Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI

I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change.

In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much easier (move these joins into a CTE etc) it would have been a detriment. Not only did I get sidetracked by a bunch of useless suggestions but I also had to put up with others dumping their raw AI output at me as if it was somehow a meaningful contribution.

Not that I don't believe its possible to fix a lot of bugs, I also wonder what the actual dynamic was. Were the people in team working much more than usual as well? Given its Google, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an "internal push" to fix more bugs over next X sprints so that they can publish this blog and some manager can show impact and AI adaption to his superior.

How many of those automated fixes were reverted? How many introduced a new bug? What's the false positive rate on the finding agents? The post has counts for everything that went right and nothing for what could go wrong.

AI critique often funnels itself into a narrow bucket: creating code blindly with AI is bad. That's easy to grant.

Adversarial testing, checking developer assumptions, refactor suggestions, small dev tools and even some guided coding all sit on the other side of the spectrum of what you can do with coding and AI. For larger and larger codebases even simple things like tracing dependencies or behavior might be greatly aided.

And the critiques reserved for that narrow bucket on the other end, blindly generating code, are too easily conflated with the rest.

This is only a flex if AI also didn’t cause an increase in bugs that needed to be fixed.

A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me or simply don't know how to work with AI. I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. They get mad at Excel for the poor investment returns. At this point, this is such a strawman, it isn't worth counter arguing.

I think I'll abandon this discussion and keep using AI quietly while exchanging tips with like-minded people who are interested in using it properly and efficiently.

I am actually using AI to learn about Windows OS performance. I have a couple of prompts scheduled to research, test, and implement performance gains in the OS, then post them here [0] and here [1]. I always admired Brendan Greg and Bryan Cantrill at Sun/Illumos/ for their work on OS performance but never had the time to sit down and catch up to their level due to my time in the military.

I got Codex to find and apply a bunch of settings I didn't know about and in the future I hope to use AI to make real changes in performance that venders probably don't have time or resources for.

that being said, what I've learned so far is essentially WhyIsItAlwaysHN's entire comment "The place to find them would be performance profiles, query plans, telemetry."

I just find it so frustrating that for a user interface that was basically solved in the 90s, Windows GUI still struggles to survive on hardware exceptionally more powerful than what we had 30 years ago

0 - https://www.lacksan.com/updates/ 1 - https://github.com/Lacksan-Dev/HP-ZBook-Performance

Elephant in the room : how many of these bugs were written by LLMs in the first place ?

Because creating 100x more bugs and fixing 100x more isn't something to be proud of.

Sad they didn't say `Thanks to Gemini`

Nice marketing Google, now tell us how many of the bugs that were fixed were actually introduced by AI usage to begin with?

I wish they'd spent more time on improving the UI now. It's largely been the same since Chrome appeared. Their recent vertical tabs are so much inferior to Dia, which is built by a much smaller team.

a lot of these bugs wouldn't have ever been found without AI

But how many new ones did it introduce?

Still can't stand Chrome.

Good. Now please fix youtube. Amount of bugs that I'm getting in youtube app on iphone should be embarassing for company like Google. I cannot believe how bad it become in last couple years.

Real question is: how much those "fixed" bugs actually bothered the users to begin with?

But since Google cares mostly about its investors, the numbers and a mention of Gemini in such a blog post are more important.

So will the Chromium bug 5569 finally get fixed?

give it another year and AI will be filing bugs faster than humans can merge the fixes, and the Chrome team will need a separate AI just to triage the first AI's bug reports

More important thing:

Do you import new more bugs?

Me too! It's actually tiring! In a good way

I've mostly only used Codex for reviews, for Godot/GDScript code, and it helped me catch bugs that would've taken me ages to even notice on my own; games be tricky like that.

Claude was mostly useless or annoying up until the last time I tried it (about 3 months ago)

You have to be vigilant though: Codex often picks out obscure edge cases and suggests adding multiple new functions and flags to avoid issues that would be better off left as fast-failure crashes. Maybe that's because of the 5.6 Sol Max I leave it on.

The biggest bug still has not been fixed here, which is:

Google.

We really need an alternative to this greedy and evil corporations de-facto controlling a huge portion of the modern www stack. All decision-making processes are here subjugated to what fits Google's adEmpire. This is a perpetual system of control amplifying abusive systems in place. We already see this with the recent age sniffing; Google just yesterday announced that all android users must hand over their age to everyone else. Before that google kicked out or locked out open source alternatives to android (or, at the least, made their life significantly harder than before). These are not isolated ways of abuse - this is systematic abuse.

We really need alternatives to Google here. It can not be that one tyrant company dictates so much of people's open lives (and no, Firefox is no alternative; Mozilla is basically a nerfed and bribed entity that has given up on firefox many years ago already; ladybird may become an alternative at one point in time, but right now is not and there are questions over how Kling handles the overall project, but these complaints are significantly below what Google is doing globally here).

Fixing more bugs in the adChromium code base does not change the underlying problem at hand.

Maybe fix all the decade-long old bugs first.

Seems like they have enough AI they could find a way to put ManifestV2 back into the browser and fix things we actually wanted instead of putting more bullshit "AI improvements" we didn't?

A company valued at $4+ trillion based on the recent AI hype alone is touting the benefits of using said AI, and we're supposed to take this shit for granted.

I'm wondering what the Alphabet employees still commenting on this forum have to say about it? I guess for the right comps they can keep their mouths shut no matter the high level of idiocy involved.

[dead]

Did anyone check the code changes manually? What if it is just slop code?

AI meaning Claude or Codex, because Gemini is a laughingstock for coding. Also Gemini was mentioned only once in the article.