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So this is basically the google CEO saying "a quarter of our terminal inputs is written by a glorified tab completion"?
by atoav 2y ago
So this is basically the google CEO saying "a quarter of our terminal inputs is written by a glorified tab completion"?
- asdfman123 2y agoYes. Most AI hype is this bad. They have to justify the valuations.
- remus 2y ago"tab completion good enough to write 25% of code" feels like a pretty good hit rate to me! Especially when you consider that a good chink of the other 75% is going to be the complex, detailed stuff where you probably want someone thinking about it fairly carefully.
- Maxion 2y agoFor me it's really goddam satisfying having good autocomplete, especially when you are just writing boilerplate lines of code to get the code into a state where you actually get to work on the fun stuff (ther harder problems).
- amelius 2y agoAlso if your code gets sent to someone else's cloud?
- mewpmewp2 2y agoHave you ever had your code repository hosted by Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab or similar? If so, all your code is sent to cloud.
- amelius 2y agoAnswer: yes, some code. But other code I and my company like to keep private.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoWhere exactly is the repo hosted if there is one?
- _heimdall 2y agoThere are alternatives out there for self-hosted git. I have a Gitea instance running on a mini PC at home for my own projects.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoDo you have backups of that as well? If something were to happen to your mini pc would you lose your code?
- _heimdall 2y agoGreat question, yeah I do. Right now it backs up to a separate NAS on my home network. Every once in a while I'll copy the most important directories onto a microSD card backup, but its usually going to be at least a few weeks out of date.
- amelius 2y agoOwn servers.
- red_admiral 2y agoInternally hosted gitlab instances are a thing.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoThey are, but frequently the boxes where they are hosted are in AWS or similar. Or do frequently companies have actual in house servers for this purpose?
- red_admiral 2y agoNot in house, but in a "segmented" part of the cloud that comes with service level agreements and access control and restrictions on which countries the data can be hosted in and compliance procedures etc. etc. An extreme example of this would be the AWS GovCloud for government/military applications.
- infecto 2y agoI don't care. The vast majority of code written in the private space is garbage and not unique. Products are usually not won because of the code. Would I send the source of a trading algo or chatgpt to a third party, probably not but those are the outliers. The code for your xyz SAAS does not matter. I am probably an outlier in that I don't really care what corpus a LLM trains off of. Its its available in the public space, go for it.
- rantallion 2y agoThe problem being that the time spent fixing the bugs in that 25% outweighs the time saved. Now that tools like Copilot are being widely used, studies are showing that they do not in fact boost productivity. All claims to the contrary seem to be either anecdotal or marketing fluff. https://www.techspot.com/news/104945-ai-coding-assistants-do-not-boost-productivity-or.html https://www.techspot.com/news/104945-ai-coding-assistants-do...
- pawelmurias 2y agoThe AI tap complition is >100000% better than the coding assistants, it just saves you typing and doesn't introduce new bugs you need to fix instead of writting buggy shitty code from a text description.
- red_admiral 2y agoAs far as I know, LLMs are a genuine boost for junior developers, but still not close to what senior/principal engineers get up to.
- _heimdall 2y agoIt'd be interesting to know how much of Google's code is written by junior engineers. I can't imagine 25% of the code is from juniors, at which point Google's CEO is either exaggerating what he considers LLM-generated code or more than just juniors are using it. I agree with your take though, it does seem helpful to juniors but not beyond that (yet), and this OP stat seems dubious unless juniors are doing a big portion of the work.
- makestuff 2y agoI have around 7 YOE, and I have found LLMs useful for very specific questions about syntax whenever I am working in a new language. For example, I needed to write some typescript recently and asked it how can I make a type that does X. It is not as good with questions about API documentation for popular java libraries though and it will just hallucinate APIs/method names. If I ask it a generic question like "how can I create a class in Java to invoke this API and store the data in this database" it is pretty useless. I'm sure I could spend more time giving it a better prompt but at that point I can just write the code myself. Overall they are a better search engine for stackoverflow, but the LLMs are not really helping me code 30% faster or whatever the latest claim is.
- keybored 2y ago25% is a great win if you are prone to RSI. And for quicker feedback. But in terms of the overarching programming goal? Churning out code is a small part of it. Code is often a liability.
- red_admiral 2y ago"rm re[TAB]" to remove a file called something like "report-accounting-Q1_2024.docx" is really helpful, especially when it adds quotes as required, but not exciting enough to get me out of bed any earlier in the morning. I feel it's a bit like the old "measuring developer productivity in LoC" metric. As I hinted at in another comment, in Java if you had a "private String name;" then the following: /** * Returns the name. * @return The name. */ public String getName() { return this.name; } and the matching setter, are easy enough to generate automatically and you don't need a LLM for it. If AI can do that part of coding a bit better, sure it's helpful in a way, but I'm not worried about my job just yet (or rather, I'm more worried about the state of the economy and other factors).
- mmmpetrichor 2y agoYeah, but he wants people to hear "reduce headcount by 25% if you buy our shit!"
- mewpmewp2 2y agoHow do you know that? You are creating this false sense of expectations and hype yourself. I am going to argue contrary. If AI increases productivity 2x, it opens up as much new usecases that previously didn't seem worthy to do for its cost. So overall there will just be more work.
- JimDabell 2y ago> I am going to argue contrary. If AI increases productivity 2x, it opens up as much new usecases that previously didn't seem worthy to do for its cost. So overall there will just be more work. This is the entire history of the computing industry. We’ve been automating our work away for decades and it just creates more demand.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoYeah, this is only side projects, but I've been spending pretty much all of my free time now on side projects, largely because I feel much faster building them with LLMs and it has a compounding motivational effect. I also see so many use cases and work left to do, even with AI, the possibilities almost overwhelm me. Well I do freelancing as well besides my usual day to day work, and that's also where direct benefits apply, and I'm getting more and more work, overwhelmingly so.
- unglaublich 2y agoYes, isn't that the essential idea of industrialization and automation?
- OtherShrezzing 2y agoI think the critique here is that the AI currently deployed at Google hasn't meaningfully automated this user's life, because most IDEs already solved "very good autocomplete" more than a decade ago.
- tormeh 2y agoLLM autocomplete is on an entirely different level. It's not comparable to traditional autocomplete and mostly does not even compete with traditional autocomplete. LLM autocomplete will sometimes write entire blocks of code for you, with surprising skill. I often wonder how it knew what I wanted. It also generates some wrong code from time to time, but that's well worth it.
- randomdata 2y ago> LLM autocomplete is on an entirely different level. Which is how they've surpassed 25% in new code, as compared to the 10% (made up number, but clearly non-zero) in the past. But incremental improvement, is all.
- pawelmurias 2y ago[flagged]
- binkHN 2y agoI wouldn't call it genius tab completion. Unfortunately, more than half of the time that the "genius" produces the code, I'm wasting my time reviewing code that is incorrect.
- tguinot 2y agoI'm sorry but I don't understand how people say LLMs are simply "tab completion". They allow me to do much more than that thanks to all the knowledge they contain. For instance, yesterday I wanted to write a tool that transfers any large file that is still being appended to to multiple remote hosts, with a fast throughput. By asking Claude for help I obtained exactly what I want in under two hours. I'm no C/C++ expert yet I have now a functional program using libtorrent and libfuse. By using libfuse my program creates a continuously growing list of virtual files (chunks of the big file). A torrent is created to transfer the chunks to remote hosts. Each chunk is added to the torrent as it appears on the file system thanks to the BEP46 mutable torrent feature in libtorrent. On each receving host, the program rebuilds the large file by appending new chunks as soon as they are downloaded through the torrent. Now I can transfer a 25GB file (and growing) to 15 hosts as it is being written too. Before LLM this would have taken me at least four days as I did not know those libraries. LLMs aren't just parrots or tab completers, they actually contain a lot of useful knowledge and they're very good at explaining it clearly.
- qwertox 2y ago> By asking Claude for help I obtained exactly what I want in under two hours. Did you use it in your editor or via the chat interface in the browser? Because they are two different approaches, and the one in the editor is mostly a (pretty awesome) tab completion. When I tell an LLM to "create a script which does ..." I won't be doing this in the editor, even if copilot does have the chat interface. I'll be doing this in the browser because there I have a proper chat topic to which I can get back later, or review it.
- shombaboor 2y agoIt would be funny if they had a metric for how much code is completed by CTRL+V
- busterarm 2y agoglorified, EXPENSIVE tab completion.
- walthamstow 2y agoI assume you're referring to the compute/energy used to run the completion?
- busterarm 2y agoto train the model