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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

#971

Post by wpietri »

jcgrillo wrote: post #948
wpietri wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The way I explain this to managers is that software development is unlike most work. If I'm making widgets and I fuck up, that widget goes out the door never to be seen again. But in software, today's outputs are tomorrow's raw materials. You can trade quality for speed in the very short term at the cost of future productivity, so you're really trading speed for speed. I should add, though, that one can do th…

> the best designs are based on the most information, and there's a lot of information that is not available until later in a project This is an important point. I don't remember where I read it, but someone said something similar about taking a loss on your first few customers as an early stage startup--basically, the idea is you're buying information about how well or poorly your product meets a need. Where it goes…

For sure. Or, worse, choose to run a company in such a way that anybody making choices is insulated from that information.

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

#972

Post by ttul »

simianparrot wrote: post #591
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…

You’re also the CEO so chances are the people looking at that ticket aren’t going to tell you the absolute mess the AI snippet actually is and how pointless it was to include it instead of a simple succinct sentence explaining the requirements. If you’re not a developer chances are very high the code it produces will look passable but is actually worthless — or worse, it’s misleading and now a dev has to spend more t…

LoL, I really appreciate this comment. My team is very frank with me about code quality and they said Claude’s work looked pretty good — this time. But I’ll take your recommendation to heart for next time.

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

#973

Post by game_the0ry »

wayoverthecloud wrote: post #383
game_the0ry wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure nowadays. Given how often big tech lays off employees and the abundance of recently laid off tech talent, trying to start your own company sounds a lot more appealing than ever. I consider myself risk-averse and even I am contemplating starting a small business in the event I get laid off.

Interesting. I think the same thing but I wonder if the market is not ready for products created by the big guys, what can I offer? Have you thought in that line?

Well the whole point is that you have some edge that the "big guys" cannot compete with or you have discovered an opportunity they have not (making you ripe for acquisition).

New successful businesses are being created all the time. We just focus on the ones that have already been successful for a long time.

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

#974

Post by game_the0ry »

shiroiushi wrote: post #519
game_the0ry wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure nowadays. Given how often big tech lays off employees and the abundance of recently laid off tech talent, trying to start your own company sounds a lot more appealing than ever. I consider myself risk-averse and even I am contemplating starting a small business in the event I get laid off.

> trying to start your own company sounds a lot more appealing than ever. It really isn't. Even if you get laid off from a large tech company, you probably didn't have to pay a cent to get the job there in the first place, and you started drawing a paycheck right away (after the initial delay due to the pay cycle). If you only work there for 6 months, you can save a really good amount of money if you have frugal habi…

I look at it differently.

If I was working a typical corp job, I would "quiet quit" and start using my excess savings to run small experiments. Maybe run like 3 in parallel a month and let them cook.

Example - start a niche blog based on my hobby, hire 3 writers and pay them up to $3k a month to write content for the blog. Let it cook for months. If it gets traffic, monetize with ads. If very profitable, quit job.

Starting an internet based business if fairly cheap nowadays, especially with cursor and ai.

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

#975

Post by nlehuen »

gniv wrote: post #736
nlehuen wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering. However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript. One thing the system is already pretty good at is wri…

That's pretty nice. Does it write modern C++, as I guess it's expected?

Yes it does. Internally Google uses C++20 (https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#C++_Versio...) and the model picks the style from training, I suppose.

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

#979

Post by miki123211 »

Aachen wrote: post #701
miki123211 wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good idea even outside of Google, with tools like copilot and such. Often when I don't know exactly what function / sequence of functions I need to achieve a particular outcome, I put in a comment describing what I want to do, and Copilot does the rest. I then remove the comment once I make sure that the generated code actually works. I find it a lot less flow-breaking than stackoverflow or even asking an L…

Why remove the comment that summarises the intent for humans? The compiler will ignore your comment anyway, so it's only there for the next human who comes along and will help them understand the code

Because the code, when written, is usually obvious enough.

Something like:

  query = query.orderBy(field: "username", Ordering.DESC)
Doesn't need an explanation, but when working in a language I don't know well, I might not remember whether I'm supposed to call orderBy on the query or on the ORM module and pass query as the argument, whether the kwarg is called "field" or "column", whether it wants a string or something like `User.name` as the column expression, how to specify the ordering and so on.

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

#980

Post by AI_beffr »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #962
AI_beffr wrote: post #464

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.

no im saying they are anthropomorphizing the capabilities of these AIs which disguises how advanced they really are.
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