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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

#871

Post by zac23or »

reverius42 wrote: post #89
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…

To me the most interesting part of this is the claim that you can accurately and meaningfully measure software engineering productivity.

I knew a superstar developer who worked on reports in an SQL tool. In the company metrics, the developer scored 420 points per month, the second developer scored 60 points. “Please learn how to score more points from the leader”, the boss would say.

The superstar developer’s secret… he would send blank reports to clients (who would only realize it days later, and someone else would end up redoing the report), and he would score many more points without doing anything. I’ve seen this happen a lot in many different companies. As a friend of mine used to say, “it’s very rare, but it happens all the time.”

I have no doubt that AI can help developers, but I don’t trust the metrics of the CEO or people who work on AI, because they are too involved in the subject.

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

#872

Post by zac23or »

ttul wrote: post #572

I wanted a new feature in our customer support console and the dev lead suggested I write a JIRA. I’m the CEO, so this is not my usual thing (and probably should not be). I told Claude what I wanted and pasted in a .js file from the existing project so that it would get a sense of the context. It cranked out a fully functional React component that actually looks quite nice too. Two new API calls were needed, but Clau…

> dev lead suggested I write a JIRA. I’m the CEO, so this is not my usual thing (and probably should not be)

Fascinating point of view.

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

#873

Post by jl6 »

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.

It’s a disservice to the public to assume they aren’t capable of understanding why AI job losses might be concerning even if they aren’t directly impacted. Most people aren’t so committed to class warfare that they will root for the apocalypse as long as it stomps a rich guy first.

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

#874

Post by hoveringhen »

markstos wrote: post #801
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…

Which editor is Google's AI code completion integrated with? VS Code?

Yeah

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

#876

Post by mbfg »

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?

Except that no one trusts Barney down the hall that has stack overflow open 24/7. People naturally trust AI implicitly.

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

#877

Post by OnionBlender »

guappa wrote: post #613
OnionBlender wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect that if you work on trivial stuff that has been asked on stackoverflow countless of times they work very nicely.

This is what I've been noticing. For C++ and Swift, it makes pretty unhelpful suggestions. For Python, its suggestions are fine.

Swift is especially frustrating because it will hallucinate the method name and/or the argument names (since you often have to specify the argument names when calling a method).

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

#878

Post by pjmlp »

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.

No one cares about self checkout on supermarkets impact on their employees, until their employer does something similar.

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

#879

Post by hoveringhen »

znpy wrote: post #716
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…

> 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. I really mean no offense, but your example doesn't sound much different from what old IDEs (say, Netbeans) used to do 15 years ago. I could design a Swing ui and it would generate the code and if I wanted to override a method it would generate a decen…

This video is a pretty good one on how it works in practice: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/media...
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