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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

#711

Post by cryptonym »

nlehuen wrote: post #660
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 also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering. However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript. One thing the system is already pretty good at is wri…

I find writing code to be almost relaxing plus that's really a tiny fraction of dev work. Not too excited about potential productivity gains based purely on authoring snippets. I find it much more interesting on boosting maintainability, robustness and other quality metrics (not focusing on quality of AI output, actual quality of the code base).

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

#712

Post by tguinot »

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"?

I'm sorry but I don't understand how people say LLMs are simply "tab completion".

They allow me to do much more than that thanks to all the knowledge they contain.

For instance, yesterday I wanted to write a tool that transfers any large file that is still being appended to to multiple remote hosts, with a fast throughput.

By asking Claude for help I obtained exactly what I want in under two hours.

I'm no C/C++ expert yet I have now a functional program using libtorrent and libfuse.

By using libfuse my program creates a continuously growing list of virtual files (chunks of the big file).

A torrent is created to transfer the chunks to remote hosts.

Each chunk is added to the torrent as it appears on the file system thanks to the BEP46 mutable torrent feature in libtorrent.

On each receving host, the program rebuilds the large file by appending new chunks as soon as they are downloaded through the torrent.

Now I can transfer a 25GB file (and growing) to 15 hosts as it is being written too.

Before LLM this would have taken me at least four days as I did not know those libraries.

LLMs aren't just parrots or tab completers, they actually contain a lot of useful knowledge and they're very good at explaining it clearly.

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

#713

Post by alickz »

nlehuen wrote: post #660
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 also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering. However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript. One thing the system is already pretty good at is wri…

Comment Driven Programming might be interesting, as an offshoot of Documentation Driven Programming

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

#714

Post by qwertox »

Aachen wrote: post #701
miki123211 wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good idea even outside of Google, with tools like copilot and such. Often when I don't know exactly what function / sequence of functions I need to achieve a particular outcome, I put in a comment describing what I want to do, and Copilot does the rest. I then remove the comment once I make sure that the generated code actually works. I find it a lot less flow-breaking than stackoverflow or even asking an L…

Why remove the comment that summarises the intent for humans? The compiler will ignore your comment anyway, so it's only there for the next human who comes along and will help them understand the code

It's often unnecessarily verbose. If you read a comment and glance at the code that follows, you'll understand what it is supposed to do. But the comment you're giving as an instruction to an LLM usually contains information which will then be duplicated in the generated code.

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

#715

Post by jappgar »

nlehuen wrote: post #660
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 also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering. However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript. One thing the system is already pretty good at is wri…

I can guarantee you there is more publicly accessible javascript in the world than C++.

Copilot will autocomplete entire functions as well, sometimes without comments or even after just typing "f". It uses your previous edits as context and can assume what you're implementing pretty well.

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

#716

Post by znpy »

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…

> 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.

I really mean no offense, but your example doesn't sound much different from what old IDEs (say, Netbeans) used to do 15 years ago.

I could design a Swing ui and it would generate the code and if I wanted to override a method it would generate a decent boilerplate boilerplate (a getter, like in your example) along with usual comments and definitely correct parameters list (with correct types).

Is this "AI Code" thing something that appears new because at some point we abandoned IDEs with very strong intellisense (etc) ?

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

#717

Post by michaelbuckbee »

nlehuen wrote: post #660
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 also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering. However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript. One thing the system is already pretty good at is wri…

I don't work at Google, but I do something similar with my code: write comments, generate the code, and then have the AI tooling create test cases.

AI coding assistants are generally really good at ramping up a base level of tests which you can then direct to add more specific scenario's to.

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

#718

Post by qwertox »

tguinot wrote: post #712
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"?

I'm sorry but I don't understand how people say LLMs are simply "tab completion". They allow me to do much more than that thanks to all the knowledge they contain. For instance, yesterday I wanted to write a tool that transfers any large file that is still being appended to to multiple remote hosts, with a fast throughput. By asking Claude for help I obtained exactly what I want in under two hours. I'm no C/C++ exper…

> By asking Claude for help I obtained exactly what I want in under two hours.

Did you use it in your editor or via the chat interface in the browser? Because they are two different approaches, and the one in the editor is mostly a (pretty awesome) tab completion.

When I tell an LLM to "create a script which does ..." I won't be doing this in the editor, even if copilot does have the chat interface. I'll be doing this in the browser because there I have a proper chat topic to which I can get back later, or review it.

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

#719

Post by CaptainFever »

0points wrote: post #620
farseer wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not even been 2 years, and you think things are coming to a halt?

Yes. The models require training data and they already been fed the internet. More and more of the content generated since is LLM generated and useless as training data. The models get worse, not better by being fed their own output, and right now they are out of training data. This is why Reddit just went profitable, AI companies buy their text to train their models because it is at least somewhat human written. Of…

Data is not the only factor. Architecture improvements, data filtering etc. matter too.

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

#720

Post by red_admiral »

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…

A few years ago we called that IntelliSense, right?

I remember many years ago as a Java developer, Netbeans could do such things as complete `psvm` to "public static void main() {...}", or if you had a field "private String name;" you could press some key combination and it would generate you the getter and setter, complete with javadoc which was mandatory at that place because apparently you need "Returns the name.\n @return The name." on a method called getName() in case you wondered what it was for.

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