[nlehuen]

I also work at Google and I agree with the general sentiment that AI completion is not doing engineering per se, simply because writing code is just a small part of engineering.

However in my experience the system is much more powerful than you described. Maybe this is because I'm mostly writing C++ for which there is a much bigger training corpus than JavaScript.

One thing the system is already pretty good at is writing entire short functions from a comment. The trick is not to write:

  function getAc...

But instead:

  // This function smargls the bleurgh
  // by flooming the trux.
  function getAc...

This way the completion goes much farther and the quality improves a lot. Essentially, use comments as the prompt to generate large chunks of code, instead of giving minimum context to the system, which limits it to single line completion.

[Aachen]

This type of not having to think about the implementation, especially in a language that we've by now well-established can't be written safely by humans (including by Google's own research into Android vulnerabilities if I'm not mistaken), at least with the current level of LLM, worries me the most

Time will tell whether it outputs worse, equal, or better quality than skilled humans, but I'd be very wary of anything it suggests beyond obvious boilerplate (like all the symbols needed in a for loop) or naming things (function name and comment autocompletes like the person above you described)

[munksbeer]

> worries me the most

It isn't something I worry about at all. If it doesn't work and starts creating bugs and horrible code, the best places will adjust to that and it won't be used or will be used more judiciously.

I'll still review code like I always do and prevent bad code from making it into our repo. I don't see why it's my problem to worry about. Why is it yours?

[caeril]

It's worrying, yes, but we've had stackoverflow copy-paste coding for over a decade now already, which has exactly the same effects.

This isn't a new concern. Thoughtless software development started a long time ago.

[miki123211]

This is a good idea even outside of Google, with tools like copilot and such.

Often when I don't know exactly what function / sequence of functions I need to achieve a particular outcome, I put in a comment describing what I want to do, and Copilot does the rest. I then remove the comment once I make sure that the generated code actually works.

I find it a lot less flow-breaking than stackoverflow or even asking an LLM.

It doesn't work all of the time, and sometimes you do have to Google still, but for the cases it does work for, it's pretty nice.

[Aachen]

Why remove the comment that summarises the intent for humans? The compiler will ignore your comment anyway, so it's only there for the next human who comes along and will help them understand the code

[jappgar]

I can guarantee you there is more publicly accessible javascript in the world than C++.

Copilot will autocomplete entire functions as well, sometimes without comments or even after just typing "f". It uses your previous edits as context and can assume what you're implementing pretty well.

[infecto]

I can guarantee you that the author was referencing code within Google. That is, their tooling is trained off internal code bases. I am imagining c++ dwarfs javascript.

[lupire]

Google does not write much publicly available JavaScript. They wrote their own special flavor. (Same for any hugel legacy operation)

[cryptonym]

I find writing code to be almost relaxing plus that's really a tiny fraction of dev work. Not too excited about potential productivity gains based purely on authoring snippets. I find it much more interesting on boosting maintainability, robustness and other quality metrics (not focusing on quality of AI output, actual quality of the code base).

[xp84]

I frequently use copilot and also find that writing comments like you do, to describe what I expect each function/class/etc to do gives superb results, and usually eliminates most of the actual coding work. Obviously it adds significant specification work but that’s not usually a bad thing.

[michaelbuckbee]

I don't work at Google, but I do something similar with my code: write comments, generate the code, and then have the AI tooling create test cases.

AI coding assistants are generally really good at ramping up a base level of tests which you can then direct to add more specific scenario's to.

[tomhallett]

Has anyone made a coding assistant which can do this based off audio which I’m saying out loud while I’m typing (interview/pairing style), so instead of typing the comment I can just say it?

[hecanjog]

I had some success using this for basic input, but never took it very far. It's meant to be customizable for that sort of thing though: https://talon.wiki/quickstart/getting_started/ (Edit: just the voice input part)

[alickz]

Comment Driven Programming might be interesting, as an offshoot of Documentation Driven Programming

[gniv]

That's pretty nice. Does it write modern C++, as I guess it's expected?

[nlehuen]

Yes it does. Internally Google uses C++20 (https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#C++_Versio...) and the model picks the style from training, I suppose.