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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

#731

Post by red_admiral »

rantallion wrote: post #637
remus wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

As far as I know, LLMs are a genuine boost for junior developers, but still not close to what senior/principal engineers get up to.

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

#732

Post by tguinot »

qwertox wrote: post #718
tguinot wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

I did not use copilot or cursor. I used the Claude interface. I'm planning to setup a proper editor tool such as Cursor as I believe they got much better lately. Last time I tried was 2023 and it was kind of a pain in the butt.

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

#733

Post by tguinot »

znpy wrote: post #721
tguinot wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds like a great idea, are you going to open source that?

I think I will, I don't have time to maintain additional software right for other people now but I'm definitely planning on open sourcing it when I get time

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

#734

Post by red_admiral »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #632
amelius wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Internally hosted gitlab instances are a thing.

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

#735

Post by lupire »

hyperpape wrote: post #681
onion2k wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" That's only worth doing if you're trying to cut costs though. If the company has unmet ambitions there's no reason to shrink the headcount from 10 to 8 and have the same amount of output when you can keep 10 people and have the output of 12 by leveraging AI.

Almost all the big tech companies have had layoffs over the past several years. I think it’s safe to say cost cutting is very much part of their goal.

But the specific roles being laid off are arbitrary, and the overall goal headcount reduction is driven by macroeconomics factors (I'm being generous there), not based on new efficiencies.

Note the difft between "cost cutting" (do less, to lower cost) and "efficiency" (do same, but with less cost)

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

#736

Post by gniv »

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…

That's pretty nice. Does it write modern C++, as I guess it's expected?

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

#737

Post by binkHN »

pawelmurias wrote: post #703
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"?

[flagged]

I wouldn't call it genius tab completion. Unfortunately, more than half of the time that the "genius" produces the code, I'm wasting my time reviewing code that is incorrect.

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

#738

Post by lupire »

jappgar wrote: post #715
nlehuen wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google does not write much publicly available JavaScript. They wrote their own special flavor. (Same for any hugel legacy operation)

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

#739

Post by karolinepauls »

mos_basik wrote: post #467
karolinepauls wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very few people approach the field of software engineering with anything remotely resembling rigor, and I have this one opinion which I would not say at work: In software development it's easy to feel smart because what you made "works" and you can show "effects". - Does it wrap every failable condition in `except Exception`? Uhh, but look, it works . - Does it define a class hierarchy for what should be a dictiona…

The whole one about the stateful blob of an object with all optional attributes got me real good. Been fighting that for years. But the dev that writes this produces code faster than me and understands parts of the system no one else does and doesn't speak great English, so it continues. And the company is still afloat. So who's right in the end? And does it matter?

I don't know who's right but I know that it's the ergonomics of programming languages that make producing stateful blobs fast and easy that are in the wrong.

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

#740

Post by lupire »

cryptonym wrote: post #709
Aachen wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Next human will put the code in a prompt and ask what it does. Chinese Whispers.

(No need to Orientalize to defamiarize, especially when a huge fraction of the audience is Chinese, so Orientalizing doesn't defamiliarize. Game of Whispers or Telephone works fine.)
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