alt Hacker NewsEngineers at Google are much less likely to be doing green-field generation of large amounts of code . It's much more incremental, carefully measured changes to mature, complex software stacks, and done within the Google ecosystem, which is heavily divergent from the OSS-focused world of startups, where most training data comes from
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There are plenty of good tasks left, but they're often one-off/internal tooling.
Last one at work: "Hey, here are the symptoms for a bug, they appeared in <release XYZ> - go figure out the CL range and which 10 CLs I should inspect first to see if they're the cause"
(Well suited to AI, because worst case I've looked at 10 CLs in vain, and best case it saved me from manually scanning through several 1000 CLs - the EV is net positive)
It works for code generation as well, but not in a "just do my job" way, more in a "find which haystack the needle is in, and what the rough shape of the new needle is". Blind vibecoding is a non-starter. But... it's a non-starter for greenfields too, it's just that the FO of FAFO is a bit more delayed.
Yeah but Google won’t expect you to use AI tools developed outside Google and trained on primarily OSS code. It would expect you to use the Google internal AI tools trained on google3, no?
I think it’s a fair point that google has more stakeholders with a serious investment in some flubbed AI generated code not tanking their share value, but I’m not sure the rest of it is all that different from what engineer at $SOME_STARTUP does after the first ~8monthes the company is around. Maybe some folks throwing shit at a wall to find PMF are really getting a lot out of this, but most of us are maintaining and augmenting something we don’t want to break.
That is the problem.
AI is optimized to solve a problem no matter what it takes. It will try to solve one problem by creating 10 more.
I think long time/term agentic AI is just snake oil at this point. AI works best if you can segment your task into 5-10 minutes chunks, including the AI generating time, correcting time and engineer review time. To put it another way, a 10 minute sync with human is necessary, otherwise it will go astray.
Then it just makes software engineering into bothering supervisor job. Yes I typed less, but I didn’t feel the thrill of doing so.