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- Hacker News
- Worrying. Extrapolating a (speculative) future, this means (Google will feel) that soon the chromium base will no longer need the crowd-sourced bug hunting that is open-source. I expect Google to eventually stop working on chromium (in the open) and all current chromium-flavours will become de-facto forks of the last published version of chromium. These forks won't be equally easy to maintain given that the groups running them do not have access to the same level of subsidy as Chrome does with Gemini.by Phemist
- I can't comment on Chrome bugs, but I can comment on Safari bugs. According to a search of the WebKit Bugzilla, I'm the most prolific filer of web inspector bugs outside of the WebKit team itself.
Recently I noticed an unusually high number of web inspector bugs fixed by one longtime WebKit engineer, and I suspected AI assistance, though the commit messages include no disclosure of this. Nonetheless, the increase in volume was quite dramatic.
The other day, an update to Safari Technology Preview was released, and I attempted to verify whether a couple of my bugs were indeed fixed. However, it was impossible for me to verify, because the latest version of Safari Technology Preview introduced a new web inspector bug that totally broke the features I was testing.
Thus, I remain unimpressed.
Without a doubt, LLMs have demonstrable skills and can produce code much faster than humans. I never thought that producing code fast was wise, though, even before LLMs arrived. For many years I've criticized software development based on management-driven release schedules, where developers are forced to pump out code regardless of quality, regardless of whether it's ready. Your boss may not like it, but code is done when it's done, not when your boss says it has to be done. If software complexity were predictable and reproducible, then indeed management could replace engineers with automation, but that's not how it works in reality.
Back to Chrome, the browser is notorious for continually adding invasive new "features" to the web that nobody wants except advertisers. I wonder how many Chrome bugs were the result of Google push push pushing all of this new crap on users over the years?
by lapcat - AI critique often funnels itself into a narrow bucket: creating code blindly with AI is bad. That's easy to grant.
Adversarial testing, checking developer assumptions, refactor suggestions, small dev tools and even some guided coding all sit on the other side of the spectrum of what you can do with coding and AI. For larger and larger codebases even simple things like tracing dependencies or behavior might be greatly aided.
And the critiques reserved for that narrow bucket on the other end, blindly generating code, are too easily conflated with the rest.
by mw888 - The real datapoint was Firefox not paying any money in Berlin's Pwn2Own competition round this May just gone. Unheard of to have nothing confirmed... they've paid out every event since 2007 (I checked). Does this mean we must move past the low-hanging fruit now? Probably... Certainly indicates some usefulness of these models.by unprovable
- How many of those automated fixes were reverted? How many introduced a new bug? What's the false positive rate on the finding agents? The post has counts for everything that went right and nothing for what could go wrong.by dabedee
- What remains to be seen is whether Google also introduced more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI.
The big problem is that AI output can be very convincing and look "right", even appear to work, until you examine it in detail and realise all the edge-cases it didn't handle.
by userbinator - Not that I don't believe its possible to fix a lot of bugs, I also wonder what the actual dynamic was. Were the people in team working much more than usual as well? Given its Google, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an "internal push" to fix more bugs over next X sprints so that they can publish this blog and some manager can show impact and AI adaption to his superior.by truncate
- To me this merely signals how broken C++ development really is. Most if not all of the bugs being uncovered are memory related and therefore intimately tied to the mental memory model of C and C++, namely manual memory management.
It's fine for a C or C++ program encompassing a couple hundred lines but beyond that it's a liability.
C and C++ are simply not fit for purpose when large scale software projects are concerned. All of these need to be ported to Rust or another memory-safe language ASAP to prevent mayhem.
The hundreds if not thousands of developers working on Chrome weren't idiots who didn't know what they're doing. The complexity of programming in C/C++ is simply beyond most intelligent individuals' ability to get perfect all the time.
by hn_submit