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Comment by beyang | Hacker News Reader

Author of the post here—as another commenter mentioned, this is indeed a bit dated now, someone should probably write an updated post!

There's been a ton of evolution in dev tools in the past 3 years with some old workhorses retiring (RIP Phabricator) and new ones (like Graphite, which is awesome) emerging... and of course AI-AI-AI. LLMs have created some great new tools for the developer inner loop—that's probably the most glaring omission here. If I were to include that category today, it would mention tools like ChatGPT, GH Copilot, Cursor, and our own Sourcegraph Cody (https://cody.dev). I'm told that Google has internal AI dev tools now that generate more code than humans.

Excited to see what changes the next 3 years bring—the pace of innovation is only accelerating!

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> I'm told that Google has internal AI dev tools now that generate more code than humans.

Given that code is not an asset but a heavy liability the elephant in the room is the question: Who is going to maintain all that huge piles of generated code?

Wake me up when there's an AI that can safely delete code… That would be a really disrupting achievement!

> Wake me up when there's an AI that can safely delete code… That would be a really disrupting achievement!

Big tech already has depandabot-like bots doing this: dead code removal, refactoring and other things a linter can warn you about all get turned into automated pull requests (or PR comments). These are things a linter would tell you - if you had the patience to wait several hours to lint a gigantic monorepo; there probably will be more tooling support based on LLM trained on the huge code bases.

I'm not talking about dead-code elimination (that's something that compiles do since decades, without AI), and not about something like Scalafix's automatic refactorings (which are actually deterministic and correct, because it doesn't use AI), but about some true AI that could simplify code—and remove in that process at least 80% of it, because that's usually just crap that piled up over time.

Like said: Wake me up when when you can show me metrics where the use of AI shrunk code-bases by significant large amounts. For example going from 500 kLOC to 100 kLOC, or something like that. (Of course without loosing functionality; and at the same time making the code-base easier to understand). That would be success.

Everything that goes in the opposite direction is imho just leading inevitably to doom.

> Google has internal AI dev tools now that generate more code than humans

wondering how good it is? any googler using it can compare it to copilot?

It's absolutely fantastic. I feel disabled coding without it in my spare time. Imagine a pair programming session with someone that can read your mind and knows the entire codebase. I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about so I'll leave it at that.

I don't have access to copilot so I can't compare but I'd wager it works a lot better for Google internally because the training data is customized to Google.

I'm at Google and am not entirely sure what you are referring to, but I'd love to try it. Could you provide an internal codename I could search for? Or is it integrated somewhere in Cider (the name is public knowledge so I'm not leaking anything by using this) that you could guide me to (i.e. X dropdown -> 3rd option) while preserving ambiguity?

Googlers.. please take it to internal comms.

Relax, they just bragging.

It's not trivial to find the person talking. Why does a comment or two bother you so much?

It's a conversation that isn't relevant to anyone outside the company. One commenter, who may or may not work in Google, is asking for an internal codename.

You're the downvoter here so why does my comment bother _you_ so much?

On any other "social media" they would be great comments, but they're not really in the spirit of Hacker News.

I miss the days when google was super open with their new tech :/

I’m fascinated that of two people working at the same company, one raves about how an internal tool is a complete game changer and indispensable while another isn’t even aware it exists.

I'm fascinated that at a 175k employee company, two employees I know nothing about, in business areas or positions I know nothing about, could possibly use different tooling for their day to day duties.

*Surely* at your place of work, the cleaning staff is familiar with the CTO's dearest tools and vice versa?

surely at my place of work, there is no cleaning staff and no CTO.

That’s an unnecessarily snarky answer given the two people above are clearly both in similar roles. The parent comment was asking where to find the option in the tooling they both shared.

Snarky replies comparing CTO to cleaning staff don’t even begin to apply.

Shoot me a mail to e-hackernews[at]wthack.de so we can connect less publicly.

Interesting, I didn't find it that impressive when I tried it a couple months ago and fairly quickly went back to regular old-fashioned autocomplete. What language(s) were you working with out of curiosity?

No idea how good other languages are but Java in cider-v is very nice.

Close friend worked at Google Brain, now Deepmind. Said he presses tab 70% of the time and it just works. When shown my paid version of Copilot said it felt his auto completes had higher accuracy.

The code search section misses the two most obvious tools IMO: ripgrep / git grep and GitHub. (They were the obvious tools in 2020 also).

Github's codesearch leaves something to be desired.

The new one is pretty good

It's definitely better, I'll give it that!

Besides the tools mentioned, what are some other AI tools that can be used to accelerate coding for established codebases? I have some money to try out new tools, but am wondering if there are that are less "black boxy" and would work with a company's private instance of Azure ChatGPT?

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