Google announces that its artificial intelligence now generates 75% of its new code. However, during the company's most important event, its own engineers were mocking the tool on an internal social network. The figure, far from being a milestone, is an inflated metric that hides an uncomfortable reality: AI remains a clumsy assistant that generates more work than it saves.
The 75% of junk code nobody counts 🤡
That percentage includes autocompletions of trivial functions, comments, and test lines that are often removed. Human engineers still design the overall architecture and, above all, spend hours debugging absurd errors introduced by AI. Google needs to maintain this fiction to justify multi-million dollar investments and its stock market value, but the reality is that programmers spend more time fixing junk code than writing from scratch.
AI is clumsy, but marketing is an expert 😅
While Google sells smoke to investors, engineers laugh on the inside. AI suggests loose lines that seem great until you try to compile them and discover it has created an infinite loop or a variable that doesn't exist. The average person reads the headline and thinks programmers are on thin ice. The reality is that the tool still needs a babysitter, and that babysitter is an engineer with caffeine and infinite patience.