How many lines in a diff are actually relevant code? Anyone who does reviews knows the answer.
That is one of the reasons why lean, terse languages are often better to review.
We can guess by those companies preferred coding styles and technologies whether their codebases are lean and terse or full of straw. And that should give us an estimate.
Of course, I could be wrong. They could be doing this measurement after removing irrelevant changes.
The better choice would be not to publish those sorts of claims if there is not a clear methodology that explains how the number was achieved.
AI suggestions can also be as simple as autocomplete and still be counted for the sake of engagement metrics.
Oh and in enterprise settings and especially MS shops Github Copilot is being pushed everywhere, (forceful) adoption rates are much higher than the market average.
[0] Claude 3.7 in my recent experience
and
> The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.
So the CEO of Microsoft is saying that 20 - 30% of their code is being produced by computer systems that write poor code?
Does it mean AI though? Lots of lines in repositories are generated by software that isn’t AI. Dependency lock files, proto files, etc
IMO the wording is intentionally misleading.
> "I'd say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software," Nadella said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
which is clearly untrue, one assumes he meant "20%, 30% written since 2023 was partially generated by an LLM operated by a developer", but that doesn't sell stock.
There is no use of writing VBA these days :@
Not that 30% of code being automatically generated from templates or in some algorithmic way seem unbelievable. There is likely lot of code that could be generated by other code and it might even be reasonable choice.
techpineapple•2mo ago
This does seem to me to be the key question, is anyone transparent about this? If not, why not?
cratermoon•2mo ago
techpineapple•2mo ago
sublinear•2mo ago
rsynnott•2mo ago
Any time you see companies refusing to even vaguely define what metrics like this mean (or, for that matter, using non-standard metrics, like disclosing weekly active users but not monthly), it's generally a very strong signal that they're not interested in being transparent because the truth is, ah, not what they would like it to be.
hnav•2mo ago