according to Google, they’re recently reached “50% of code by character count was generated by LLMs”. Since Google haven’t massively cut their headcount, that suggests they’re now producing code at roughly twice the rate as a few years ago (at least by character count).
This doesn’t seem true. Time spent interfacing with LLMs trades off against time spent coding. Significantly more than 50% of my code is LLM written, but I haven’t seen a 2x code increase. Not a great source and a few months old, but I would expect a code-output increase in open source repos if Google was seeing 2x code output and that doesn’t seem to have materialized yet.
Fair enough, eliciting the plan and the code, and then checking for and if necessary cleaning up the mess afterwards does take time — but the code itself appears so fast that the time seems negligible. And there are plenty of studies showing that people are not very good at estimating whether they’re actually faster in centaur mode, or just feel faster.
So maybe even in coding, agents aren’t actually very helpful yet, and Google are primarily training their engineers to use them anyway in anticipation for when they get better?
This doesn’t seem true. Time spent interfacing with LLMs trades off against time spent coding. Significantly more than 50% of my code is LLM written, but I haven’t seen a 2x code increase.
Not a great source and a few months old, but I would expect a code-output increase in open source repos if Google was seeing 2x code output and that doesn’t seem to have materialized yet.
Fair enough, eliciting the plan and the code, and then checking for and if necessary cleaning up the mess afterwards does take time — but the code itself appears so fast that the time seems negligible. And there are plenty of studies showing that people are not very good at estimating whether they’re actually faster in centaur mode, or just feel faster.
So maybe even in coding, agents aren’t actually very helpful yet, and Google are primarily training their engineers to use them anyway in anticipation for when they get better?