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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

#471

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

> I think most programmers who claim that LLMs aren't useful are reacting emotionally. They don't want LLMs to be useful because, in their eyes, that would lower the status of programming.

I think revealing the domain each programmer works in and asking in hose domains would reveal obvious trends. I imagine if you work in Web that you'll get workable enough AI gen code, but something like High Performance computing would get slop worse than copying and lasting the first result on Stackoverflow.

A model is only as good as its learning set, and not all types are code are readily able to be indexable.

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

#472

Post by bcherny »

ntulpule wrote: post #88

Hi, I lead the teams responsible for our internal developer tools, including AI features. We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases. Google has a unique, massive monorepo which poses a lot of fun challenges when it comes to deploying AI capabilities at scale. 1. We take a lot of care to make sure the AI recommendations are safe and…

How are you measuring productivity? And is the effect you see in A/B tests statistically significant? Both of these were challenging to do at Meta, even with many thousands of engineers —- curious what worked for you.

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

#473

Post by aiforecastthway »

sally_glance wrote: post #407
aiforecastthway wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ext…

I was totally with you until "70% of things are pretty systematic and repeatable". This has not been my experience, and I think you acknowledged it yourself when you said "Google (as opposed to e.g. a bank)" - there are many more banks in the world than Googles. The main challenge will be transitioning all those "banks" to "Google's" and further still. They have 10y+ codebases written in 5 months by a single genius e…

No, I think we agree! Google SWE roles will be automated faster SWE roles in the financial sector :)

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

#475

Post by wpietri »

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…

Agreed.

The way I explain this to managers is that software development is unlike most work. If I'm making widgets and I fuck up, that widget goes out the door never to be seen again. But in software, today's outputs are tomorrow's raw materials. You can trade quality for speed in the very short term at the cost of future productivity, so you're really trading speed for speed.

I should add, though, that one can do the rigorous thinking before or after the doing, and ideally one should do both. That was the key insight behind Martin Fowler's "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code". Think up front if you can, but the best designs are based on the most information, and there's a lot of information that is not available until later in a project. So you'll want to think as information comes in and adjust designs as you go.

That's something an LLM absolutely can't do, because it doesn't have access to that flow of information and it can't think about where the system should be going.

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

#476

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aeolun wrote: post #301
er4hn wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's reasonable to say that LLMs are not completely useless. There is also a very valid case to make that LLMs are not good at generating production ready code. I have found asking LLMs to make me Nix flakes to be a very nice way to make use of Nix without learning the Nix language. As an example of not being production ready: I recently tried to use ChatGPT-4 to provide me with a script to manage my gmail labels. Th…

I find a recurring theme in these kind of comments where people seem to blame their laziness on the tool. The problem is not that the tools are imperfect, it’s that you apparently use them in situations where you expect perfection. Does a carpenter blame their hammer when it fails to drive in a screw?

>Does a carpenter blame their hammer when it fails to drive in a screw?

That's the exact problem. I have plenty of screwdrivers but there's so much pressure from people not in carpentry telling me to use this shiny new army Swiss knife contraption. Will it work? Probably, if I'm just screwing in a few screws. Would I readily abandon my set of precision built, magnetic tip, etc. Screwdriver set for it? Definitely not.

I'm sure it's great for non-carpenters to have so many tools in so small a space. But I developed skills and tools already. My job isn't just to screw in a few screws a day and call it quits. People wanting to replace me for a quarter the cost for this Swiss army carpenter will quickly see a quality difference and realize why it's not a solution to everything.

Or in the software sense, maybe they are fine with unlevel shelves and hanging nails in carpet. It's certainly not work I'd find acceptable.

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

#477

Post by gonzobonzo »

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…

Doesn't this get to one of the fundamental issues though, that many of these frameworks and languages are poorly constructed in the first place? A lot of the times people turn to web searches, Stack Overflow, or AI is because they want to do X, and there's no quick, clear, and intuitive way to do X. I write cheat sheets for opaque parts of various frameworks myself. A lot of them aren't fundamentally difficult once you understand them, but they're constructed in an extremely convoluted way, and there's usually extremely poor documentation explaining how to actually use them.

In fact, I'd say I use AI more for documentation than I do for code itself, because AI generated documentation is often superior to official documentation.

In the end, these things shouldn't be necessary (or barely necessary) if we had well constructed languages, frameworks, libraries and documentation, but it appears like it's easier to build AI than to make things non-convoluted in the first place.

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

#478

Post by wpietri »

llm_trw wrote: post #454
jcgrillo wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When scopes creep and requirements change, simply refactor. Where is it written in The Law that you have to accrue technical debt? EDIT: I'm gonna double down on this one. The fact that your organization thinks they can demand of you that you can magically weathervane your codebase to their changeable whims is evidence that you have failed to realistically communicate to them what is actually possible to do well . Th…

>When scopes creep and requirements change, simply refactor. Congratulations, you just refactored out a use case which was documented in a knowledge base which has been replaced by 3 newer ones since then, happens once every 18 months and makes the company go bankrupt if it isn't carried out promptly. The type of junior devs who think that making code tidy is fixing the application are the type of dev who you don't l…

Refactoring is improving the design of existing code. It shouldn't change behavior.

And regardless, the way you prevent loss of important functionality isn't by hoping people read docs that no longer exist. It's by writing coarse-grained tests that makes sure the software does the important things. If a programmer wants to change something that breaks a test like that, they go ask a product manager (or whatever you call yours) if that feature still matters.

And if nobody can say whether a feature still matters, the organization doesn't have a software problem, it has a serious management problem. Not all the coding techniques in the world can fix that.

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

#479

Post by johnnyanmac »

uh_uh wrote: post #462
coliveira wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who can do it will be high status They don't have high status even today, imagine in a world where they will be seen as just reviewers for AI code...

> They don't have high status even today Try putting on a dating website that you work at Google vs you work in agriculture and tell us which yielded more dates.

Does it matter? I imagine the tanned shirtless farmer would get more hits than the pasty million dollar salary Googler anyway. (no offense to Googleers).

With so many hits, it's about hitting all the checkmarks instead of minmaxing on one check.

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