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More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI. (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 year ago by Dot@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] dan@upvote.au 73 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I really don't believe the headline. Google has thousands of teams of engineers that are writing code for hundreds of different products... There's no way all of them are generating anywhere near 25% of their new code via AI.

Unless they're doing something like generating massive test fixtures or training data sets using AI and classifying them as "code" 🤔

[-] 0x0@programming.dev 30 points 1 year ago

I really don’t believe the headline.

The The company had a strong quarter thanks in large part to AI. part is what makes it sound strange to me, sounds like shareholder egostrking.

That said all they need to do is mandate use of AI during development like my company's done and they can boast this kind of bullshit easily.

[-] aidan@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

That said all they need to do is mandate use of AI during development

Wtf does that mean? Like what if you know exactly what you want to do? Do you have to ask GPT to review your code?

[-] 0x0@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago

Where i work they had us use AI with the IDEs.

I'd say about 20% of the times what it suggests is actually usable.

That's autocomplete on steroids for you.

[-] FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 5 points 1 year ago

I wonder if "code" means pull requests and they have a load of automated ones to update versions of external and internal libraries

[-] emax_gomax@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Given the size of lockfiles this would not surprise me but who the hell counts lock files code. Their barely configs :/.

[-] Shiggles@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago

How often does a solution need “new” code and not “basically the same code as a previous issue but with two small details changed”? This is a genuine question, I have only ever coded as a hobby. But 25% of your work being essentially just copy pasted sounds plausible, and that’s sorta all LLMs are doing, right?

[-] dan@upvote.au 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Reusable code is usually pulled out into a library and reused that way, rather than copied and pasted into a new project. You might copy and paste some boilerplate to new projects but it wouldn't be anywhere near 25% of the code.

I'm not sure why someone downvoted you (it wasn't me!) because your comment did seem like a genuine question.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

Pretty often, but then you can just refactor the code so you can use it for more situations

What LLMs are good at are the opposite - when the thing you want to do is almost exactly the same, but nearly all the details need to be changed

Say you want a page to edit account details, and another page to edit community details. And the API paths to do this will be even more similar - but because they're different things, you'd have to get fancy with the design to make code that works for both... It's possible, but there will be trade-offs

LLMs are great at it though... Pass in the account page, give it the object definition for the community details, and it'll spit it out for you

[-] realharo@lemm.ee 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If they're counting all the auto-completed code that's inserted after pressing Tab on an AI suggestion (such as from Copilot), then I easily believe it.

Tons of places in code only have 1 possible thing that can go on a particular line, given the context, and there is no point in typing it all out manually.

[-] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago

Does this mean "AI was used as a fancy autocomplete"? Because that's my number 1 use case for AI like copilot, and if that's the case, over 25% of my code is written by AI. But let me tell you, it still gets it wrong, repeatedly making the same syntax errors no matter how many times I correct it. It starts to get it right, then later reverts to making the same syntax errors, even making up variable names that violate widely known public APIs.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

Auto complete is about... 60% helpful and increases my productivity with about 5-10% as I need to double check everything it does and half the time it's something ridiculously stoopid

[-] prof@infosec.pub 5 points 1 year ago

Agreed. It's really shit for new code, but if I'm writing glue code stuff or repetitive code it saves a lot of time spent on typing.

[-] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago

25% of all new code written at all? Sure, I guess.

25% of all new code that actually gets used in a real product, not just tested in an IDE? Bullshit.

[-] BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

I wonder if they do the monkey writing shakespeare experiment but with code. If you keep letting it write code, something has to come out of it.

[-] DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

You still need to check the hell out of it because AI is wildly unreliable.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 year ago

That would explain the decline in quality of everything from Google. Even Gmail is becoming buggy as hell, even though I haven't seen any new features added. I have used Gmail since it's founding and only in the last year or so did it become extremely buggy.

[-] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

Now they can fill new holes at the google graveyard at twice the speed!

[-] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Awesome. How much more time off to google software engineers get? I guess it's none.

[-] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

They just laid off a ton of them instead.

[-] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

A quarter of them.

[-] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Coincidence?

[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 15 points 1 year ago

I've read exactly the opposite article a few days ago:

https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html

[-] btaf45@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

This company wasn't trying to bullshit financial analysts which was the reason for the google CEO comment.

[-] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago

Not disappointed by The Verge, first paragraph paraphrases the title with no source and the following is just off topic.

[-] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 11 points 1 year ago

Ah Elon most love all this extra code being written. If course it's super inefficient but look at all those lines sooo much code.

[-] kamiheku@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago

Are the lines salient though?

[-] btaf45@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

How is Elon going to tell the AI to print its code on hardcopy and then fly to Elon's city to show him your hardcopy code like he told actual Twitter developers to do?

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Makes sense considering how shitty Google products have become.

[-] mEEGal@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

NICE TRY, AI !

this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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