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

businessinsider.com

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

#861

Post by Aachen »

munksbeer wrote: post #825
Aachen wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of not having to think about the implementation, especially in a language that we've by now well-established can't be written safely by humans (including by Google's own research into Android vulnerabilities if I'm not mistaken), at least with the current level of LLM, worries me the most Time will tell whether it outputs worse, equal, or better quality than skilled humans, but I'd be very wary of anything…

> worries me the most It isn't something I worry about at all. If it doesn't work and starts creating bugs and horrible code, the best places will adjust to that and it won't be used or will be used more judiciously. I'll still review code like I always do and prevent bad code from making it into our repo. I don't see why it's my problem to worry about. Why is it yours?

Because I do security audits

Functional bugs in edge cases are annoying enough, and I seem to run into these regularly as a user, but there's yet another class of people creating edge cases for their own purposes. The nonchalant "if it doesn't work"... I don't know whether that confirms my suspicion that not all developers are aware of (as a first step; let alone control for) the risks

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

#862

Post by pizzafeelsright »

lupire wrote: post #744
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'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.

I am of the strong opinion most problems were solved 20-40 years ago and that most code written today is reimplementation using different languages.

I have shipped production code using LLMs in languages I did not study approved by seasoned SWE's is evidence that an acceleration is happening.

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

#863

Post by Jyaif »

avsteele wrote: post #752
Jyaif wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Google out there monitoring the IDE activity of every engineer, logging the amount of code created, by what, lines, characters, and how it was generated A good chunk ( ) of their code goes in a centralized repo, and is written via a centralized web IDE. So measuring everything you mentioned is not hard. ( ) Android, Chrome, and other similar projects are exceptions.

How does this allow them to measure the % generated by AI tooling?

The IDE integrates the AI generator, like copilot.

Yes, they'll miss AI-generated code that is copy pasted, so they only have a lower bound of AI-generated code.

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

#864

Post by dogleash »

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…

> I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements.

I'm excited about the possibilities and I still recoil at the refined marketer prose.

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

#865

Post by blindhippo »

awkward wrote: post #860
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…

Stuff that works well with AI seems to correlate pretty well with high churn changes. I've had good luck using AI to port large numbers of features from version A to version B, or getting code with a a lot of dependencies under mocked unit tests. It's easy to see that adding up quickly to represent large percentages of the codebase by line, but it's not feature development or solving hard problems.

Same things I use it for as well - crap like "update this class to use JDK21" or "re-implement this client to use AWS SDKv2" or whatever.

And it works maybe... 80% of the way and I spend all my time fixing the remaining 20%. Anecdotally I don't "feel" like this really accelerates me or reduces the time it would take me to do the change if I just implemented the translation manually.

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

#866

Post by Aachen »

caeril wrote: post #851
Aachen wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of not having to think about the implementation, especially in a language that we've by now well-established can't be written safely by humans (including by Google's own research into Android vulnerabilities if I'm not mistaken), at least with the current level of LLM, worries me the most Time will tell whether it outputs worse, equal, or better quality than skilled humans, but I'd be very wary of anything…

It's worrying, yes, but we've had stackoverflow copy-paste coding for over a decade now already, which has exactly the same effects. This isn't a new concern. Thoughtless software development started a long time ago.

As a security consultant, I think I'm aware of security risks all the time, also when I'm developing code just as a hobby in spare time. I can't say that I've come across a lot of stackoverflow code that was unsafe. It happened (like unsafe SVG file upload handling advice) and I know of analyses that find it in spades, but I personally correct the few that I see (got enough stackoverflow rep to downvote, comment, or even edit without the user's approval though I'm not sure I've ever needed that) and the ones found in studies may be in less-popular answers that people don't come across as often because we should be seeing more of them otherwise, both personally and in the customer's code

So that's not to say there is nothing to be concerned about on stackoverflow, just that the risk seems manageable and understood. You also nearly always have to fit it to your own situation anyway. With the custom solutions from generative models, this is all not yet established and you're not having to customise (look at) it further if it made a plausible-looking suggestion

Perhaps this way of coding ends up introducing fewer bugs. Time will tell, but we all know how many wrong answers these things generate in text as well as what they were trained on, giving grounds for worry—while also gathering experience, of course. I'm not saying to not use it at all. It's a balance and something to be aware of

I also can't say that I find it to be thoughtless when I look for answers on stackoverflow. Perhaps as a beginning coder, you might copy bigger bits? Or without knowing what it does? That's not my current experience, though

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

#867

Post by insane_dreamer »

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…

also useful for writing unit tests, comments, descriptions, so if you count all of that as code, together with boilerplate stuff, then yeah, it could add up to 25%.

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

#868

Post by mmcdermott »

darth_avocado wrote: post #852
ytss wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not how the mind works. People cheered when Elon fired 80% of the Twitter staff. No one cares when people with high paying jobs suffer.

The people who cheered about the firing of 80% of the Twitter staff largely believed (rightly or wrongly) that they were being adversely affected by them. While Google may be seen with more wariness in tech circles, I don't think the average person believes that Google is actively harming them (again, rightly or wrongly).

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

#869

Post by agentultra »

lenerdenator wrote: post #811
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".…

> I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. Would it be? Do they care? Sam Altman's been talking about how GenAI could break capitalism (maybe not the exact quote, but something similar), and these companies have been pushing out GenAI products that could obviously and easily be used to fake photographic or video evidence of things that have occurred in the real world. Elon's obsessed with making an AI…

100%.

Altman encourages anyone that will listen to him that monopolies are the only path to success in business. He has a lot riding on making sure everyone is addicted to AI and that he’s the one selling the shovels.

Google isn’t far off.

Most capitalists have this fantasy that they can reduce their labour expenses with AI and continue stock buy-backs and ever-increasing executive payouts.

What sucks is that they rely on class divisions so that people don’t feel bad when the “overpaid” software developers get replaced. Problem is that software developers are also part of the proletariat and creating these artificial class divisions is breaking up the ability to organize.

It’s not AI replacing jobs, it’s capital holders. AI is just the smoke and mirrors.

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

#870

Post by josh_carterPDX »

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…

My first reaction to the title was, "That explains why things are broken." but this explanation makes so much sense. Thanks for clarifying.

But yeah, I wish the new version of Chrome worked better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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