More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI (opens in new tab)

> 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.

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

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.

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.

80 lines of licence comment

30 lines of class boilerplate

One explanatory comment for every statement

The revolution is here!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.