Over 25 percent of Google’s code is now written by AI?
October 31, 2024
Hello there,
If you read that headline and your first instinct was to panic and to start looking into new careers, then I suppose it did its job. Many news outlet's had similar headlines as well alluding to the inevitable demise of the humanoid software engineer. But after looking into it a bit, maybe that isn't warranted, just yet.
That particular metric came from Google's CEO himself during Google's Q3 2024 earnings call this past Tuesday. He mentioned how Google is indeed using AI internally to improve coding processes and how it is boosting productivity and efficiency. No alarms there, as many developers and companies do indeed use coding agents on a day to day basis, such as myself.
And most news outlets are also not providing (or emphasizing) the full context of what Sundar Pichai said, which is as follows:
"Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers."
Obviously that second part is crucial, because that's how I would expect a company to use A.I., with a skilled developer at hand to monitor for any potential hallucinations or issues.
But the second part to notice is how he also mentions that the "new code" is generated by A.I., which I'll point out, most developers know that a fair amount of development work at a company isn't necessarily "new" code. It's maintaining an older codebase, removing code, editing code, etc.
If anything, this definitely points to how well Google is doing in terms of creating A.I. based developer workflows and processes.
However, 25% is an insane amount to be honest. I personally use ChatGPT to generate alot of my new code. I wrote the first 99% of the code at my current startup from scratch, but as ChatGPT got better and better I was able to leverage it more and more. So now maybe it accounts for 1% of the total codebase. Then again, I don't have the resources that a company such as Google has at their disposal, as compute can be expensive.
But perhaps as my own workflows and processes get better and better, and as compute gets cheaper and cheaper, that 1% will begin to steadily climb in the coming years. That's definitely a possibility and to be honest, just based on how much time I do save now with A.I. generated code, it's not something that I'm shying away from. But I'll probably still be just a few feet behind keeping an eye out just in case. ✌️
-- Walt
