I'm not a Google employee but I've heard enough stories to know that a surprising amount of code changes at google are basically updating API interfaces.
The way google works, the person changing an interface is responsible for updating all dependent code. They create PRs which are then sent to code owners for approval. For lower-level dependencies, this can involve creating thousands of PRs across hundreds of projects.
Google has had tooling to help with these large-scale refactors for decades, generally taking the form of static analysis tools. However, these would be inherently limited in their capability. Manual PR authoring would still be required in many cases.
With this background, LLM code gen seems like a natural tool to augment Google's existing process.
I expect Google is currently executing a wave of newly-unblocked refactoring projects.
If anyone works/worked at google, feel free to correct me on this.
Do they have tooling for generating scaffolding for various things (like unit/integration tests)?
If we’re guessing what code is easiest and largest proportion of codebase to write, my first guess would be test suites. Lots of lines of repetitive code patterns that repeat and AI is decent at dealing with
The way google works, the person changing an interface is responsible for updating all dependent code. They create PRs which are then sent to code owners for approval. For lower-level dependencies, this can involve creating thousands of PRs across hundreds of projects.
Google has had tooling to help with these large-scale refactors for decades, generally taking the form of static analysis tools. However, these would be inherently limited in their capability. Manual PR authoring would still be required in many cases.
With this background, LLM code gen seems like a natural tool to augment Google's existing process.
I expect Google is currently executing a wave of newly-unblocked refactoring projects.
If anyone works/worked at google, feel free to correct me on this.