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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

#71

Post by EasyMark »

AlexandrB wrote: post #61
ausbah wrote: post #3

i would be may more impressed if LLMs could do code compression. more code == more things that can break, and when llms can generate boatloads of it with a click you can imagine what might happen

Exactly this. Code is a liability, if you can do the same thing with less code you're often better off.

Not if it’s already stable and has been running for years. Legacy doesn’t necessarily mean “need replacement because of technical debt”. I’ve seen lots of people want to replace code that has been running basically bug free for years because “there are better coding styles and practices now”

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

#72

Post by mattigames »

Nullabillity wrote: post #43
dyauspitr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the public cares wether their code is written by machines or real people as long as the product works.

Just today, Google Calendar asked me whether I wanted the "easy" or "depressed" colour scheme.

It's for when you have an upcoming funeral, the calendar it's just trying to dress appropriately.

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

#73

Post by 8note »

ausbah wrote: post #3

i would be may more impressed if LLMs could do code compression. more code == more things that can break, and when llms can generate boatloads of it with a click you can imagine what might happen

How would it know which edge cases are being useful and which ones aren't?

I understand more code as being more edge cases

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

#74

Post by 8note »

jeffparsons wrote: post #19
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually sparked an idea for me. Could code complexity be measured as cumulative entropy as measured by running LLM token predictions on a codebase? Notably, verbose boilerplate would be pretty low entropy, and straightforward code should be decently low as well.

Not quite, I think. Some kinds of redundancy are good, and some are bad. Good redundancy tends to reduce mistakes rather than introduce them. E.g. there's lots of redundancy in natural languages, and it helps resolve ambiguity and fill in blanks or corruption if you didn't hear something properly. Similarly, a lot of "entropy" in code could be reduced by shortening names, deleting types, etc., but all those things we…

Interpreting this comment, it would predict low complexity for code copied unnecessarily.

I'm not sure though. If it's copied a bunch of times, and it actually doesn't matter because each usecase of the copying is linearly independent, does it matter that it was copied?

Over time, you'd still see copies being changed by themselves show up as increased entropy

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

#75

Post by Tier3r »

Google is getting enshittified. It's already visible in many small ways. I was just using Google maps and in the route they called X (bus) Interchange as X International. I can only assume this happened because they are using AI to summarise routes now. Why in the world are they doing that? They have exact location names available.

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

#76

Post by 8note »

marcosdumay wrote: post #26
dmix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elitism of programmers who think the boilerplate code they write for 25% of the job, that's already been written before by 1000 other people before, is in fact a valuable use of company time to write by hand again. IMO it's only really an issue if a competent human wasn't involved in the process, basically a person who could have written it if needed, then they do the work connecting it to the useful stuff, and h…

If 25% of your code is boilerplate, you have a serious architectural problem. That said, I've seen even higher ratios. But never in any place that survived for long.

Is it though? It seems to me like a team ownership boundary question rather than an architecture question.

Architecturally, it sounds like different architecture components map somewhere close to 1:1 to teams, rather than teams hacking components to be closer coupled to each other because they have the same ownership.

I'd see too much boilerplate as being a organization/management org issue rather than a code architecture issue

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

#77

Post by kev009 »

dmix wrote: post #18
kev009 wrote: post #11

I would hope a CEO, especially a technical one, would have enough sense to couple that statement to some useful business metric, because in isolation it might be announcement of public humiliation.

The elitism of programmers who think the boilerplate code they write for 25% of the job, that's already been written before by 1000 other people before, is in fact a valuable use of company time to write by hand again. IMO it's only really an issue if a competent human wasn't involved in the process, basically a person who could have written it if needed, then they do the work connecting it to the useful stuff, and h…

Doing the same thing but faster might just mean you are masturbating more furiously. Show me the money, especially from a CEO.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

Tier3r wrote: post #75

Google is getting enshittified. It's already visible in many small ways. I was just using Google maps and in the route they called X (bus) Interchange as X International. I can only assume this happened because they are using AI to summarise routes now. Why in the world are they doing that? They have exact location names available.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by kibwen »

joeevans1000 wrote: post #45
hipadev23 wrote: post #17

Google is now mass-producing techdebt at rates not seen since Martin Fowler’s first design pattern blogposts.

Not really technical debt when you will be able to regenerate 20K lines of code in a minute then QA and deploy it automatically.

So a fresh, new ledger of technical debt every morning, impossible to ever pay off?
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