More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI

https://twitter.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1851374530998256126

by bgrainger • 2 years ago

23 31 2 years ago

nnf• 2 years ago

One thing that worries me about AI-generated code is that if there's an obscure bug that pops up later, there's no engineer to think "ok hang on, I remember something strange happening when I first wrote that code... let me have a look." Instead, there are only engineers who reviewed the code, which is of course a lot different from writing it.

jerlam• 2 years ago

How common is this situation? While it's nice to look at the history of some line of code and contact the person who wrote it, in a company with a lot of turnover or promotion, that person isn't going to be available or want to help you.

nunez• 2 years ago

It's pretty handy if they _are_ there, and/or if they've trained others on the codebase.

csdreamer7• 2 years ago

One thing that worries me about AI-generated code is that if there's an obscure bug that pops up later, there's no engineer to think "ok hang on, I remember something strange happening when I first wrote that code... let me have a look." Instead, there are only engineers who reviewed the code, which is of course a lot different from writing it.

I feel this is a very weak argument against AI. Professional software development rarely values crafting good code. You get it in to meet a deadline to make management that is technologically clueless happy. Even orgs that value good code have people leave because of the take a new job merry-go-round to get a good pay raise of years past. One of the reasons open source surpasses most closed source software despite a lack of funding is you a variety of individuals with different goals that are focused on making a maintainable and usable solution.

sshine2• 2 years ago

Professional software development rarely values crafting good code. You get it in to meet a deadline to make management that is technologically clueless happy.

While this is very common, you also have professional software developers with a deep sense of ownership about a system: they animated it, so when it’s being quirky in particular ways, you have an almost supernatural sense of what branches it’s following. You don’t really get to internalise the logic of a program by reading it. It’s a byproduct of having to come up with it. When a part of that thinking is outsourced, some logic internalisation is lost.

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

Engineers in tech move between jobs/teams often enough that this benefit doesn’t exist anyway

jesse__• 2 years ago

RIP Google

unsnap_biceps• 2 years ago

Eh, I would imagine that more than a quarter of new code at any FAANG is boilerplate which is ideal for current AI systems. I'm pretty anti-current-AI, but I can't say that I'm not impressed at how well it handles boilerplate code.

mysterydip• 2 years ago

Because saying "more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by free crowdsourcing from internet scraping" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily ;)

johnasmith• 2 years ago

Google has two billion lines of proprietary code, conformant to their style guides and proprietary requirements. I can't imagine they'd poison their model with non-conformant third party source.

Animats• 2 years ago

Any good examples of such generated code? Anything to look at on Github, Gitlab, etc?

000ooo0002• 2 years ago

80 lines of licence comment

30 lines of class boilerplate

One explanatory comment for every statement

The revolution is here!

null_deref• 2 years ago

More than a quarter of the new code is generated by AI while I need to clarify each time with my PM what does the ticket they opened mean

muglug• 2 years ago

Better source article: https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earni...

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

AI code is the new offshore code. Have fun maintaining it.

babyent• 2 years ago

What kind of code? That’s pretty important to know right?

uberman• 2 years ago

With so many projects abandoned, is code speed really an issue for google?

Has there been any novel or interesting code written or is this code block completion that saved people keystrokes?

burnt-resistor2• 2 years ago

Like most inherently greedy corporations these days, they're figure out yet another way to demoralize, fire, and drive away talented engineers.

It could also be they're using AI to propose and do large-scale refactor code mods, but that would be a smart use-case for it.

000ooo0002• 2 years ago

CEO of company with AI product says, in earnings call, that nontrivial amount of code is generated by AI..

Do people think an earnings call is some kind of secret meeting where the marketing stops?

xk_id• 2 years ago

Nearly a quarter of HN submissions lately are just spammy ads for the AI sector. I seldom open them anymore, but I’ve noticed most of them get hundreds of comments. I wish people spent their time on something useful.

sshine2• 2 years ago

At least people are not openly hostile to the hype train like with blockchain.

gnabgib• 2 years ago

PDF of Earnings (31 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988811

Coverage from NYT (11 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41989256

Coverage from Verge (7 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41989674

Coverage from CNBC (2 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41989727

drewcoo• 2 years ago

Google is a big company which buys other companies to grow.

Does this AI actually improve their M&A somehow? Does it allow them to AI-write new software instead of buying it?

I don't get it.

jsnell• 2 years ago

Your entire premise is pretty obviously wrong. Acquisitions are not the main driver for any kind of growth, whether revenue or the code base

ivewonyoung• 2 years ago

Are they using models that are public, or are these customized private models.

sys_64738• 2 years ago

Mission critical code? Unit tests? Context matters.

asdfasdf1• 2 years ago

and it shows

burnt-resistor2• 2 years ago

It sounds like a boastful lie for stock reasons, but if not, the AI overlords may decide to write algorithms creating effectively a social credit service and not tell any humans.

malfist• 2 years ago

Would CEOs of companies selling AI lie about how useful AI is?

In unrelated news, Amazon's CEO boasted that AI saved the company 4,500 years of engineering effort during a JDK upgrade.

AStonesThrow• 2 years ago

When function names autocomplete in my IDE, is AI writing my code?

When vim shows me where a matching paren/bracket goes, is that AI that put them there?

When we use code validators like lint or Purify, is that AI code review from the 1980s?

jasomill• 2 years ago

This would be more interesting if it were supported by representative examples from Google open source projects.

More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI

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