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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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961–970 of 1001 posts

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

#961

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 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

This is the disconnect. I, along with others, haven't seen this yet. I'm begging to see it because I'd love to automate my work away, but I can't. This comment comes off as hand-wavy to me because it says "here we are" as if Google saying their AI works is evidence itself and not a statement that requires evidence.

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

#962

i like how people say that ai can only write "trivial" code well or without mistakes. but what about from the point of view of the AI? writing "trivial" code is probably almost exactly as much of a challenge as writing the most complex code a human could ever write. the scales are not the same. dont allow yourself to feel so safe..

You think when people say AI can only write trivial code that they are writing from the perspective of AI, where trivial is actually impressive? That's is backward ass logic.

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

#963

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I doubt he got away with this for long (unless it was a very dysfunctional org). Being the best gets you noticed (in a good way), and screwing people over gets you noticed too (in a bad way), the combination of the two paints a target on your back.

> Being the best gets you noticed (in a good way), and screwing people over gets you noticed too (in a bad way), ah, to be young again...

I don't know what you're implying - I have had a few instances in my career when I went above and beyond and while I didn't receive too much praise for my efforts directly, after a while I noticed people who had no business knowing who I was, actually did.

Now, I was really bad at capitalizing on it, so nothing much came of it, but still, there are some positive things that higher-ups do notice.

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

#964
post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but hey, even if it's not production code, it may be an ad-hoc thing that never gets push to production, it may be code reviewed by C++ experts and improved to production quality. At very least, someone saved four days with it, and could use the time for something, maybe something they are expert at. Isn't that still good?

Most of the time saving time is just an illusion. When that code will needed to be changed, people will spend more than 4 days debugging and understanding it. The mental model of it was written by AI. It can make sense or not at all. You’ll figure it out after 4 days.

The code is 2 files of 80 lines each and is very clear. There's no way any software developer needs 4 days to understand what it does.

Moreover Claude can explain the functions used very clearly (if you're too lazy to jump to definition in your editor)

LLMs are becoming actually useful to developers new to a language. Just as Google was 20 years ago.

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

#965
post #813

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…

Long before this current AI hype cycle, we’ve had excellent code completion in editors for decades. So I guess by that definition, we’ve all been writing AI assisted code for a very long time.

Yeah but it didn't cost trillions and needed its own nuclear power plant. Noone disputes that llm/ai is cool/can be helpful but at what cost, where is the roi?

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

#966
post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> they would be bragging about replacing humans with AI all day long. Has either bragged about this at all? The only thing I've heard floated is Musk running a "government efficiency commission" which I just assumed meant he would be looking for ways to gut a lot of the never ending, never dying government programs. I've never heard him saying the commissions goal was to replace people with AI. https://www.newsnatio…

Trump and Musk will get bored quickly if elected. Once in office your power is checked.

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

#967
post #887
post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Corporates will soon have to realise the hard reality that when masses of humans have been replaced there won't be masses of humans with salaries to buy said corporate's goods anymore.

AI is socialism, and it's unstoppable. People are trying to stop progress and go back to the old days. Nothing about the universe permits this.

A new economy is forming and there is nothing that can stop it without causing major, unintended fallout.

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

#968
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but then every line of code we write is hard, because it's meaningful, and that feels bad enough to many developers, I don't know that I've ever even met a developer who wants to be writing endless pools of trivial boilerplate instead of meaningful code. Even the people at work who are willing to say they don't want to deal with the ambiguity and high level design stuff and just want to be told what to do pretty cle…

That, but boilerplate stuff is also incredibly easy to understand. As compared to high density, high meaning code anyway. I prefer more low density low meaning code as it makes it much easier to reason about any part of the system.

In and of itself, it's usually easy to understand. But the more fluff you stuff between the nontrivial bits, the harder it is to take in all at once. I think large quantities of simple boilerplate make the overall project harder to understand and debug. Though that is in comparison to an imagined alternative that's somehow exactly the same but with all the glue removed, so maybe that's not entirely fair.

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

#969
post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I share your sentiment, I've written three apps where I've used language models extensively (a different one for each: ChatGPT, Mixtral and Llama-70B) and while I agree that they where immensely helpful in terms of velocity, there are a bunch of caveats: - it only works well when you write code from scratch, context length is too short to be really helpful for working on existing codebase. - the output code is pretty…

I use o1 for research rather than coding. If I have a complex question that requires combining multiple ideas or references and checking the result, it's usually pretty good at that.

Sometimes that results in code, but it's the research and cross referencing that's actually useful with it

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

#970
post #640
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you just were not up to speed with the current research. Which is completely normal. Now marketing departments are on the job.

Transformers were proposed in 2017. A decade ago none of this was predictable.

emacs psichologist was there from before :D

And so were a lot of markov chain based chatbots. Also Doretta, the microsoft AI/search engine chatbot.

Were they as good? No. Is this an iteration of those? Absolutely.

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