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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

#591

Post by simianparrot »

ttul wrote: post #572

I wanted a new feature in our customer support console and the dev lead suggested I write a JIRA. I’m the CEO, so this is not my usual thing (and probably should not be). I told Claude what I wanted and pasted in a .js file from the existing project so that it would get a sense of the context. It cranked out a fully functional React component that actually looks quite nice too. Two new API calls were needed, but Clau…

You’re also the CEO so chances are the people looking at that ticket aren’t going to tell you the absolute mess the AI snippet actually is and how pointless it was to include it instead of a simple succinct sentence explaining the requirements.

If you’re not a developer chances are very high the code it produces will look passable but is actually worthless — or worse, it’s misleading and now a dev has to spend more time deciphering the task.

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

#592

Post by arisAlexis »

simplyluke wrote: post #580
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…

This is exactly how I’ve used copilot for over a year now. It’s really helpful! Especially with repetitive code. Certainly worth what my employer pays for it. The general public has a very different idea of that though and I frequently meet people very surprised the entire profession hasn’t been automated yet based on headlines like this.

Because you are using it like that doesn't mean that it can't be used for the whole stack and on its own and the public including laymen such as the Nvidia CEO and Sam think that yes, we (I'm a dev) will be replaced. Plan accordingly my friend.

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

#593

Post by Wheatman »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #206

I cannot imagine this to be true, cause imo current LLM's coding abilities are very limited. It definitely makes me more productive to use it as a tool, but I use it mainly for boilerplate and short examples (where I had to read some library documentation before). Whenever the problem requires thinking, it horribly fails because it cannot reason (yet). So unless this is also true for google devs, I cannot see that 25…

My guess is that they counted each line of code made by an engineer using AI coding tools.

Besides, even google employees write a lot of boilerplate, especially android IIRC, not to mention simple but essential code, so AI can prevent carpal tunnel for the junior devs working on that.

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

#594

Post by mcintyre1994 »

OnionBlender wrote: post #528
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…

Do people find these AI auto complete things helpful? I was trying the XCode one and it kept suggesting API calls that don't exist. I spent more time fixing its errors than I would have spent typing the correct API call.

I like Cursor, it seems very good at keeping its autocomplete within my code base. If I use its chat feature and ask it to generate new code that doesn’t work super well. But it’ll almost always autocomplete the right function name as I’m typing, and then infer the correct parameters to pass in if they’re variables and if the function is in my codebase rather than a library. It’s also unsurprisingly really good at pattern recognition, so if you’re adding to an enum or something it’ll autocomplete that sensibly too.

I think it’d be more useful if it was clipboard aware though. Sometimes I’ll copy a type, then add a param of that type to a function, and it won’t have the clipboard context to suggest the param I’m trying to add.

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

#595

Post by olalonde »

hitradostava wrote: post #95
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…

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 continually surprised by the amount of negativity

Maybe I'm just old, but to me, LLMs feel like magic. A decade ago, anyone predicting their future capabilities would have been laughed at.

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

#596

Post by cetu86 »

reverius42 wrote: post #183
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What a stupid future. Machines which make errors being “corrected” by machines which make errors in a death spiral. An unbelievable waste of figurative and literal energy. Humans are machines which make errors. Somehow, we got to the moon. The suggestion that errors just mindlessly compound and that there is no way around it, is what's stupid.

To err is human. To err at scale is AI.

I fear that we'll see a lot of humans err at scale next Tuesday. Global warming is another example of human error at scale.

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

#597

Post by goatlover »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #122
latexr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality That’s a huge “if”, and by your own admission not what’s happening now. > other LLM agents reviewing code, feeding in compile errors, letting other LLM agents interact with the produced code, etc. What a stupid future. Machines which make errors being “corrected” by machines which make errors in a death spiral. An unbelievable waste of figurative and lit…

> What a stupid future. Machines which make errors being “corrected” by machines which make errors in a death spiral. An unbelievable waste of figurative and literal energy. Humans are machines which make errors. Somehow, we got to the moon. The suggestion that errors just mindlessly compound and that there is no way around it, is what's stupid.

Machines are intelligently designed for a purpose. Humans are born and grow up, have social lives, a moral status and are conscious, and are ultimately the product of a long line of mindless evolution that has no goals. Biology is not design. It's way messier.

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

#598

Post by unglaublich »

atoav wrote: post #537
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…

So this is basically the google CEO saying "a quarter of our terminal inputs is written by a glorified tab completion"?

Yes, isn't that the essential idea of industrialization and automation?

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

#599

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

cdchn wrote: post #558
jvanveen wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hours; but days instead of months: porting around 30k lines of legacy livescript project to typescript. Most of the work is in tweaking a prompt for Claude (using Aider) so the porting process is done correctly.

Thankfully it seems like AI is best at automating the most tedious and arguably most useless endeavor in software engineering- rewriting perfectly good code in whatever the language du jour is.

Again, what AI is good at shows the revealed preferences of the training data, so it does make sense that it would excel at pointless rewrites.

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

#600

Post by gloflo »

ttul wrote: post #572

I wanted a new feature in our customer support console and the dev lead suggested I write a JIRA. I’m the CEO, so this is not my usual thing (and probably should not be). I told Claude what I wanted and pasted in a .js file from the existing project so that it would get a sense of the context. It cranked out a fully functional React component that actually looks quite nice too. Two new API calls were needed, but Clau…

> Everyone knows this was “made by AI” because ...

They should know because you told them so.

Having to decipher weird code only to discover it was not written by a human is not nice.

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