I cannot imagine this to be true, cause imo current LLM's coding abilities are very limited. It definitely makes me more productive to use it as a tool, but I use it mainly for boilerplate and short examples (where I had to read some library documentation before).
Whenever the problem requires thinking, it horribly fails because it cannot reason (yet). So unless this is also true for google devs, I cannot see that 25% number.
My guess is that they counted each line of code made by an engineer using AI coding tools.
Besides, even google employees write a lot of boilerplate, especially android IIRC, not to mention simple but essential code, so AI can prevent carpal tunnel for the junior devs working on that.
Roughly only one quarter (assuming they are outputting similar amounts of code as non AI using engineers) of engineers actually using AI regularly for coding is a statistic that is actually believable to me based on my own experience. A lot of small teams have their "AI guy" who has drunk the kool aid, but it's not as widespread as HackerNews would make you think.
80% or more of the code you write day to day is just grunt work. Boring code that has, for the most part, already been written in some form such that it was copied from Google or StackOverflow. AI is basically a shortcut to using that stuff..
Whenever the problem requires thinking, it horribly fails because it cannot reason (yet). So unless this is also true for google devs, I cannot see that 25% number.