Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 668 posts

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#41

Post by glimshe »

A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me or simply don't know how to work with AI. I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. They get mad at Excel for the poor investment returns. At this point, this is such a strawman, it isn't worth counter arguing.

I think I'll abandon this discussion and keep using AI quietly while exchanging tips with like-minded people who are interested in using it properly and efficiently.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#42

Post by paganel »

A company valued at $4+ trillion based on the recent AI hype alone is touting the benefits of using said AI, and we're supposed to take this shit for granted.

I'm wondering what the Alphabet employees still commenting on this forum have to say about it? I guess for the right comps they can keep their mouths shut no matter the high level of idiocy involved.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#43

Post by flohofwoe »

dewey wrote: post #36
flohofwoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The place to find them would be performance profiles, query plans, telemetry. Tbh, once this information is available (which is the tricky part), in 99% of cases there's really no AI needed to analyze the data, since the 'low hanging fruits' will usually stand out anyway. And once you get into the area where optimization hotspots are no longer obvious, you're already deep in the diminishing returns area and optimiz…

> there's really no AI needed once this information is available Most people are not arguing that problems are too tricky for a human to solve once presented with it, but AI can look at 1000 things at the same time across a whole code base and then just come back with the results a human can review.

True, but at least IME, once you get beyond fixing the 'obvious bugs' (how many there are depends on the initial quality of the code base - but I agree that AI is really useful to find those), you'll get into a murky grey area of "maybe false positives" which require a lot of time to validate. As a result you sink a lot of time creating and tweaking code-base-specific rules to try filtering out false positives, and IMHO this is exactly the tipping point where the whole thing becomes pointless because it becomes a bureaucratic monster.

E.g. a good code analysis tool needs to work predictably at button press on any code base.

Still better than nothing of course, e.g. I actually think bug scanning / code analsysis is indeed the one area where LLMs are actually useful, but it suffers from the same 'diminishing returns' problem as traditional approaches, if not worse (e.g. still no silver bullet, but a mostly useful additional tool in the toolbox).

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#44

Post by maccard »

colechristensen wrote: post #28
VBprogrammer wrote: post #17

I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much e…

Then you're not grounding it to reality properly. LLMs get bad pretty quickly when you just tell them to pull the answer out of thin air. Pin them to reality with actual performance tests to run to test theories and the results will be much better. Performance optimization involves simulating real world loads and measurable results. Give them the opportunity to actually have a closed loop if you want more than trivia…

Have you any example materials that show a harness that an agent can be pointed at an app with some sort of telemetry tool, the results it gained and the cost of doing so? Because my experience is the same as the parents - the LLM goes on massive tangents, and the more tangents it goes on the worse the results get.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#45

Post by asutekku »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #17

I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much e…

I've had a completely different experience. I usually know the problematic part and then ask the AI to optimize that exact part with benchmarks, telling it to try various different approaches, and it very often gains massive performance increases on various tasks, with me of course steering it and giving it pointers every now and then.

I was able to optimize a physical water simulation that was almost unrunnable on browsers to a buttery smooth 60fps version.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#46

Post by shevy-java »

The biggest bug still has not been fixed here, which is:

Google.

We really need an alternative to this greedy and evil corporations de-facto controlling a huge portion of the modern www stack. All decision-making processes are here subjugated to what fits Google's adEmpire. This is a perpetual system of control amplifying abusive systems in place. We already see this with the recent age sniffing; Google just yesterday announced that all android users must hand over their age to everyone else. Before that google kicked out or locked out open source alternatives to android (or, at the least, made their life significantly harder than before). These are not isolated ways of abuse - this is systematic abuse.

We really need alternatives to Google here. It can not be that one tyrant company dictates so much of people's open lives (and no, Firefox is no alternative; Mozilla is basically a nerfed and bribed entity that has given up on firefox many years ago already; ladybird may become an alternative at one point in time, but right now is not and there are questions over how Kling handles the overall project, but these complaints are significantly below what Google is doing globally here).

Fixing more bugs in the adChromium code base does not change the underlying problem at hand.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#47

Post by gieksosz »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #17

I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much e…

I did a lot of SQL optimisation with claude code over the last year, what made it work for me was making sure I verify everything with explain analyze. The whole loop was not fully “agentic” because of this but it was still faster and better than when done entirely manually. Claude also suggested plenty of small optimisations I would otherwise not do.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#48

Post by Razengan »

Me too! It's actually tiring! In a good way

I've mostly only used Codex for reviews, for Godot/GDScript code, and it helped me catch bugs that would've taken me ages to even notice on my own; games be tricky like that.

Claude was mostly useless or annoying up until the last time I tried it (about 3 months ago)

You have to be vigilant though: Codex often picks out obscure edge cases and suggests adding multiple new functions and flags to avoid issues that would be better off left as fast-failure crashes. Maybe that's because of the 5.6 Sol Max I leave it on.

Re: Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

#49

Post by maccard »

glimshe wrote: post #41

A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me or simply don't know how to work with AI. I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. They get mad at Excel for the poor investment returns. At this point, this is such a strawman, it isn't worth counter arguing. I think I'll abandon this discussion and keep using AI qu…

> A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me

I feel this way on this topic too.

> I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you.

The problem is; how _should_ I use AI? On a previous thread, I had two replies to the same comment, one saying "provide the LLM all the context it needs and let it go ham", and the other saying "Carefully guide and craft it and review everything". Both subthreads had people agreeing.

My experience with LLMs is leaving them unattended gives very poor results within a handful of iterations, and that carefully guiding them can be a value add, but the effort ot do that is very often as much as just writing the damn code myself, particularly if there's a few iterations that go on.

Post reply on HN