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Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
- est 2y agoNow maintain quarter of your old code base with AI, don't shut down services randomly.
- arethuza 2y agoI'm waiting for some Google developer to say "More than a quarter of the CEOs statements are now created by AI"... ;-)
- freilanzer 2y agoI'd say most CEO statements are quite useless already, as they're mostly corporate newspeak.
- psunavy03 2y agoAnd yet the 2024 State of DevOps report THAT GOOGLE PRODUCES has a butt-ton of caveats about the effectiveness of GenAI . . .
- sreitshamer 2y agoSoftware development isn't a code-production activity, it's a knowledge-acquisition activity. It involves refactoring and deleting code too. I guess the AI isn't helping with that?
- defactor 2y agoTry any AI tool to write basic factor code.hallucinates most of the time
- zxilly 2y agoAs a go developer, Copilot write 100% "if err != nnil for me
- 1GZ0 2y agoI wonder how much of that code is boilerplate vs. actual functionality.
- an_d_rew 2y agoHuh. That may explain why google search has, in the past couple of months, become so unusable for me that I switched (happily) to kagi.
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- twarge 2y agoWhich uses Google results?
- S0y 2y agohttps://archive.is/X43PU https://archive.is/X43PU
- ausbah 2y agoi would be may more impressed if LLMs could do code compression. more code == more things that can break, and when llms can generate boatloads of it with a click you can imagine what might happen
- Scene_Cast2 2y agoThis actually sparked an idea for me. Could code complexity be measured as cumulative entropy as measured by running LLM token predictions on a codebase? Notably, verbose boilerplate would be pretty low entropy, and straightforward code should be decently low as well.
- jeffparsons 2y agoNot quite, I think. Some kinds of redundancy are good, and some are bad. Good redundancy tends to reduce mistakes rather than introduce them. E.g. there's lots of redundancy in natural languages, and it helps resolve ambiguity and fill in blanks or corruption if you didn't hear something properly. Similarly, a lot of "entropy" in code could be reduced by shortening names, deleting types, etc., but all those things were helping to clarify intent to other humans, thereby reducing mistakes. But some is copy+paste of rules that should be enforce in one place. Teaching a computer to understand the difference is... hard. Although, if we were to ignore all this for a second, you could also make similar estimates with, e.g., gzip: the higher the compression ratio attained, the more "verbose"/"fluffy" the code is. Fun tangent: there are a lot of researchers who believe that compression and intelligence are equivalent or at least very tightly linked.
- 8note 2y agoInterpreting this comment, it would predict low complexity for code copied unnecessarily. I'm not sure though. If it's copied a bunch of times, and it actually doesn't matter because each usecase of the copying is linearly independent, does it matter that it was copied? Over time, you'd still see copies being changed by themselves show up as increased entropy
- malfist 2y ago
- jrockway 2y agoWhen I was there, way more than 25% of the code was copying one proto into another proto, or so people complained. What sort of memes are people making now that this task has been automated?
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- dietr1ch 2y agoI miss old memegen, but it got ruined by HR :/
- rcarmo 2y agoI am reliably told that it is alive and well, even if it’s changed a bit.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoI am very interested in how this 25% number is calculated, and if it's a lot of boilerplate that in the past would have been just been big copy-paste jobs like a lot of protobuffers work. Would be curious if any Googlers could comment. Not that I'm really discounting the value of AI here. For example, I've found a ton of value and saved time getting AI to write CDKTF (basically, Terraform in Typescript) config scripts for me. I don't write Terraform that often, there are a ton of options I always forget, etc. So asking ChatGPT to write a Terraform config for, say, a new scheduled task for example saves me from a lot of manual lookup. But at the same time, the AI isn't really writing the complicated logic pieces for me. I think that comes down to the fact that when I do need to write complicated logic, I'm a decent enough programmer that it's probably faster for me to write it out in a high-level programming language than write it in English first.
- bakugo 2y ago[flagged]
- FactKnower69 2y ago[flagged]
- eob 2y agoSo GCS customers will trust their codegen product. (Engineers aren’t the buyer; corp suite is)
- dyauspitr 2y agoI don’t think the public cares wether their code is written by machines or real people as long as the product works.
- Nullabillity 2y agoJust today, Google Calendar asked me whether I wanted the "easy" or "depressed" colour scheme.
- Mistletoe 2y agoIronically, your comment brightened my day.
- mattigames 2y agoIt's for when you have an upcoming funeral, the calendar it's just trying to dress appropriately.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoI don't understand why you think this at all. Care to explain?
- joeevans1000 2y agoThese companies are competing to be the next codegen service provider.
- lesuorac 2y agoWell, the article has a paywall so it might go into this. I'm not sure this stat is as important as people point it out to be. If I start of `for` and the AI auto-completes `for(int i=0; i<args.length; i++) {` then a lot more than 25% of the code is AI written but it's also not significant. I could've figured out how to write the for-loop and its also not a meaningful amount of time saved because most of the time is figuring out and testing which the AI doesn't do.
- tylerchilds 2y agoif the golden rule is that code is a liability, what does this headline imply?
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- danielmarkbruce 2y agoI'm sure google won't pay you money to take all their code off their hands.
- AlexandrB 2y agoBut they would pay me money to audit it for security.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoyup, you can get paid all kinds of money to fix/guard/check billion/trillion dollar assets..
- eddd-ddde 2y agoThe code would be getting written anyways, its an invariant. The difference is less time wasted typing keys (albeit small amount of time) and more importantly (in my experience) it helps A LOT for discoverability. With g3's immense amount of context, LLMs can vastly help you discover how other people are using existing libraries.
- tylerchilds 2y agomy experience dabbling with the ai and code is that it is terrible at coming up with new stuff unless it already exists in regards to how others are using libraries, that’s where the technology will excel— re-writing code. once it has a stable AST to work with, the mathematical equation it is solving is a refactor. until it has that AST that solves the business need, the game is just prompt spaghetti until it hits altitude to be able to refactor.
- kev009 2y agoI would hope a CEO, especially a technical one, would have enough sense to couple that statement to some useful business metric, because in isolation it might be announcement of public humiliation.
- dyauspitr 2y agoOr a statement of pride that the intelligence they created is capable of lofty tasks.
- dmix 2y agoThe elitism of programmers who think the boilerplate code they write for 25% of the job, that's already been written before by 1000 other people before, is in fact a valuable use of company time to write by hand again. IMO it's only really an issue if a competent human wasn't involved in the process, basically a person who could have written it if needed, then they do the work connecting it to the useful stuff, and have appropriate QA/testing in place...the latter often taking far more effort than the actual writing-the-code time itself, even when a human does it.
- marcosdumay 2y agoIf 25% of your code is boilerplate, you have a serious architectural problem. That said, I've seen even higher ratios. But never in any place that survived for long.
- cryptoz 2y agoAndroid mobile development has gotten so …architectured that I would guess most apps have a much higher rate of “boilerplate” than you’d hope for. Everything is getting forced into a scalable, general purpose way, that most apps have to add a ridiculous amount of boilerplate.
- dmix 2y agoYou're probably thinking of just raw codebases, your company source code repo. Programmers do far, far more boilerplate stuff than raw code they commit with git. Debugging, data processing, system scripts, writing SQL queries, etc. Combine that with generic functions, framework boilerplate, OS/browser stuff, or explicit x-y-z code then your 'boilerplate' (ie repetitive, easily reproducible) easily gets to 25% of code you're programmers write every month. If your job is >75% pure human cognition problem solving you're probably in a higher tier of jobs than the vast majority of programmers on the planet.
- croes 2y agoRelated? > New tool bypasses Google Chrome’s new cookie encryption system https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988648
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- hipadev23 2y agoGoogle is now mass-producing techdebt at rates not seen since Martin Fowler’s first design pattern blogposts.
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- joeevans1000 2y agoNot really technical debt when you will be able to regenerate 20K lines of code in a minute then QA and deploy it automatically.
- kibwen 2y agoSo a fresh, new ledger of technical debt every morning, impossible to ever pay off?
- 1attice 2y agoAssuming, of course: - You know which 20K lines need changing - You have perfect QA - Nothing ever goes wrong in deployment. I think there's a tendency in our industry to only take the hypotenuse of curves at the steepest point
- TheNewsIsHere 2y agoThat is a fantastic way to put it. I’d argue that you’ve described a bubble, which fits perfectly with the topic and where _most_ of it will eventually end up.
- nelup20 2y agoWe've now entered the age of exponential tech debt, it'll be a sight to behold
- evbogue 2y agoI'd be turning off the autocomplete in my IDE if I was at Google. Seems to double as a keylogger.
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- YPPH 2y agoActually 0%, assembly language is assembled to machine code, not compiled.
- ndesaulniers 2y agoInline asm has to go through the compiler to get wired up by the register allocator.
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- joeevans1000 2y agoI read these threads and the usual 'I have to fix the AI code for longer than it would have taken to write it from scratch' and can't help but feel folks are truly trying to downplay what is going to eat the software industry alive.
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- steve_adams_86 2y agoI’m not convinced it’s there yet. I think it’s actively eating part of the software industry, but I wonder where that’ll stop—at least for some time—and a new shape of the industry is settled upon. There are still things I do in my IDE that I can’t seem to get AI to do. It’s not really close yet. I don’t doubt it could get there eventually, but I suppose I don’t believe it’s about to eat those parts of the industry. I do anticipate a massive issue from lower skill software jobs vanishing. I don’t know what entry into the industry will look like. There will be a strange gap that’s filled by AI and some people who use it to do basic things but have no idea how it does it. They will be somewhat like data entry workers, knowing how to use a spreadsheet or word processor but having no idea how the program actually works let alone the underlying operating system. I fully expect that to happen, and I can’t properly imagine what the implications will be.
- microtherion 2y ago[flagged]
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- mjbale116 2y agoIf you manage to convince software engineers that you are doing them a favour by employing them then they will approach any workplace negotiations with a specific mindset which will make them grab the first number it gets thrown to them. These statements are brilliant.
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- akira2501 2y agoThese statements rely on an unchallenged monopoly position. This is not sustainable. These statements will hasten the collapse.
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- imaginebit 2y agoI think he's trying to promote AI, somehow raises questions about thrir code quality among some
- dietr1ch 2y agoI think it just shows how much noise there is in coding. Code gets reviewed anyways (although review quality was going down rapidly the more PMs where added to the team) Most of the code must be what could be snippets (opening files and handling errors with absl::, and moving data from proto to proto). One thing that doesn't help here, is that when writing for many engineers on different teams to read, spelling out simple code instead of depending on too many abstractions seems to be preferred by most teams. I guess that LLMs do provide smarter snippets that I don't need to fill out in detail, and when it understands types and whether things compile it gets quite good and "smart" when it comes to write down boilerplate.
- ultra_nick 2y agoWhy work at big businesses anymore? Let's just create more startups.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoRisk appetite.
- game_the0ry 2y agoNot 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.
- wayoverthecloud 2y agoInteresting. 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?
- game_the0ry 2y agoWell 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.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoYou’re thinking about it wrong. Most large companies won’t put development time into an idea that would only make them $1-5M per year. On the other hand, $1-5M per year is great money to an individual. So there’s a lot of untouched markets that can make you rich but just don’t interest the big guys. All of that said, there are a lot of products that are produced by large companies and are just bad. Don’t be afraid to go after a Goliath if you see an opportunity.
- nine_zeros 2y agoWriting more code means more needs to be maintained and they are cleverly hiding that fact. Software is a lot more like complex plumbing than people want to admit: More lines == more shit to maintain. Complex lines == the shit is unmanageable. But wall street investors love simplistic narratives such as More X == More revenue. So here we are. Pretty clever marketing imo.
- Tier3r 2y agoGoogle is getting enshittified. It's already visible in many small ways. I was just using Google maps and in the route they called X (bus) Interchange as X International. I can only assume this happened because they are using AI to summarise routes now. Why in the world are they doing that? They have exact location names available.
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- 1oooqooq 2y agothis only means employees sign up to use new toys and they are paying enough seats for all employees. it's like companies paying all those todolist and tutorial apps left running on aws ec2 instances in 2007ish. I'd be worried if i were a google investor. lol.
- fragmede 2y agoI'm not sure I get your point. Google created Gemini and whatever internal LLM their employees are using for code generation. Who are they paying, and for what seats? Not Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic...
- nosbo 2y agoI 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.
- n_ary 2y agoYou just made it less attractive to the target corps who are to buy this product from Google. Saying, intellisense means corps already have license of various of these and some are even mostly free. Saying AI generate our 25% code sounds more attractive to corps, because it feels like something new and novel and you can imagine laying off 25% of the personnel and justify buying this product from Google. When someone who uses a product says it, there is a 50% chance of it being true, but when someone far away from the user says it, it is 100% promotion of product and setup for trust building for a future sale.
- coldpie 2y agoLooks like it's an impressive autocomplete feature, yeah. Check out the video about halfway down here: https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-google-progress-and-the-path-ahead/ https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-g... (linked from other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992028 ) Not what I thought when I heard "AI coding", but seems pretty neat.
- stephenr 2y ago> I don't write code as I'm a sysadmin. Mostly just scripts. .... so what do you put in your scripts if not code?
- bongodongobob 2y agoThe colloquial difference is a few lines, maybe a dozen or two, for maintenance and one off stuff, not a full blown application.
- nosbo 2y agoDon't disagree. But I think it's pretty accepted that sysadminy scripts and full blown applications are different. Just don't want to give the wrong impression that I know what I'm talking about I guess.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: Alphabet ($GOOG) 2024 Q3 earnings release https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988811
- ntulpule 2y agoHi, 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 have a high quality bar (regular monitoring, code provenance tracking, adversarial testing, and more). 2. We also do regular A/B tests and randomized control trials to ensure these features are improving SWE productivity and throughput. 3. We see similar efficiencies across all programming languages and frameworks used internally at Google and engineers across all tenure and experience cohorts show similar gain in productivity. You can read more on our approach here: https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-google-progress-and-the-path-ahead/ https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-g...
- reverius42 2y agoTo me the most interesting part of this is the claim that you can accurately and meaningfully measure software engineering productivity.
- valval 2y agoYou can come up with measures for it and then watch them, that’s for sure.
- lr1970 2y agowhen metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric. when discovered how it works developers will type the first character immediately after opening the log. edit: typo
- joshuamorton 2y agoOnly if the developer is being judged on the thing. If the tool is being judged on the thing, it's much less relevant. That is, I, personally, am not measured on how much AI generated code I create, and while the number is non-zero, I can't tell you what it is because I don't care and don't have any incentive to care. And I'm someone who is personally fairly bearish on the value of LLM-based codegen/autocomplete.
- pixelat3d 2y ago[flagged]
- rcarmo 2y agoThere is a running gag among my friends using Google Chat (or whatever their corporate IM tool is now called) that this explains a lot of what they’re experiencing while using it…
- tdeck 2y agoI didn't know anyone outside Google actually used that...
- mergisi 2y ago[dead]
- marstall 2y agofirst thought is that much of that 25% is test code for non-ai-gen code...
- oglop 2y agoNo surprise. I give my career about 2 years before I’m useless.
- phi-go 2y agoThey still need someone to write 75% of the code.
- k4rli 2y agoSeems just overhyped tech to push up stock prices. It was already claimed 2 years ago that half of the jobs would be taken by "AI" but barely any have and AI has barely improved since GPT3.5. Latest Anthropic is only slightly helpful for software development, mostly for unusual bug investigations and logs analysis, at least in my experience.
- jdmoreira 2y agoI would prefer if he was more competent and made the stock price go up. I guess grifters are going to grift
- lysace 2y agoGithub Copilot had an outage for me this morning. It was kind of shocking. I now believe this metric. :-) I'll be looking into ways of running a local LLM for this purpose (code assistance in VS Code). I'm already really impressed with various quite large models running on my 32 GB Mac Studio M2 Max via Ollama. It feels like having a locally running chatgpt.
- kulahan 2y agoI'm very happy to hear this; maybe it's finally time to buy a ton of ram for my PC! A local, private LLM would be great. I'd try talking to it about stuff I don't feel comfortable being on OpenAI's servers.
- lysace 2y agoGetting lots of ram will let you run large models on the CPU, but it will be so slow. The Apple Silicon Macs have this shared memory between CPU and GPU that let's the (relatively underpowered GPU, compared to a decent Nvidia GPU) run these models at decent speeds, compared with a CPU, when using llama.cpp. This should all get dramatically better/faster/cheaper within a few years, I suspect. Capitalism will figure this one out.
- kulahan 2y agoInteresting, so this is a Mac-specific solution? That's pretty cool. I assume, then, that the primary goal would be to drop in the beefiest GPU possible when on windows/linux?
- lysace 2y agoWith Windows/Linux I think the issue is that NVidia is artificially limiting the amount of onboard RAM (they want to sell those devices for 10x more to openai, etc) and that AMD for whatever reason can't get their shit together. I'm sure that there are other much more knowledgeable people here though, on this topic.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoIt’s replaced the 25% previously copy pasted from stack overflow.
- ryoshu 2y agoSpoken like an MBA who counts lines of code.
- marstall 2y agomaps with recent headlines about AI improving programmer productivity 20-30%. which puts it in line with previous code-generation technologies i would imagine. I wonder which of these increased productivity the most? - Assembly Language - early Compilers - databases - graphics frameworks - ui frameworks (windows) - web apps - code generators (rails scaffolding) - genAI
- akira2501 2y agoEarly Compilers. By a wide margin. They are the enabling factor for everything that comes below it. It's what allows you to share library interfaces and actually use them in a consistent manor and across multiple architectures. It entirely changed the shape of software development. The gap between "high level assembly" and "compiled language" is about as large as it gets.
- skrebbel 2y agoTo my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code? Or do all their engineers babysit the AI and bugfix the subtly wrong code? Or are all their engineers so junior that an AI is such a substantial help? Like, isn't this announcement a terrible indictment of how inexperienced their engineers are, or how trivial the problems they solve are, or both?
- tmoravec 2y agoDoes the figure include unit tests?
- airstrike 2y agoBy definition, "trivial" code should make up a significant portion of any code base, so perhaps the 25% is precisely the bit that is trivial and easily automated.
- Smaug123 2y agoI don't think the word "definition" means what you think it means!
- hifromwork 2y ago25% trivial code sounds like a reasonable guess.
- fzysingularity 2y agoThis seems reasonable - but I'm interpreting this as most junior-level coding needs will end and be replaced with AI.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
- 0xCAP 2y agoPeople overestimate faang. There are many talents working there, sure, but a lot of garbage gets pumped into their codebases as well.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago>a lot of garbage gets pumped into their codebases I would imagine it always has. >Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI It may very well be starting to become apparent anyway :\
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoDevs 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.
- sbochins 2y agoIt’s probably code that was previously machine generated that they’re now calling “AI Generated”.
- frank_nitti 2y agoThat would make sense and be a good use case, essentially doing what OpenAPI generators do (or Yeoman generators of yore), but less deterministic I’d imagine. So optimistically I would guess it covers ground that isn’t already solved by mainstream tools. For the example of generating an http app scaffolding from an openapi spec, it would probably account for at least 25% of the text in the generated source code. But I imagine this report would conveniently exclude the creation of the original source yaml driving the generator — I can’t imagine you’d save much typing (or mental overhead) trying to prompt a chatbot to design your api spec correctly before the codegen
- otabdeveloper4 2y agoThat explains a lot about Google's so-called "quality".
- AlwaysRock 2y agoIf we are talking about the boilerplate code and autofill syntax code that copilot or any other "AI" will offer me when I start typing... Then sure. Sounds about right. The other 75% is the stuff you actually have to think about. This feels like saying linters impact x0% of code. This just feels like an extension of that.
- creativenolo 2y agoIt probably does. But an amazing number of commenters think they are prompting the copy & pasting, and hoping for the best.
- Kalabasa 2y agoYep, a lot of headline readers here. It's just a very advanced autocomplete, completely integrated into the internal codebase and IDE. You can read this on the research blog (maybe if everyone just read the blog). e.g. I start typing `var notificationManager` It would suggest `= (Notification Manager) context.getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_MANAGER);` If you've done Android then you know how much boilerplate there is to suggest. I press Ctrl+Enter or something to accept the suggestion. Voila, more than 50% of that code was written by AI. > blindly committing AI code Even before AI, no one blindly accepts autocomplete. A lot of headline-readers seem to imagine some sort of semi-autonomous or prompt based code generation that writes whole blocks of code to then be blindly accepted by engineers.
- skydhash 2y agoThat makes a while since I’ve done Android, but I’m sure that this variable should be a property and be set as part of the lifecycle. And while Android (and any big project) is full of boilerplate, each line is subtly different or it would have already been abstracted in some base class. And even then, the code completion is already so good in Android Studio that you would have to be a complete junior (in this case, you wouldn’t know that the AI suggestion is good) to complain that writing code is slow. Most time spent is designing code, fixing subtle bugs, and refactoring to clean up the code.
- chabes 2y agoWhen Google announced their big layoffs, I noted the timing in relation to some big AI announcements. People here told me I was crazy for suggesting that corporations could replace employees with AI this early. Now the CEO is confirming that more than a quarter of new code is created by AI. Can’t really deny that reality anymore folks.
- akira2501 2y ago> Can’t really deny that reality anymore folks. You have to establish that the CEO is actually aware of the reality and is interested in accurately conveying that to you. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no reason to believe any part of this.
- paradox242 2y agoWhen leaders without the requisite technical knowledge are making decisions then the question of whether AI is capable of replacing human workers is orthogonal to the question of whether human workers will be replaced by AI.
- hbn 2y agoI'd suggest the bigger factor in those layoffs is the money was made in earlier covid years where money was flowing and everyone was overhiring to show off record growth, then none of those employees had any justification for being kept around and were just a money sink so they fired them all. Not to mention Elon publicly demonstrated losing 80% of staff when he took over twitter and - you can complain about his management all you want - as someone who's been using it the whole way through, from a technical POV their downtimes and software quality has not been any worse and they're shipping features faster. A lot of software companies are overstaffed, especially Google who has spent years paying people to make projects just to get a PO promoted, then letting the projects rot and die to be replaced by something else. That's a lot of useless work being done.
- robohoe 2y agoWho claims that he is speaking the truth and not some marketing jargon?
- Starlevel004 2y agoNo wonder search barely works anymore
- hggigg 2y agoI reckon he’s talking bollocks. Same as IBM was when it was about to disguise layoffs as AI uplift and actually just shovelled the existing workload on to other people.
- fzysingularity 2y agoWhile I get the MBA-speak of lines-of-code that AI is now able to accomplish, it does make me think about their highly-curated internal codebase that makes them well placed to potentially get to 50% AI-generated code. One common misconception is that all LLMs are the same. The models are trained the same, but trained on wildly different datasets. Google, and more specifically the Google codebase is arguably one of the most curated, and iterated on datasets in existence. This is a massive lever for Google to train their internal code-gen models, that realistically could easily replace any entry-level or junior developer. - Code review is another dimension of the process of maintaining a codebase that we can expect huge improvements with LLMs. The highly-curated commentary on existing code / flawed diff / corrected diff that Google possesses give them an opportunity to build a whole set of new internal tools / infra that's extremely tailored to their own coding standard / culture.
- morkalork 2y agoIs the public gemini code gen LLM trained on their internal repo? I wonder if one could get it to cough up propriety code with the right prompt.
- p1esk 2y agoI’m curious if Microsoft lets OpenAI train on GH private repos.
- happyopossum 2y ago> Is the public gemini code gen LLM trained on their internal repo? Nope
- bqmjjx0kac 2y ago> that realistically could easily replace any entry-level or junior developer. This is a massive, unsubstantiated leap.
- risyachka 2y agoThe issue is it doesn't really replace junior dev. You become one - as you have to babysit it all the time, check every line of code, and beg it to make it work. In many cases it is counterproductive
- LudwigNagasena 2y agoHow much of that generated code is `if err != nil { return err }`?
- cebert 2y agoDid AI have to go thru several rounds of Leetcode interviews?
- scottyah 2y agoyes: https://alphacode.deepmind.com/ https://alphacode.deepmind.com/ edit: blog link https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/competitive-programmin...
- twis 2y agoHow much code was "written by" autocomplete before LLMs came along? From my experience, LLM integration is advanced autocomplete. 25% is believable, but misleading.
- scottyah 2y agoMy linux terminal tab-complete has written 50% of my code
- devonbleak 2y agoIt's Go. 25% of the code is just basic error checking and returning nil.
- QuercusMax 2y agoIn Java, 25% of the code is import statements and curly braces
- NeoTar 2y agoDoes auto-code generation count as AI?
- contravariant 2y agoIn lisp about 50% of the code is just closing parentheses.
- harry8 2y agoHeh, but it can't be that, no reason to think llms can count brackets needing a close any more than they can count words.
- overhead4075 2y agoLogically, it couldn't be 50% since that would imply that the other 50% would be open brackets and that would leave 0% room for macros.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoThat's just a rounding error ;)
- int_19h 2y agoLLMs can count words (and letters) just fine if you train them to do so. Consider the fact that GPT-4 can generate valid XML (meaning balanced tags, quotes etc) in base64-encoded form. Without CoT, just direct output.
- _spduchamp 2y agoI can ask AI to generate the same code multiple times, and get new variations on programming style each time, and get the occasional solution that is just not quite right but sort of works. Sounds like a recipe for a gloppy mushy mess of style salad.
- soperj 2y agoThe real question is how many lines of code was it responsible for removing.
- randomNumber7 2y agoI cannot imagine this to be true, cause imo current LLM's coding abilities are very limited. It definitely makes me more productive to use it as a tool, but I use it mainly for boilerplate and short examples (where I had to read some library documentation before). Whenever the problem requires thinking, it horribly fails because it cannot reason (yet). So unless this is also true for google devs, I cannot see that 25% number.
- Wheatman 2y agoMy guess is that they counted each line of code made by an engineer using AI coding tools. Besides, even google employees write a lot of boilerplate, especially android IIRC, not to mention simple but essential code, so AI can prevent carpal tunnel for the junior devs working on that.
- chrisjj 2y ago> My guess is that they counted each line of code made by an engineer using AI coding tools. ... and forgot to count the Delete presses.
- zifpanachr23 2y agoRoughly only one quarter (assuming they are outputting similar amounts of code as non AI using engineers) of engineers actually using AI regularly for coding is a statistic that is actually believable to me based on my own experience. A lot of small teams have their "AI guy" who has drunk the kool aid, but it's not as widespread as HackerNews would make you think.
- jdefr89 2y ago80% or more of the code you write day to day is just grunt work. Boring code that has, for the most part, already been written in some form such that it was copied from Google or StackOverflow. AI is basically a shortcut to using that stuff..
- ThinkBeat 2y agoThis is quite interesting to know. I will be curious to see if it has any impact positive or negative over a couple of years. Will the code be more secure since the AI does not make the mistakes humans do? Or will the code, not well enough understood by the employees, exposes exploits that would not be there? Will it change average up time?
- kunley 2y agowhat makes you think that current direction of AI development would lead to making less mistakes than humans do, as opposed to repeating same miskates plus hallucinating more?
- ThinkBeat 2y agoSo um. With making this public statement, can we expect that 25% of "the bottom" coders at Google will soon be granted a lot more time and ability to spend time with their loves ones.
- SavageBeast 2y agoGoogle needs to bolster their AI story and this is good click bait. I'm not buying it personally.
- mjhay 2y ago100% of Sundar Pichai could be replaced by an AI.
- wokkaflokka 2y agoNo wonder their products are getting worse and worse...
- deterministic 2y agoNot impressed. I currently auto generate 90% or more of the code I need to implement business solutions. With no AI involved. Just high level declarations of intent auto translated to C++/Typescript/…
- arminiusreturns 2y agoI was a luddite about the generative LLMs at first, as a crusty sysadmin type. I came around and started experimenting. It's been a boon for me. My conclusion is that we are at the first wave of a split between those who use LLMs to augment their abilities and knowledge, and those who delay. In cyberpunk terminally, it's aug-tech, not real AGI. (and the lesser ones code abilities and simpler the task, the more benefit, it's an accelerator)
- elzbardico 2y agoWell. When I developed in Java, I think that Eclipse did similar figures circa 2005.
- marviel 2y ago> 80% at Reasonote
- jeffbee 2y agoIt's quite amusing to me because I am old enough to remember when Copilot emerged the HN mainthought was that it was the death sentence for big corps, the scrappy independent hacker was going to run circles around them. But here we see the predictable reality: an organization that is already in an elite league in terms of developer velocity gets more benefit from LLM code assistants than Joe Hacker. These technologies serve to entrench and empower those who are already enormously powerful.
- davidclark 2y agoIf I tab complete my function and variable symbols, does my lsp write 80%+ of my lines of code?
- hi_hi 2y ago> More than a quarter of new code created at Google is generated by AI, said CEO Sundar Pichai... How do they know this? At face value, it sounds like alot, but it only says "new code generated". Nothing about code making it into source control or production, or even which parts of googles vast business units. For all we know, this could be the result of some internal poll "Tell us if you've been using Goose recently" or some marketing analytics on the Goose "Generate" button. It's puff piece to put Google back in the lime light, and everyone is lapping it up.
- Hamuko 2y agoHow do Google's IP lawyers feel about a quarter of the company's code not being copyrightable?
- sjs382 2y agoThis was one of my first thoughts, too. In what ways can this contaminate their codebase? What if they use AI to add uncopyrightable code to GPL projects?
- zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y agoI feel this made me loose the respect I still had for Google
- prmoustache 2y agoAren't we just talking about auto completion? In that case those 25% are probably the very same 25% that were automatically generated by LTP based auto-completion.
- blibble 2y agothis is the 2024 version of "25% of our code is now produced by outsourced resources"
- tabbott 2y agoWithout a clear explanation of methodology, this is meaningless. My guess is this statistic is generated using misleading techniques like classifying "code changes generated by existing bulk/automated refactoring tools" as "AI generated".
- skatanski 2y agoI think at this moment, this sounds more like "quarter of the company's new code is created using stackoverflow and other forums. Many many people use all these tools to find information, as they did using stackoverflow a month ago, but now suddenly we can call it "created by AI". It'd be nice to have a distinction. I'm saying this, while being very excited about using LLMs as a developer.
- skywhopper 2y agoAll this means is that 25% of code at Google is trivial boilerplate that would be better factored out of their process rather than tasking inefficient LLM tools with. The more they are willing to leave the “grunt work” to an LLM, the less likely they are to ever eliminate it from the process.
- Terr_ 2y agoMy concern is that "frequently needed and immediately useful results" is strongly correlated to "this code should already be abstracted away into a library by now." Search Copy-Paste as a Service is hiding a deeper issue.
- jmartin2683 2y agoI’m gonna bet this is a lie.
- freedomben 2y agoI don't think it's a lie, but I do think it's very misleading. With common languages probably 25% of code can be generated by an AI, but IME it's mostly just boilerplate or some pattern that largely just saves typing time, not programming/thinking time. In other words it's the 25% lowest hanging fruit, so thinking like "1/4 of programming is now done by AI" is misleading. It's probably more like 5 to 10 percent.
- xyst 2y agoI remember Google used to market "lines of code" for their products. Chrome at one point had 6.7 LoC. Now the new marketing term is: "product was made with 1M lines of AI generated code (slop)!11!". Or "Chrome refactored with 10% AI" or some bs
- motoxpro 2y agoPeople talk about how AI is bad at generating non-trivial code, but why are people using it to generate non-trivial code? 25% of coding is just the most basic boilerplate. I think of AI not as a thinking machine but as a 1000 WPM boilerplate typer. If it is halucinating, you're trying to make it do stuff that is too complex.
- ghosty141 2y agoBut for this boiletplate creating a few snippets in your code generally works better. Especially if things change you dont have to retrain your model. Thats my main problem: for trivial things it works but isnt much better than conventional tools, for hard things it just produces incorrect code such that writing it from scratch barely makes a difference
- motoxpro 2y agoI think thats a great analogy. What would it look like if I could have 3-500 snippets instead of 30. Those 300 are things that I do all over my codebase e.g. same basic where query but in the context of whatever function I am in, a click handler with the correct types for that purpose, etc. There is no way I can have enough hotkeys or memorize that much, and I truly can't type faster than I can hit tab. I don't need it to think for me. Most coding (front-end/back-end web) involves typing super basic stuff, not writing complex algorithms. This is where the 10-20% speed-up comes in. On average I am just typing 20% faster by hitting tab.
- globular-toast 2y agoWere people seriously writing this boilerplate by hand up until this point? I started using snippets and stuff more than 15 years ago!
- holtkam2 2y agoCan we also see the stats for how much code used to come from StackOverflow? Probably 25%
- hollowturtle 2y agoSometimes I wonder why we would want LLMs spit out human readable code. Wouldn’t be a better future where LLMs generate highly efficient machine code and eventually we read the “source map” for debugging? Wasn’t source code just for humans?
- sparcpile 2y agoYou just reinvented the compiler.
- palata 2y agoBecause you can't trust what the LLM generates, so you have to read it. Of course the question then is whether you can trust your developer or not.
- hollowturtle 2y agoI’d rather reply with LLMs aren’t just capable of that. They’re okay with Python and JS simply because there’s a lot of training data out in the open. My point was that it seems like we’re delegating the future to tools that could generate critical code using languages originally thought to be easy to learn.. it doesn’t make sense
- mattxxx 2y agoI think they spit out human-readable code, because they've been tried on human authors. But you make an interesting point: eventually AI will be making for other AI's + machines, and human verification can be an after thought.
- standardUser 2y agoI use it all the time for work. Not much for actual code that goes into production, but a lot for "tell me what this does" or "given x, how do I do y". It speeds me up a ton. I'll also have it do code review when I'm uncertain about something, asking if there's any bugs or inefficiencies in a given chunk of code. I've actually found it to be more reliable about code than more general topics. Though I'm using it in a fairly specific way with code, versus asking for deep information about history for example, where is frequently gets facts very wrong.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mastazi 2y agoThe auto-linter in my editor probably generates a similar percentage of the characters I commit.
- niobe 2y agoThis explains a LOT about Google's quality decline.
- summerlight 2y agoIn Google, there is a process called "Large Scale Change" which is primarily meant for trivial/safe but extremely tedious code changes that potentially span over the entire monorepo. Such as foundational API changes, trivial optimization, code style etc etc. This is a perfectly suitable for LLM driven code changes (in fact I'm seeing more and more of LLM generated LSC) and I guess a large fraction of mentioned "AI generated codes" can be actually attributable to this.
- bubaumba 2y agoyeh, but the main problem is the quality. with algorithm bug can be fixed. with llm it's more complicated. in practice they do some mistakes consistently, and in some cases cannot recover even with assistance. (don't take me wrong, I'm very happy with the results most of the time)
- agomez314 2y agoI thought great engineers reduce the amount of new code in a codebase?
- nephy 2y agoCan we move on to the next grift yet?
- foobarian 2y agoThe real question is, what fraction of the company’s code is deleted by AI :-)
- rockskon 2y agoNo shit a quarter of Google's new code is created by AI. How else do you explain why Google search has been so aggressively awful for the past 5~ years? Seriously. The penchant for outright ignoring user search terms, relentlessly forcing irrelevant or just plain wrong information on users, and the obnoxious UI changes on YouTube! If I'm watching a video on full screen I have explicitly made it clear that I want YouTube to only show me video! STOP BRINGING UP THE FUCKING VIDEO DESCRIPTION TO TAKE UP HALF THE SCREEN IF I TRY TO BRIEFLY SWIPE TO VIEW THE TIME OR READ A MESSAGE. I have such deep-seated contempt for AI and it's products for just how much worse it makes people's lives.
- remram 2y agoYeah that might explain some of the loss of quality. Google apps and sites used to be solid, now they are full of not-breaking-but-annoying bugs like race conditions (don't press buttons too fast), display glitches, awful recommendations, and other usability problems. Then again, their devices are also coming out with known fatal design flaws, like not being able to make phone calls, or the screen going black permanently.
- asdfman123 2y agoI 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 tool but it's not doing any engineering at all. It's probably about as good, maybe slightly worse, than Copilot. (I haven't used it recently though.)
- insane_dreamer 2y agoalso 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%.
- ImaCake 2y agoThis autocomplete seems about on par with github copilot. Do you also get options for prompting it on specific chunks of code and performing specific actions such as writing docs or editing existing code? All things that come standard with gh copilot now.
- hackerknew 2y agoI wondered if this the real context. i.e. They are just referring to code-completion as AI-generated code. But, the article seems like it is referring to more than that?
- ghostpepper 2y agoDoes it make you 25% more productive?
- vundercind 2y agoBetween the fraction of my time I spend actually writing code, and how much of the typing time I’m using to think anyway, I dunno how much of an increase in my overall productivity could realistically be achieved by something that just helped me type the code in faster. Probably not 25% no matter how fast it made that part. 5% is maybe possible, for something that made that part like 2-3x faster, but much more than that and it’d run up against a wall and stop speeding things up.
- horns4lyfe 2y agoI’d bet at least a quarter of their code is class definitions, constructors, and all the other minutiae files required for modern software, so that makes sense. But people weren’t writing most of that before either, we’ve had autocomplete and code geb for a long time.
- nektro 2y agoGoogle used to be respected, a place so highly sought after that engineers who worked there were revered like wizards. oh how they've fallen :(
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoPublic says more than a quarter of Google's search results are absolute crap.
- drunken_thor 2y agoA company that used to be the pinnacle of software development is now just generating code in order to sell their big data models. Horrifying. Devastating.
- yapyap 2y agoyikes
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sigmonsays 2y agoimho code that is written by AI is code that is not worth having.
- hsuduebc2 2y agoI believe it is absolutely suitable for generating controllers in java spring or connecting to database and making a simple query which from my experience as an ordinary enterprise developer in Fintech is most of the job. Making these huge applicatins is a lot of repetitive work and integrations. Not a work that usually requires some advanced logic.
- AI_beffr 2y agoi 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..
- Capricorn2481 2y agoYou 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.
- AI_beffr 2y agono im saying they are anthropomorphizing the capabilities of these AIs which disguises how advanced they really are.
- Capricorn2481 2y agoNot really what you said. In any case, people aren't doing that, they are just pointing out that AI writes poor code beyond very basic things. That's not Anthropomorphizing.
- AI_beffr 2y agoit is what i said exactly and they are doing it.
- avsteele 2y agoEveryone here is arguing about the average AI code quality and I'm here just not believing the claim. 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? Dubious.
- kunley 2y agoVery good point. How was the 25% measured?
- Jyaif 2y ago> 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.
- shane_kerns 2y agoIt's no wonder that their search absolutely sucks now. Duckduckgo is so much better in comparison now.
- tgtweak 2y agoI feel like, given my experience lately with all the API models currently available, that this is only a fact if the models google is using internally are SIGNIFICANTLY better than what is available publicly even on closed models. Claude 3.5-sonnet (latest) is barely able to stay coherent on 500 LOC files, and easily gets tripped up when there are several files in the same directory. I have tried similarly with o1-preview and 4o, and gemini pro... If google is using a 5M token context window LLM with 100k+ token-output trained on all the code that is not public... then I can believe this claim. This just goes to show how critical of an issue this is that these models are behind closed doors.
- nomel 2y ago> This just goes to show how critical of an issue this is that these models are behind closed doors. How is competitive advantage, using in-house developed/funded tools, a critical issue? Every company has tools that only they have, that they pay significantly for to develop, and use extensively. It's can often be the primary thing that really differentiates companies who are all doing similar things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yearolinuxdsktp 2y agoOf course when so much of it is written in verbose-as-fuck languages like Java and Go, you’d be stupid not to let computers generate lack chunks of it. It’s sad, we as humans stopped trying to do better at better coding languages. At least Java is slowly making progress—-maybe in another 10 years, it will finally become a high level language. Go never tried to be one. You surprised you need AI to tab complete your boilerplate?! Financial incentives at large companies are not aligned with low volumes of code. There are no rewards for less code. People get rewarded for another bullshit framework to slap on their resume. Box me in, no, cube me in to a morass of a thick ingress layer, that uses 1/8th of my CPU.
- throwaway290 2y ago"More than a quarter of our code is created by autocomplete!" That's not that much...
- hiptobecubic 2y agoI've had mixed results writing "normal" business logic in c++, but i gotta say, for SQL it's pretty incredible. Granted SQL has a lot of boilerplate and predictable structure, but it saves a ton of time honestly.
- echoangle 2y agoDoes protobuf count as AI now?
- yangcheng 2y agoHaving worked at both FAANG companies and startups, I can offer a perspective on AI's coding impact in different environments. At startups, engineers work with new tech stacks, start projects from scratch, and need to ship something quickly. LLMs can wrtie way more code. I've seen ML engineers build React frontends without any previous frontend experience, flutter developers write 100-line SQL queries for data analysis, with LLM 10x productivity for this type of work. At FAANG companies, codebases contain years of business logic, edge cases, and 'not-bugs-but-features.' Engineers know their tech stacks well, and legacy constraints make LLMs less effective, and can generate wrong code that needs to be fixed
- davnicwil 2y agoIt might not quite be there yet, but one key advantage large codebases have that I think LLMs in time will be able to better exploit is the detection of existing patterns - presuming they're consistent - and application to new code doing similar things or to fix bugs in existing code that deviates from the pattern in some way that causes a bug. It's a different thing to what you're talking about, but it's one way I'd expect to see LLMs contribute a lot to productivity on larger codebases specifically.
- mdgrech23 2y agolarge application codebase - consistent - have you worked in the field? I feel like usually there are 3 or 4 patterns from different people/teams at different points in time that spearheaded a particular ideology about how things "should" be done.
- martin82 2y agoI guess that must be the reason for the shocking enshitification of Google
- ttul 2y agoI 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 Claude helpfully told me that. So I pasted the code sample and a screenshot of the HTML output into the JIRA and then got Claude to write me the rest of the JIRA as well. Everyone knows this was “made by AI” because there’s no way in hell I would ever have the time. These models might not be able to sit there and build an entire project from scratch yet, but if what you need is some help adding the next control panel page, Claude’s got your back on that.
- simianparrot 2y agoYou’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 time deciphering the task.
- ttul 2y agoLoL, 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.
- gloflo 2y ago> Everyone knows this was “made by AI” because ... They should know because you told them so. Having to decipher weird code only to discover it was not written by a human is not nice.
- JonChesterfield 2y ago> Everyone knows this was “made by AI” because there’s no way in hell I would ever have the time. Doubtful. A decent fraction of the people reading it will guess that you've wasted your time writing incoherent nonsense in the jira. Engineers don't usually have much insight into what the C suite are doing. It would be a prudent move to spend the couple of seconds to write "something like this AI sketch:" before the copy&paste.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoNo wonder it sucks. Google's vaunted engineering has always been suspect, but their douchebaggery has been an accepted fact (even by them)>
- Timber-6539 2y agoAll this talk means nothing until Google gives AI permissions to push to prod.
- alienchow 2y agoWhen setting up unit tests traditionally took more time and LOC than the logic itself, LLMs are particularly useful. 1. Paste in my actual code. 2. Prompt: Write unit tests, test tables. Include scenarios: A, B, C, D, E. Include all other scenarios I left out, isolate suggestions for review. I used to spend the majority of the coding time writing unit tests and mocking test data, now it's more like 10%.
- arkh 2y ago> Paste in my actual code. > Prompt: Write unit tests TDD in shambles. What you'd like is: > Give your specs to some AI > Get a test suite generated with all edge cases accounted for > Code
- alienchow 2y agoMatter of preference. I've found TDD to be inflexible for my working style. But your suggestion would indeed work for a staunch TDD practitioner.
- Kiro 2y agoI find it interesting that the people who dismiss the utility of AI are being so aggressive, sarcastic and hateful about it. Why all the anger? Where's the curiosity?
- makerofthings 2y agoI keep trying to use these things but I always end up back in vim (in which I don't have any ai autocomplete set up.) The AI is fine, but every time it makes a little mistake that I have to correct it really breaks my flow. I might type a lot more boilerplate without it but I get better flow and overall that saves me time with less mistakes.
- daylet 2y agohttps://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/tdd-and-pair-programming-the-perfect-companions-for-copilot https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/tdd...
- mgaunard 2y agoAI is pretty good at helping you manage a messy large codebase and making it even more messy and verbose. Is that a good thing though? We should work and making code small and easy to manage without AI tools.
- haccount 2y agoNo wonder Gemini is a garbage fire if had chatgpt write the code for it.
- meindnoch 2y agoI saw code on master which was parsing HTML with regex. The author was proud that this code was mostly generated by AI. :)
- fmardini 2y agoProto-plumbing is very LLM amenable
- agilob 2y agoSo we're using CoL as a metric now?
- nottorp 2y agoThe protobuf boilerplate, right? :)
- me551ah 2y agoAI has boosted my productivity but only marginally. Earlier I used to copy paste stuff from stackoverflow and now AI generates that for me.
- bamboozled 2y ago"Product has not improved, or maybe even become worse in that time"
- submeta 2y agoPandora‘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 write code to transform data, write scripts, write one-off scripts, or even write boilerplate, test code and what not. And this is only after a short time. I cannot even imagine what we‘ll have ten years from now where we can propably have much larger context windows where the system can „unterstand“ the whole code base, not just parts. I am sorry for low level engineering jobs, but I am super exited as well. With GebAI I have been writing super complex Elisp code to automate workflow in Emacs, or VBA scripts in Excel, or Bash scripts I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to write, or JavaScript, or quickly write Python code to solve very tricky problems (and I am very high level in Python), or even React code for web apps for my personal use. The future looks exiting to me.
- gmm1990 2y agoI don’t fully understand the workflow were you hand boiler plate code off to a junior wouldn’t the communication overhead be higher than writing it yourself. Certainly llms have valid uses but I see improving junior productivity more than senior productivity
- Capricorn2481 2y ago> 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.
- redbell 2y agoWait a second—didn't Google warn its employees against using AI-generated code? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399021). What had changed?! Has Gemini now surpassed Bard in capabilities? Did they manage to resolve the copyright issues? Or maybe they've noticed a boost in productivity? I'm not sure, but let’s see if other big tech companies would follow this path.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoDifferent audiences. You tell investors that AI is freaking magic and going to usher in an age of savings and productivity gains. You tell your developers that it's a neat autocomplete, they should use carefully.
- fredgrott 2y agoKind of useless stat given how much code a typical dev refactors....
- jagged-chisel 2y ago“Created by” or “with the assistance of”?
- teknopaul 2y agoI'd say the same. But 90% of my time not writing code. It is mostly time wasted with github and k8s build issues.
- floor_ 2y agoSo no one owns a quarter of the new code at google. It's going to be very funny when it hits 100%.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nenadg 2y agoInternet random person (me) says more than 99% of Google's 25%+ code written by AI has already been written by humans.
- anacrolix 2y agoPuts on Google
- thelittleone 2y agoI understand CEOs need to promote their companies, but it's notable that Google - arguably the world's leading information technology company - fell behind in AI development under Pichai's leadership. Now he's touting Google's internal capabilities, yet Gemini is being outperformed by relative newcomers like Anthropic and OpenAI. His position seems secure despite these missteps, which highlights an interesting double standard: there appears to be far more tolerance for strategic failures at the CEO level compared to the rigorous performance standards expected of engineering staff.
- jdefr89 2y agoTo be fair the paper that helped launch LLMs to a new level was from Google. “All You Need Is Attention”, Keras… They fell behind when it comes to marketing AI maybe…
- josephd79 2y agothat explains everything.
- sheeshkebab 2y agoand it shows… Google codebases I see in the wild are the worst - jumbled mess of hard to read code.
- AmazingTurtle 2y agoYeah, go ahead and lay off another 25% of development staff and see how well AI coders perform.:))
- tylerchilds 2y agoas a consumer, i never could have guessed
- d_burfoot 2y agoI'd be far more impressed if the CEO said "The AI deleted a quarter of our company's code".
- zh3 2y agoYes, like the old story about why not to measure productivity by LoC generated. https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
- baalimago 2y agoTo me, programming assistants have two usecases: 1. Generate unit tests for modules which are already written to be tested 2. Generate documentation for interfaces Both of these require quite deep knowledge in what to write, then it simply documents and fills in the blanks using the context which already has been laid out.
- dep_b 2y agoA quarter of all new code? Of course. Especially if you include all "smart autocomplete" code. When dealing with a fermenting pile of technical debt? I expect very little. LLM's don't have application-wide context yet. AI is definitely revolutionizing our field, but the same people that said that no-code tools and all of the other hype-of-the-decade technologies would make developers jobless are actually the people AI is making jobless. Generate an opinion piece about how AI is going to make developers jobless, using AI? Less than a minute. And you don't need to maintain that article, once it's published, it's done. While there's a tsunami of AI-generated almost-there projects coming that need to be moved to a shippable and sellable state. So I'm more afraid about the kind of work I'm going to get while still getting paid handsomely for my skills, than ever being jobless as the only guy that really understands the whole stack from top to bottom.
- randomdata 2y agoAt the end of the day an LLM is just a compiler anyway. The developer isn't going away even if 100% of the code is generated by LLMs, just as the developer didn't go away when we stopped spending our days flipping toggle switches.
- dep_b 2y agoI'm actually surprised that _the others_ always think that the programmers somehow will make themselves obsolete first? If it gets cheaper to make software, more software will be made, until we reach the point again we're running short on people capable enough to keep it all running.
- okokwhatever 2y agoPeople still don't understand those who pay the bills are those who claim developers are less and less necessary. It doesn't matter how much we love our job and how much we care for quality, at the end those who pay take more care of reducing workforce for something potentially free or cheap. We are less needed, less cared and less seen as engineers. We are just a cost in a wrong column of Quickbooks. Get use to it.
- syngrog66 2y ago> "and we continue to be laser-focused on building great products." NO! False. I can confirm they are not. I've known of several major obvious unfixed bugs/flaws in Google apps for years. and in the last year or so especially theres been an explosion in the number of head-scratching, jaw-dropping fails and UX anti-patterns in their code. GMail, Search, Maps and Android are now riddled with them. on Sundar Pichai's watch he's been devolving Google to be yet another Microsoft type in terms of quality, care and taste.
- fennecbutt 2y agoThat explains a lot.
- sanj 2y agoCaveat: I formerly worked at Google. What missing is that code being written by AI may have less of an impact than dataset that are developed or refined by AI. Consider examples like a utility function's coefficients, or the weights of a model. As these are aggressively tuned using ML feedback, they'll influence far more systems than raw code.
- gilfoyle 2y agoThis is like saying more than a quarter of the code is from oss, examples and stackoverflow before LLMs.
- odinkara 2y agoand it shows
- klocksib 2y agoit's quicker and easier than ever to generate a project to send to the Google Graveyard.
- ajkjk 2y agoWell yeah he sells AI and wants you to believe in it so the stock price stays good.
- hodder 2y agoThe market would be even more shocked to learn that another 30% is pasted in from Stack Overflow!
- xen0 2y agoI really do wonder who these engineers are, that the current 'AI' tools are able to write so much of their code. Maybe my situation is unusual; I haven't written all that much code at Google lately, but what I do write is pretty tied to specific details of the program and the AI auto completion is just not that useful. Sometimes it auto completes a method signature correctly, but it never gets the body right (or even particularly close). And it routinely making up methods or fields on objects I want to use is anti productive.
- piyuv 2y agoI wish Tim Cook would reply with “more than half of all iMessages are created with autocomplete”
- hollywood_court 2y agoCursor and v0.dev write 95% of the code for myself and the two other devs on my team.
- erlend_sh 2y agoSelf-interested hyperbole aside, I think that’s a laughably low number for what is now effectively an ‘AI Company’. I’m sure >95% of Google employees use Google (well, at least until recent years). If this stuff really works as well as these companies claim it does, wouldn’t their entire workforce excitedly be using these tools already?
- flessner 2y ago"AI generated code" essentially means using Github Copilot or an alternative - these barely write a function without errors, nor are they even close to implementing a new feature autonomously. I expect these tools to improve productivity for new-ish developers, however for anyone that is literate in a programming language the effect is marginal at best ("Copilot pause" etc.)
- matt3210 2y agoNVIDIA CEO said there would be no more developers too and it totally wasn't a marketing thing.
- fortylove 2y agoIs this why we finally got darkmode in gcal?
- _hcuq 2y agoYeah. I just wrote 600 lines of SQL using a macro processor. Took 10 minutes.
- tremorscript 2y agoSounds about right and it explains a lot about the current quality of google products and google search. :-)
- socrateslee 2y agoor saying that most of the Google engineers are using tools like copilot, and they use the copilot just as everyone else.
- annlee2019 2y agogoogle CEO doesn't write code
- dickersnoodle 2y agoThat explains a lot, actually.
- octacat 2y agoIt is visible...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- silexia 2y agoIs this why Google search results are so bad now?
- ken47 2y agoWithout context, not very meaningful. Does this simple measure lines of code? Characters written? Is it “oversuggesting” code that it shouldn’t be confident in? Does this code make it into production or is a large percentage of it fixed by humans at great cost? Google, and really, the whole financial machine has a vested interest playing up the potential of AI. Unfortunate that it isn’t being given time to grow organically.