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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

#631

Post by saagarjha »

afro88 wrote: post #553
bubaumba wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeh, but the main problem is the quality. with algorithm bug can be fixed. with llm it's more complicated. in practice they do some mistakes consistently, and in some cases cannot recover even with assistance. (don't take me wrong, I'm very happy with the results most of the time)

You just fix the mistakes and keep moving. It's like autocomplete where you still need to fill in the blanks or select a different completion.

Spotting and fixing mistakes in a LSC is no small feat.

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

#632

Post by mewpmewp2 »

amelius wrote: post #614
Maxion wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's really goddam satisfying having good autocomplete, especially when you are just writing boilerplate lines of code to get the code into a state where you actually get to work on the fun stuff (ther harder problems).

Also if your code gets sent to someone else's cloud?

Have you ever had your code repository hosted by Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab or similar?

If so, all your code is sent to cloud.

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

#633

Post by mewpmewp2 »

mmmpetrichor wrote: post #573
atoav wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, but he wants people to hear "reduce headcount by 25% if you buy our shit!"

How do you know that? You are creating this false sense of expectations and hype yourself.

I am going to argue contrary. If AI increases productivity 2x, it opens up as much new usecases that previously didn't seem worthy to do for its cost. So overall there will just be more work.

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

#634

Post by arkh »

fuzztester wrote: post #549
reverius42 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

err , "hallucinate" is the euphemism you're looking for. ;)

I don't like the use of hallucinate. It implies that LLM have some kind of model of reality and some times get confused. They don't have any kind of model of anything, they cannot "hallucinate", they can only output wrong results.

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

#635

Post by ncruces »

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 particularly like the part where it suggests changes to pasted code.

When I copy and paste code, very often it needs some small changes (like changing all xs to ys and at the same time widths to heights).

It's very good at this, and does the right thing the vast majority of the time.

It's also good with test code. Test code is supposed to be explicit, and not very abstracted (so someone only mildly familiar with a codebase that's looking at a failing test can at least figure the cause). This means it's full of boilerplate, and a smart code generator can help fill that in.

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

#636

Post by davedx »

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'm working on a CRM with a flexible data model, and ChatGPT has written most of the code. I don't use the IDE integrations because I find them too "low level" - I work with GPT more in a sort of "pair programming" session: I give it high level, focused tasks with bits of low level detail if necessary; I paste code back and forth; and I let it develop new features or do refactorings.

This workflow is not perfect but I am definitely building out all the core features way faster than if I wrote the code myself, and the code is in quite a good state. Quite often I do some bits of cleanup, refactorings, making sure typings are complete myself, then update ChatGPT with what the code now looks like.

I think what people miss is there are dozens of different ways to apply AI to your day-to-day as a software engineer. It also helps with thinking things through, architecture, describing best practices.

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

#637

Post by rantallion »

remus wrote: post #607
asdfman123 wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most AI hype is this bad. They have to justify the valuations.

"tab completion good enough to write 25% of code" feels like a pretty good hit rate to me! Especially when you consider that a good chink of the other 75% is going to be the complex, detailed stuff where you probably want someone thinking about it fairly carefully.

The problem being that the time spent fixing the bugs in that 25% outweighs the time saved. Now that tools like Copilot are being widely used, studies are showing that they do not in fact boost productivity. All claims to the contrary seem to be either anecdotal or marketing fluff.

https://www.techspot.com/news/104945-ai-coding-assistants-do...

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

#638

Post by qeternity »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #594
OnionBlender wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

I really like Cursor but the more I use it the more frustrated I get when it ends up in a tight loop of wanting to do something that I do not want to do. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to say “do not do this thing or things like it for the next 5 minutes”.

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

#640

Post by davedx »

guappa wrote: post #627
olalonde wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nah, you just were not up to speed with the current research. Which is completely normal. Now marketing departments are on the job.

Transformers were proposed in 2017. A decade ago none of this was predictable.
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