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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

#741

Post by whywhywhywhy »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #705
NotAnOtter wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at google (until last Friday). Agree with what you said. My thoughts are 1. This quote is clearly meant to exaggerate reality, and they are likely including things like fully automated CL/PR's which have been around for a decade as "AI generated". 2. I stated before that if a team of 10 is equally as productive as a team of 8 utilizing things like copilot, it's fair to say "AI replaced 2 engineers", in my…

> no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general. This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer".…

> and from the public in general

Don't think the public will be that concerned about people in Google's salary bracket losing their jobs.

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

#742

Post by lupire »

Aachen wrote: post #727
qwertox wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see. Might still be good to have a verbose comment than no comment at all, as well as a marker of "this was generated" so (by the age of the code) you have some idea of what quality the LLM was in that year and whether to proofread it once more or not

External comments are API usage comments. LLM prompts are also implementation proposal.

Implementation comments belong inside the implementation, so they should be over if not deleted.

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

#743

Post by binkHN »

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.

Right now my opinion is that they're 60% unhelpful, so I largely agree with you. Sometimes I'll find the AI came up with a somewhat better way of doing something, but the vast majority of the time it does something wrong or does something that appears right, but it's actually wrong and I can only spot it with a somewhat decent code review.

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

#744

Post by lupire »

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…

That's fine for your quick hack that is probably a reimplementation of an existing program you can't find.

But it's not a production quality implementation of new need.

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

#745

Post by qwertox »

tguinot wrote: post #732
qwertox wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I tried Cursor this month but even though it is much better than copilot, it also tries to do too much. And both of them fail regularly at generating proper autocompletions, which makes Cursor a bigger annoyance because it messes up your code quite often, which copilot doesn't do. Cursor is too aggressive.

But using copilot as a better autocomplete is really helpful and well worth the subscription. Just while typing as well as giving it more precise instructions via comments.

It's like a little helper in the editor, while the ChatGPT/Claude in the browser are more like "thinking machines" which can generate really usable code.

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

#746

Post by ktnaWA »

arisAlexis wrote: post #644
robertlagrant wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because you are using it like that doesn't mean that it can't be used for the whole stack Well no, but we have no evidence it can be used for the whole stack, whatever that means.

Even last year's gpt4 could make a whole iphone app from scratch for someone that doesn't know how to code. You can find videos online. I think you are applying the ostrich method which is understandable. We need to adapt.

Which industry would you pivot to? The only industry that is desperate for workers right now is the defense industry. But manufacturing shells for Ukraine and Israel does not seem appealing.

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

#747

Post by Leherenn »

hgomersall wrote: post #623
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…

Before I go and rip out and replace my development workflow, is it notably better than auto complete suggestions from CoC in neovim (with say, rust-analyzer)? I'm generally pretty impressed how quickly it gives me the right function call or whatever, or it's the one of the top few.

It's more than choosing the right function call, it goes further than that. If your code has patterns, it recognises and suggests them.

For instance, one I find very useful is that we have this pattern of checking the result of a function call, logging the error and returning, or whatever. So now, every time you have `result = foo()`, it will auto suggest `if (!result) log_error...` with a generally very good error message.

Very basic, but damn convenient. The more patterns you use, the more helpful it becomes.

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

#749

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#750

Post by ytss »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #741
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general. This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer".…

> and from the public in general Don't think the public will be that concerned about people in Google's salary bracket losing their jobs.

The public might though be concerned that if they are being replaced, many in other positions at other companies will soon be replaced as well.
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