just because.

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

#380

Post by II2II »

hughesjj wrote: post #328
photonthug wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. B…

Even though I miss using boolean operators in search, I doubt that it was ever sustainable outside of specialized search engines. Very few people seem to think in those terms. Many of those who do would still have difficulty forming complex queries.

I suspect the real problem is that search engines ceased being search engines when they stopped taking things literally and started trying to interpret what people mean. Then they became some sort of poor man's AI. Now that we have LLMs, of course it is going to replace the poor excuse for search engines that exist today. We were heading down that road already, and it actually summarizes what is out there.

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