and it shows… Google codebases I see in the wild are the worst - jumbled mess of hard to read code.
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
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It'd be interesting to know how much of Google's code is written by junior engineers. I can't imagine 25% of the code is from juniors, at which point Google's CEO is either exaggerating what he considers LLM-generated code or more than just juniors are using it.
I agree with your take though, it does seem helpful to juniors but not beyond that (yet), and this OP stat seems dubious unless juniors are doing a big portion of the work.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, isn't that the essential idea of industrialization and automation?
I think the critique here is that the AI currently deployed at Google hasn't meaningfully automated this user's life, because most IDEs already solved "very good autocomplete" more than a decade ago.
LLM autocomplete is on an entirely different level. It's not comparable to traditional autocomplete and mostly does not even compete with traditional autocomplete. LLM autocomplete will sometimes write entire blocks of code for you, with surprising skill. I often wonder how it knew what I wanted. It also generates some wrong code from time to time, but that's well worth it.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.\…
Yes, Copilot and other LLM coding tools are just a (much) better version of IntelliSense.
Much worse imo.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What a stupid future. Machines which make errors being “corrected” by machines which make errors in a death spiral. An unbelievable waste of figurative and literal energy. Humans are machines which make errors. Somehow, we got to the moon. The suggestion that errors just mindlessly compound and that there is no way around it, is what's stupid.
> Humans are machines Even if we accept the premise (seeing humans as machines is literally dehumanising and a favourite argument of those who exploit them), not all machines are created equal. Would you use a bicycle to fill your taxes? > Somehow, we got to the moon Quite hand wavey. We didn’t get to the Moon by reading a bunch of text from the era then probabilistically joining word fragments, passing that around t…
Humans are obviously machines. If not, what are humans then? Fairies?
Now once you've recognized that, you're better equiped for task at hand - which is augmenting and ultimately automating away every task that humans-as-machines perform by building equivalent or better machine that performs said tasks at fraction of the cost!
People who want to exploit humans are the ones that oppose automation.
There's still long way to go, but now we've finally reached a point where some tasks that were very ellusive to automation are starting to show great promise of being automated, or atleast being greatly augmented.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#776I 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…
Its interesting to see these LLM tools turning developers into no-code customers. Where tools like visual site builders allowed those without coding experience to code a webpage, LLMs are letting those with coding experience to avoid the step of coding.
There's not even anything wrong with that, don't take my comment the wrong way. It is an interesting question of what happens at scale though. We could easily find ourselves in a spot where very few people know how to code and most producing code don't actually know how it works and couldn't find or fix a bug if they needed to. It also means LLMs would be stuck with today's code for a training set until it can invent its own coding paradigms and languages, at which point we're all left in the dust trusting it to work right.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#777Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#778Earlier 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
Like he says, the "comment" describes what he wants to do. That's not what humans are interested in. The human already knows "what he wants to do" when they read the code. It's the things like "why did he want to do this in the first place?" that is lacking in the code, and what information is available to add in a comment for the sake of humans.
Remember, LLMs are just compilers for programming languages that just so happen to have a lot of similarities with natural language. The code is not the comment. You still need to comment your code for humans.
Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#779Earlier 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" 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.
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Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
#780Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about (c) the human doesn't realize the LLM-generated code is flawed, and accepts it?
I mean what happens when a human doesn't realize the human generated code is wrong and accepts the PR and it becomes part of the corpus of 'safe' code?
Do you ask a junior to review your code or someone experienced in the codebase?