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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

#501
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These tools also require the developer class to that they are intended to replace to continue to do what they currently do (create the knowledge source to train the AI on). It's not like the AIs are going to be creating the accessible knowledge bases to train AIs on, especially for new language extensions/libraries/etc. This is a one and f'd development. It will give a one time gain and then companies will be shocked…

One of my concerns is that AI may actually slow innovation in software development (tooling, languages, protocols, frameworks and libraries), because the opportunity cost of adopting them will increase, if AI remains unable to be taught new knowledge quickly.

that is solved via larger contexts

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

#502
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but then every line of code we write is hard, because it's meaningful, and that feels bad enough to many developers, I don't know that I've ever even met a developer who wants to be writing endless pools of trivial boilerplate instead of meaningful code. Even the people at work who are willing to say they don't want to deal with the ambiguity and high level design stuff and just want to be told what to do pretty cle…

That, but boilerplate stuff is also incredibly easy to understand. As compared to high density, high meaning code anyway. I prefer more low density low meaning code as it makes it much easier to reason about any part of the system.

So basically it’s a presentation problem.

We want to control code at the call site, boilerplate helps with that by being locally modifiable.

We also want to systematize chunks of code so that they don’t flicker around and mess with a reader.

We wanted this since forever and no one does anything because anything above simple text completion is traditionally seen as an overkill, not the true way, not unix, etc. All sorts of stubborn arguments.

This can be solved by simply allowing code trees instead of lines of code (tree vs table). You drop a boilerplate into code marked as “boilerplate ‘foo’ {…}” and edit it as you see fit, which creates a boilerplate-local patch. Then you can instantly see diffs, find, update boilerplates, convert them to and from regular functions, merge best practices from boilerplate libraries, etc. Problem solved.

It feels like the development itself got collectively stuck in some stupid principles that no one dares to question. Everything that we invent stumbles upon the simple fact that we don’t have any sensible devtime structure, apart from this “file” and “import file” dullness.

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

#503
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting lots of ram will let you run large models on the CPU, but it will be so slow. The Apple Silicon Macs have this shared memory between CPU and GPU that let's the (relatively underpowered GPU, compared to a decent Nvidia GPU) run these models at decent speeds, compared with a CPU, when using llama.cpp. This should all get dramatically better/faster/cheaper within a few years, I suspect. Capitalism will figure th…

Interesting, so this is a Mac-specific solution? That's pretty cool. I assume, then, that the primary goal would be to drop in the beefiest GPU possible when on windows/linux?

There's nothing Mac specific about running LLMs locally, they just happen to be a convenient way to get a ton of VRAM in a single small power efficient package.

In Windows and Linux, yes you'll want at least 12GB of VRAM to have much of any utility but the beefiest consumer GPUs are still topping out at 24GB which is still pretty limiting.

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

#504

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…

I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements. The direction of travel is very clear - LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies. I don't think this is a bad thing - if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss and everyone has examples of LLMs producing buggy or ridiculou…

I'm not really seeing this direction of travel. I hear a lot of claims, but they are always 3rd person. I don't know or work with any engineers who rely heavily on these tools for productivity. I don't even see any convincing videos on Youtube. Just show me on engineer sitting down with theses tools for a couple hours and writing a feature that would normally take a couple of days. I'll believe it when I see it.

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

#505

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…

This is all about the tooling most companies choose when building software: Things with more than enough boilerplate most code is trivial. We can build tools that have far less triviality and more density, where the distance between the code we write and business logic is very narrow.. but then every line of code we write is hard, because it's meaningful, and that feels bad enough to many developers, so we end up wit…

I think you just nailed the paradox of Go's popularity among developers, managers are obvious.

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

#506

If we are talking about the boilerplate code and autofill syntax code that copilot or any other "AI" will offer me when I start typing... Then sure. Sounds about right. The other 75% is the stuff you actually have to think about. This feels like saying linters impact x0% of code. This just feels like an extension of that.

> The other 75% is the stuff you actually have to think about.

I’m pretty sure the actual ratio is much lower than that. In other words, LLMs are currently not good enough to remove the majority of chores, even with the state of the art model trained on highly curated dataset.

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

#508

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…

I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements. The direction of travel is very clear - LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies. I don't think this is a bad thing - if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss and everyone has examples of LLMs producing buggy or ridiculou…

I think that at least partially the negativity is due to the tech bros hyping AI just like they hyped crypto.

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements. The direction of travel is very clear - LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies. I don't think this is a bad thing - if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss and everyone has examples of LLMs producing buggy or ridiculou…

I don't see how this is sustainable. We have essentially eaten the seed corn. These current LLMs have been trained by an enormous corpus of mostly human-generated technical knowledge from sources which we already know to be currently being polluted by AI-generated slop. We also have preliminary research into how poorly these models do when training on data generated by other LLMs. Sure, it can coast off of that initi…

maybe most of the code in the future will be very different from what we’re used to. For instance, AI image processing/computer vision algorithms are being adopted very quickly given the best ones are now mostly transformers networks.

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

#510

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…

This autocomplete seems about on par with github copilot. Do you also get options for prompting it on specific chunks of code and performing specific actions such as writing docs or editing existing code? All things that come standard with gh copilot now.
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