Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

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

#901

Post by prismatic-david »

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…

This is pretty much what I've found with Copilot as well. It's like a slightly smarter autocomplete in most cases. Copilot tends toward being a little eager sometimes, but it's easy enough to just ignore the suggestions when it starts going down a weird path.

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

#902

Post by lenerdenator »

Thorrez wrote: post #848
lenerdenator wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be the way someone with no real awareness of the philosophies and realities of the two parties in the US would see it. And to be fair, that's a good description of a large chunk of the American electorate. But you can't have a guy who literally used to relieve himself into a golden toilet take over your party and be anything but the party of big business and billionaires.

>Despite widespread rumors, there is no verified evidence that Trump actually owns a gold toilet. https://royaltoiletry.com/does-trump-have-a-gold-toilet-unpa...

Fair enough.

Still a guy who operated multiple luxury hotel and golf course properties that would laugh a working man out the front door if he asked for an affordable room.

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

#903

Post by wavewrangler »

jl6 wrote: post #873
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You mean poor person. As long as it stomps a poor person. The rich don’t have a habit of getting stomped. They direct other poor people to stomp their contemporaries. The poor don’t have a chance.

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

#904

Post by aleph_minus_one »

burningChrome wrote: post #895
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".…

>> Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. When I was working in RPA (robotic process automation) about 7 years ago, we were explicitly told not to say "You can reduce your team size by having use develop an automation that handles what they're doing!" Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important…

> Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things.

As a non-politically savy person ;-) I have a feeling that this is a similarly dangerous message, since what prevents many teams to focus on really important things is often far too long meetings with managers and similar "important" stakeholders.

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

#905

Post by bongodongobob »

stephenr wrote: post #518
nosbo wrote: post #86

I don't write code as I'm a sysadmin. Mostly just scripts. But is this like saying intellisense writes 25% of my code? Because I use autocomplete to shortcut stuff or to create a for loop to fill with things I want to do.

> I don't write code as I'm a sysadmin. Mostly just scripts. .... so what do you put in your scripts if not code?

The colloquial difference is a few lines, maybe a dozen or two, for maintenance and one off stuff, not a full blown application.

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

#906

Post by OkGoDoIt »

wcoenen wrote: post #884
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…

> including things like fully automated CL/PR's which have been around for a decade I haven't seen this yet so I'm intrigued. Is this a commercial product, or internal tooling?

I’m assuming this refers to things analogous to dependabot on GitHub where maybe it automatically updates a library version reference and runs the tests and creates a PR if everything seems good, or similarly for fixing style issues or other stuff that is pretty trivial and has good test coverage.

When you maintain an open source project on GitHub you will occasionally get some open source automated bot that submits a PR to do things like this without you even asking, and I’m sure there’s plenty more you can sign up for or implement yourself.

I wouldn’t really call it AI, but it is automated. I agree with the parent comment that a journalist trying to push an angle would probably lump it in as AI in order to make the number seem larger.

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

#907

Post by mattgreenrocks »

0xCAP wrote: post #131

People overestimate faang. There are many talents working there, sure, but a lot of garbage gets pumped into their codebases as well.

Devs who pride themselves on their capacity for rational thought seem to forget that regression to the mean applies everywhere...even to the places that they aspire to.

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

#908

Post by fallingknife »

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…

Can you give me an example of one of these useful prompts? I'd love to try it out.

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

#909

Post by barrkel »

tehjoker wrote: post #881
jl6 wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software engineers and grocery store workers are in different income brackets, but in the same class (labor/prolaterian). It is managers, executives, and investors that are in the capitalist class. Class is determined by your relationship to production.

Software engineer salaries and stock compensation can be enough to shift alignment somewhat, especially after many years of capital accumulation.

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

#910

Post by jcgrillo »

galdosdi wrote: post #492
jcgrillo wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti. The problem is finding people to do it with who care enough to think rigorously about what they're going to do before they start doing it. There's this bizarre misconception popular among bigtech managers that there's some tunable tradeoff bet…

It's a market for lemons. Without redoing their work or finding a way to have deep trust (which is possible, but uncommon at a bigcorp) it's hard enough to tell who is earnest and who is faking it (or buying their own baloney) when it comes to propositions like "investing in this piece of tech debt will pay off big time" As a result, if managers tend to believe such plans, bad ideas drive out good and you end up inve…

Soviet vs NATO. The Soviet management style is micromanaging exactly how to do everything from the rear. The NATO style is delegating to the front line ranks.

Being good at the NATO style of management means focusing on the big picture--what, when, why--and leaving how to the people actually doing it.

Post reply on HN