Did google not rely on Gemini to do their ISA changeover?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14928

Was Gemini worse than no tool at all there?

Probably. According to the paper, 83.82% of automated commits were already made by algorithmic tools (non-LLM). For the remainder, a three-phase LLM approach was tried, and achieved a success rate of 30%. Based on these numbers, it probably would have been faster, cheaper, and more efficient to just enhance their current strategy rather than screwing around with text generators.

I think that’s a bad faith read on that paper.

No one is smuggling this in. The debate is over. It's transformative. We're in the midst of transformation.

It's really not over. Somebody has to actually put something into production with it first.

Implying that nobody has put AI generated code into production yet?

Stuff that's going into production now (actual production, not startup MVP production) would have been being written just before Claude Code came out, so pretty much by definition no. There's some copilot-style assisted stuff in the wild, I guess? But not really more of it than pre-copilot so the productivity argument kind of falls through there.

Cursor came out 3 years ago. "Agentic" refactors have been a thing for 1.5 years. Vibecoding as a term has been created 1 year ago.

There are multiple companies that deploy to production daily. What are we even talking about?

Right but this agentic stuff was supposed to be the wave where we would finally actually see increased output, so we should probably be seeing it soon if it's real. Like, my dev team should definitely have the actual code they keep talking about their agents making, ready for me to put into production. As should my vendors. Any day now.

What is this nonsense?

You said that none of this was in production and then when people pointed out that it was obviously in production, you shifted the goal post to some other measure that you just imagined in your head.

Well, if it's in production, it's not at my company, any of my vendors, or for that matter any of the software I use in my private life; the pace of all of that is exactly what it was 2 years ago. When it shows up I'll form an opinion.

Let me amend that: one of my vendors has a new diffusion-based noise-reduction plugin that's pretty good though the resource usage is still too high. I imagine that will come down as they improve it. And that's pretty cool. But it didn't come out any faster it's just that it uses diffusion in the plugin itself. But docker was a much bigger impact on the software we use at work than AI has been so far.

I was even trying to come up with a list of software I use in my personal life to see if any of that has started coming out faster, and I came up with:

KDE

Supercollider

Puredata

Mixxx

Renoise

CUDA and ROCM

none of which have had any kind of release acceleration that I know of (though obviously the hardware to use the last two has gotten mind-blowingly expensive, alas). I use maybe three apps on my phone and they aren't updating any more frequently than they used to.

I get that for whatever reason this bugs people, but I'm in a very tech job and have a very tech personal life (just not webdev in either case) and literally have not seen anything I deal with change other than needing to learn to scroll past the AI summary at the top of search results.

What do you expect that it’s gonna announce itself in a modal dialogue when you run the software?

This isn’t like AI image generation where you’re going to convince yourself that you can tell the difference based on how you think it looks. Do you really think no one in the production chain of any of the software that you use picked up copilot in the last two years?

What signal are you hoping to receive that this is happening?

Well like I said in the sibling post to this one I'd expect really any of the software vendors in my professional or personal life to release either more rapidly or with a wider array of features than they were a few years ago, and that hasn't been my experience, at all.

The coding was never the slow part.

I'm certainly sympathetic to that argument, but if you scroll way back this thread started with the question of whether or not AI is transformative, and if it is neither faster nor better that would suggest "no".

I feel like you might only be convinced when an AI powered robot rolls up to you and asks, "Bandrami, are you convinced that AI is transformative yet?"

Robots have been able to do that for decades now

No, it is over. Compare today to even two years ago.

I put AI assisted code in production every day, what are you talking about? At this point I don't even doubt I'm going to lose the job eventually, the question is only whether or not I will be able to pay my mortgage off first.

Also worth noting that Apple recently paid a king’s ransom for Samsung RAM

King's ransom or market price?

The market price of the ransom for a King is a King's ransom.

They redistributed money that fools gave them.

The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?

We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.

The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.

We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.

God, thank you.

Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.

Yeah, those people love authenticity. They pay a lot for authentic Modiglianis.

Why should anyone care about either of those two people?

The art establishment clearly does. Refik has a show at MoMA at the moment. Saltz won a Pulitzer for his art criticism, so I guess the Pulitzer committee cares.

But normal people doesn't care about the art establishment, it has no impact on their lives, it could die tomorrow and almost nobody would notice.

Will smith eating spaghetti is art, sorry.

If everything is art, then nothing is art. Conceptual art, and everything that followed in Duchamp's wake, is mostly meaningless nonsense, sorry.

Fresh take

I don’t know that this has to be the way. One thing that is really going to confound this very common idea that taste and quality and personal characteristics will win the day, is that you can use AI to represent all of these to other people.

It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.

I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.

If we’re restricting ourselves to the United States, then we have to admit that we have been incinerating public education for decades. American schools have had to do more with less and eventually less with less, for as long as most of us have been alive. We have watched in the last 10 years and increasingly in the last five years high school graduates be less and less able to read.

None of this happened because of AI. We could if we want blame smartphones for it, but I think that’s also pretty dubious. We will probably succeed in blaming AI for this. If there is a history, it will get the dates wrong in the 21st-century as to when America lobotomized itself.

We are really not prepared for how few people can competently read and write coming to adulthood right now. It doesn’t matter because we’re gonna speed run the results. Kicking out immigrants en masse means that we can’t even lean on countries that teach their kids how to read and write.

Many people that can read lack the emotional maturity to look reality in the face and realize they have to fight tooth and nail politically and bureaucratically to keep basic rights