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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

#781

Post by lelanthran »

hitradostava wrote: post #95
ntulpule wrote: post #88

Hi, I lead the teams responsible for our internal developer tools, including AI features. We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases. Google has a unique, massive monorepo which poses a lot of fun challenges when it comes to deploying AI capabilities at scale. 1. We take a lot of care to make sure the AI recommendations are safe and…

I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements. The direction of travel is very clear - LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies. I don't think this is a bad thing - if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss and everyone has examples of LLMs producing buggy or ridiculou…

> Don't look at the state of the art not, look at the direction of travel.

That's what people are doing. The direction of travel over the most recent few (6-12) months is mostly flat.

The direction of travel when first introduced was a very steep line going from bottom-left to top-right.

We are not there anymore.

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

#782

Post by lelanthran »

Johanx64 wrote: post #775
latexr wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> Humans are obviously machines. If not, what are humans then? Fairies?

If humans are machines, then so are fairies.

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

#783

Post by protomolecule »

lupire wrote: post #740
cryptonym wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Do the Chinese call it English Whispers?

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

#784

Post by gmm1990 »

submeta wrote: post #710

Pandora‘s box has been opened. Some say „this is mere tab completion“, some say „it won’t replace the senior engineer.“ I can remember how many fiercely argued 2 years ago that GenAI and Copilot are producing garbage. But here we are: These systems improve the workflow of creating / editing code enormously. You seniors might not be affected, but there are endless many scenarios where it replaces the junior who‘d writ…

I don’t fully understand the workflow were you hand boiler plate code off to a junior wouldn’t the communication overhead be higher than writing it yourself. Certainly llms have valid uses but I see improving junior productivity more than senior productivity

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

#785

Post by skydhash »

Roark66 wrote: post #590
fallingknife wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really seeing this direction of travel. I hear a lot of claims, but they are always 3rd person. I don't know or work with any engineers who rely heavily on these tools for productivity. I don't even see any convincing videos on Youtube. Just show me on engineer sitting down with theses tools for a couple hours and writing a feature that would normally take a couple of days. I'll believe it when I see it.

Well, I rely on it a lot, but not in the IDE, I copy/paste my code and prompts between the ide and LLM. By now I have a library of prompts in each project I can tweak that I can just reuse. It makes me 25% up to 50% faster. Does this mean every project t is done in 50/75% of the time? No, the actual completion time is maybe 10% faster, but i do get a lot more time to spend on thinking about the overall design instead…

Why don’t you read reference documents? The thing with bite-sized information is that is never gives you a coherent global view of the space. It’s like exploring a territory by crawling instead of using a map.

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

#786

Post by randomdata »

tormeh wrote: post #773
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> LLM autocomplete is on an entirely different level.

Which is how they've surpassed 25% in new code, as compared to the 10% (made up number, but clearly non-zero) in the past. But incremental improvement, is all.

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

#787

Post by rty32 »

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".…

> I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

Depends on who you ask.

If Trump wins and Elon Musk actually gets a new job, they would be bragging about replacing humans with AI all day long. And corporates are going to love it.

Not sure about what voters think though. But the fact that most of these companies are in California, New York etc means that it barely matters.

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

#788

Post by makestuff »

red_admiral wrote: post #731
rantallion wrote: post #637

Earlier 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.

I have around 7 YOE, and I have found LLMs useful for very specific questions about syntax whenever I am working in a new language. For example, I needed to write some typescript recently and asked it how can I make a type that does X.

It is not as good with questions about API documentation for popular java libraries though and it will just hallucinate APIs/method names.

If I ask it a generic question like "how can I create a class in Java to invoke this API and store the data in this database" it is pretty useless. I'm sure I could spend more time giving it a better prompt but at that point I can just write the code myself.

Overall they are a better search engine for stackoverflow, but the LLMs are not really helping me code 30% faster or whatever the latest claim is.

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

#789

Post by skydhash »

Kalabasa wrote: post #481
creativenolo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably does. But an amazing number of commenters think they are prompting the copy & pasting, and hoping for the best.

Yep, a lot of headline readers here. It's just a very advanced autocomplete, completely integrated into the internal codebase and IDE. You can read this on the research blog (maybe if everyone just read the blog). e.g. I start typing `var notificationManager` It would suggest `= (Notification Manager) context.getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_MANAGER);` If you've done Android then you know how much boilerplate there is t…

That makes a while since I’ve done Android, but I’m sure that this variable should be a property and be set as part of the lifecycle. And while Android (and any big project) is full of boilerplate, each line is subtly different or it would have already been abstracted in some base class. And even then, the code completion is already so good in Android Studio that you would have to be a complete junior (in this case, you wouldn’t know that the AI suggestion is good) to complain that writing code is slow. Most time spent is designing code, fixing subtle bugs, and refactoring to clean up the code.

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

#790

Post by mdgrech23 »

davnicwil wrote: post #679
yangcheng wrote: post #562

Having worked at both FAANG companies and startups, I can offer a perspective on AI's coding impact in different environments. At startups, engineers work with new tech stacks, start projects from scratch, and need to ship something quickly. LLMs can wrtie way more code. I've seen ML engineers build React frontends without any previous frontend experience, flutter developers write 100-line SQL queries for data analys…

It might not quite be there yet, but one key advantage large codebases have that I think LLMs in time will be able to better exploit is the detection of existing patterns - presuming they're consistent - and application to new code doing similar things or to fix bugs in existing code that deviates from the pattern in some way that causes a bug. It's a different thing to what you're talking about, but it's one way I'd…

large application codebase - consistent - have you worked in the field? I feel like usually there are 3 or 4 patterns from different people/teams at different points in time that spearheaded a particular ideology about how things "should" be done.
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