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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

#391

Post by Dalewyn »

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…

>We are willing to burn far, far more fuel than necessary because we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search.

That's because traditional search fucking sucks balls.

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

#392

Post by rockskon »

No shit a quarter of Google's new code is created by AI. How else do you explain why Google search has been so aggressively awful for the past 5~ years?

Seriously. The penchant for outright ignoring user search terms, relentlessly forcing irrelevant or just plain wrong information on users, and the obnoxious UI changes on YouTube! If I'm watching a video on full screen I have explicitly made it clear that I want YouTube to only show me video! STOP BRINGING UP THE FUCKING VIDEO DESCRIPTION TO TAKE UP HALF THE SCREEN IF I TRY TO BRIEFLY SWIPE TO VIEW THE TIME OR READ A MESSAGE.

I have such deep-seated contempt for AI and it's products for just how much worse it makes people's lives.

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

#393

Post by jihadjihad »

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…

> The problem is finding people to do it with who care enough to think rigorously

> ...

> train them, and reject low quality work.

I agree very strongly with both of these points.

But I've observed a truth about each of them over the last decade-plus of building software.

1) very few people approach the field of software engineering with anything remotely resembling rigor, and

2) there is often little incentive to train juniors and reject subpar output (move fast and break things, etc.)

I don't know where this takes us as an industry? But I feel your comment on a deep level.

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

#394

Post by TacticalCoder »

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…

> and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write

Thankfully I don't find it subtle but plain wrong for anything but trivial stuff. I use it (and pay an AI subscription) for things where false positive won't ruin the day, like parameters validation.

But for anything advanced, it's pretty hopeless.

I've talked with lawyers: same thing. With doctors: same thing.

Which ain't no surprise see how these things do work.

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

Probably lots of highly repetitive boilerplate stuff everywhere. Which in itself is quite horrifying if you think about it.

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

#395

Post by thegrim33 »

bluerooibos wrote: post #308
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 woul…

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

You're saying anything that's ever been popular is popular for a good reason? You can't think of counter examples that disprove this?

You're saying anything that people decide to do is good, or else people wouldn't do it? People never act irrationally? People never blindly act on trends? People never sacrifice long-term results for short-term gain? You can't come up with any counter examples?

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

#396

Post by CapeTheory »

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…

> 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.

Even more naive, but my personal preference: just ban all advertising. The fact that people will pay for ChatGPT implies people will also pay for good search if the free alternative goes away.

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

#397

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

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…

Ahh, well, in order to save money, training is done via an online class with multiple choice questions, or, if your company is like mine and really committed to making sure that you know they take your training seriously, they put portions of a generic book on 'tech Z' in pdf spread spread over a drm ridden web pages.

As for code, that is reviewed, commented and rejected by llms as well. It is used to be turtles. Now it truly is llms all the way down.

That said, in a sane world, this is what should be happening for a company that actually wants to get good results over time .

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

#398

Post by asdfman123 »

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code."

But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment.

So basically, it's a helpful productivity tool but it's not doing any engineering at all. It's probably about as good, maybe slightly worse, than Copilot. (I haven't used it recently though.)

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

#399

Post by asdfman123 »

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…

No, AI is generating a quarter of all characters. It's an autocomplete engine. You press tab, it finishes the line. Doesn't do any heavy lifting at all.

Source: I work there, see my previous comment.

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

#400

Post by int_19h »

eco wrote: post #207
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'd be terribly scared to use it in a language that isn't statically typed with many, many compile time error checks. Unless you're the type of programmer that is writing sabots all day (connecting round pegs into square holes between two data sources) you've got to be very critical of what these things are spitting out.

I can't help but think that Go might be one of the better languages for AI to target - statically typed, verbose with a lot of repeated scaffolding, yet generally not that easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Which might explain why this is a thing at Google specifically.
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