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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

#381

Post by sally_glance »

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 guess the obvious response would be - yes, they have _at least_ 25% trivial code (as any other enterprise), and yes, they should have lots of engineers 'babysitting' (aka generating training data). So in another year or two there will be no manpower at all needed for the trivial tasks.

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

#382

Post by summerlight »

In Google, there is a process called "Large Scale Change" which is primarily meant for trivial/safe but extremely tedious code changes that potentially span over the entire monorepo. Such as foundational API changes, trivial optimization, code style etc etc. This is a perfectly suitable for LLM driven code changes (in fact I'm seeing more and more of LLM generated LSC) and I guess a large fraction of mentioned "AI generated codes" can be actually attributable to this.

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

#383

Post by wayoverthecloud »

game_the0ry wrote: post #272
IAmGraydon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk appetite.

Not so sure nowadays. Given how often big tech lays off employees and the abundance of recently laid off tech talent, trying to start your own company sounds a lot more appealing than ever. I consider myself risk-averse and even I am contemplating starting a small business in the event I get laid off.

Interesting. I think the same thing but I wonder if the market is not ready for products created by the big guys, what can I offer? Have you thought in that line?

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

#384

Post by cj »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #178
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'm not a Google employee but I've heard enough stories to know that a surprising amount of code changes at google are basically updating API interfaces. The way google works, the person changing an interface is responsible for updating all dependent code. They create PRs which are then sent to code owners for approval. For lower-level dependencies, this can involve creating thousands of PRs across hundreds of projec…

Do they have tooling for generating scaffolding for various things (like unit/integration tests)?

If we’re guessing what code is easiest and largest proportion of codebase to write, my first guess would be test suites. Lots of lines of repetitive code patterns that repeat and AI is decent at dealing with

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

#387

Post by sethammons »

jcgrillo wrote: post #353
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…

What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti. The problem is finding people to do it with who care enough to think rigorously about what they're going to do before they start doing it. There's this bizarre misconception popular among bigtech managers that there's some tunable tradeoff bet…

"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast"

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

#389

Post by giantg2 »

jcgrillo wrote: post #353
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…

What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti. The problem is finding people to do it with who care enough to think rigorously about what they're going to do before they start doing it. There's this bizarre misconception popular among bigtech managers that there's some tunable tradeoff bet…

"What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti."

In my opinion the reason we get enterprise spaghetti is largely due to requirement issues and scope creep. It's nearly impossible to create a streamlined system without knowing what it should look like. And once the system gets to a certain size, it's impossible to get business buy-in to rearchitect or refactor to the degree that is necessary. Plus the full requirements are usually poorly documented and long forgotten by that time.

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

#390

Post by motoxpro »

ghosty141 wrote: post #354
motoxpro wrote: post #326

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.

But for this boiletplate creating a few snippets in your code generally works better. Especially if things change you dont have to retrain your model. Thats my main problem: for trivial things it works but isnt much better than conventional tools, for hard things it just produces incorrect code such that writing it from scratch barely makes a difference

I think thats a great analogy.

What would it look like if I could have 3-500 snippets instead of 30. Those 300 are things that I do all over my codebase e.g. same basic where query but in the context of whatever function I am in, a click handler with the correct types for that purpose, etc.

There is no way I can have enough hotkeys or memorize that much, and I truly can't type faster than I can hit tab.

I don't need it to think for me. Most coding (front-end/back-end web) involves typing super basic stuff, not writing complex algorithms.

This is where the 10-20% speed-up comes in. On average I am just typing 20% faster by hitting tab.

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