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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

#511

Post by hackerknew »

asdfman123 wrote: post #398

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…

I wondered if this the real context. i.e. They are just referring to code-completion as AI-generated code. But, the article seems like it is referring to more than that?

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

#512

Post by girvo »

grepLeigh wrote: post #302
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 have a whole "chop wood, carry water" speech born from leading corporate software teams. A lot of work at a company of sufficient size boils down to keeping up with software entropy while also chipping away at some initiative that rolls up to an OKR. It can be such a demotivating experience for the type of smart, passionate people that FANNGs like to hire. There's even a buzzword for it: KTLO (keep the lights on).…

> KTLO (keep the lights on)

Some places also call this "RTB" for "run the business" type work. Nothing but respect for the engineers who enjoy that kind of approach, I work with several!

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

#513

Post by ImaCake »

neaanopri wrote: post #488
deely3 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics. How? Which metrics?

There's only one metric that matters at the end of the day, and that's $. Revenue. Unfortunately there's a lot of lag

> Unfortunately there's a lot of lag

A great generalisation and understatement! Often looking like you are becoming more efficient is more important than actually being more efficient, e.g you need to impress investors. So you cut back on maintenance and other cost centres and the new management can blame you in 6 years time for it when you are far enough away from it to not hurt you.

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

#514

Post by GeneralMayhem »

remram wrote: post #419
devonbleak wrote: post #197

It's Go. 25% of the code is just basic error checking and returning nil.

Another 60% is auto-generated protobuf/grpc code. Maybe protoc counts as "AI".

Google does not check in protoc-generated code. It's all generated on demand by Blaze/Bazel.

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

#515

Post by ghostpepper »

asdfman123 wrote: post #398

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…

Does it make you 25% more productive?

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

#516

Post by monocasa »

kelnos wrote: post #368
brainwad wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM codegen at Google isn't unsupervised. It's integrated into the IDE as both autocomplete and prompt-based assistant, so you get a lot of feedback from a) what suggestions the human accepts and b) how they fix the suggestion when it's not perfect. So future iterations of the model won't be trained on LLM output, but on a mixture of human written code and human-corrected LLM output. As a dev, I like it. It speed…

What about (c) the human doesn't realize the LLM-generated code is flawed, and accepts it?

I mean what happens when a human doesn't realize the human generated code is wrong and accepts the PR and it becomes part of the corpus of 'safe' code?

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

#517

Post by alxjrvs »

asdfman123 wrote: post #398

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…

In my day to day, this still remains the main way I interact with AI coding tools.

I regularly describe it as "The best snippet tool I've ever used (because it plays horseshoes)".

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

#518

Post by stephenr »

nosbo wrote: post #86

I don't write code as I'm a sysadmin. Mostly just scripts. But is this like saying intellisense writes 25% of my code? Because I use autocomplete to shortcut stuff or to create a for loop to fill with things I want to do.

> I don't write code as I'm a sysadmin. Mostly just scripts.

.... so what do you put in your scripts if not code?

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

#519

Post by shiroiushi »

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.

> trying to start your own company sounds a lot more appealing than ever.

It really isn't. Even if you get laid off from a large tech company, you probably didn't have to pay a cent to get the job there in the first place, and you started drawing a paycheck right away (after the initial delay due to the pay cycle). If you only work there for 6 months, you can save a really good amount of money if you have frugal habits.

Starting a company isn't nearly as easy, usually requires up-front investment, and there can be a long time before you generate any profit. Either you need some business idea that's going to generate profit (or at least enough revenue to give the founder(s) a paycheck), or a business loan or other funding, which means convincing someone to invest in your company somehow.

Starting your own company only sounds appealing if you ignore reality, or have the privilege of having plenty of cash saved up for such a venture.

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

#520

Post by jon_richards »

macintux wrote: post #202
taeric wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the documentation is out of date, such that it doesn't help, this doesn't bode well for the training data of the AI helping it get it right, either?

AI can presumably integrate all of the forum discussions talking about how people really use the code. Assuming discussions don't happen in Slack, or Discord, or...

I often find the opposite. Documentation can be up to date, but AI suggests deprecated or removed functions because there’s more old code than new code. Pgx v5 is a particularly consistent example.
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