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Comments (285)

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  VBprogrammer
  I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change.In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much easier (move these joins into a CTE etc) it would have been a detriment. Not only did I get sidetracked by a bunch of useless suggestions but I also had to put up with others dumping their raw AI output at me as if it was somehow a meaningful contribution.
• unprovable
  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.
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  truncate
  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.
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  glimshe
  A lot of people here seem to be living in a different universe than me or simply don't know how to work with AI. I think detractors believe you should just let AI do the job blindly instead of leveraging it as a tool to accelerate you. They get mad at Excel for the poor investment returns. At this point, this is such a strawman, it isn't worth counter arguing.I think I'll abandon this discussion and keep using AI quietly while exchanging tips with like-minded people who are interested in using it properly and efficiently.
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  dabedee
  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.
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  Phemist
  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.
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  mw888
  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.
• MSkill1
  Did they fix the bug where Chrome tries to track you and your behavior wherever you go and whatever you do in the world?
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  goldenarm
  Elephant in the room : how many of these bugs were written by LLMs in the first place ?Because creating 100x more bugs and fixing 100x more isn't something to be proud of.
• andai
  This situation seemed familiar... https://i.ibb.co/RGvQgfmX/i-fixed-more-bugs.png
• maelito
  It's so hard to believe these kind of affirmations coming from a firm that has so many hundreds (thousands ?) of billions invested directly and indirectly in generative AI...
• iknowstuff
  This is a tacit admission it was Mythos, not Gemini, despite alluding to experiments with Gemini earlier on:> Added support for model interoperability to leverage the unique strengths of both open-weights and proprietary models
• 4lx87
  Title is inaccurate. Fixed more “security bugs” not “bugs”. The article is specifically about security vulnerabilities.
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  seanmcdirmid
  This is only a flex if AI also didn’t cause an increase in bugs that needed to be fixed.
• xacky
  Just admit that Chromium is too complex at this point, we've all seen show HNs doing what could be considered magic in Chromium. We probably need to issue a mortarium in new platform features and focus on a deep clean in bug fixes. I've said that Mozilla is too busy doing redesigns than bug fixes as well.
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  glauber
  Convenient that the LLM vendor is the one saying their own product works, isn’t it?
• iepathos
  Nice marketing Google, now tell us how many of the bugs that were fixed were actually introduced by AI usage to begin with?
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  Kiro
  I can believe it. So many small CSS quirks that have bothered me for years have suddenly been fixed, meaning I can remove my work-arounds.
• reloty
  The privatization and obfuscation of the security industry is worrying.Google claims to help open source developers, but donates millions to the Alpha Omega Foundation that did not give access to Mythos to Curl and only found one issue.The Alpha Omega people appear to be selected on physical appearance and take the money away from open source without doing much.The entire Chrome article is obviously directed at suits and unsurprisingly hypes AI for better promotion chances.
• eviks
  No worries, writing with AIs can improve the speed bugs enter the code base as well. Would be interesting to know the breakdown.> the “latent security issue.” Code that is safe and robust in isolation can be transformed into a critical vulnerability by an entirely unrelated, minor logic change elsewhere in the tree.Similarly, you can accidentally fix a bug without discovering/triaging it, so the pointless repeated bug lifecycle is incomplete
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  lr1970
  > Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AIAnd introduced how many new bugs? thanks to AI ...
• iamgopal
  with excellent test cases, AI can do wonders, human's task in AI world is to just write as many tests cases as we can.
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  Tistron
  I have a software degree and some work experience but have been doing other things for a decade or so. I'm curious to try out some "vibe engineering" but it seems a bit daunting to get started, there are so many new tools available on top of the AI itself. Are there good resources for somebody like me to get started, that'll guide me though how to think about prompting, and using CI and how go have the agent successfully write specs and tests and what-not. I don't mind paying some for a good course, but I find it hard to figure out which one would be worthwhile, or whether there are some youtubers that would be better to follow.Any tips?
• whywhywhywhy
  They keep breaking inertial scroll on Mac though, which is something that irritates me thousands of times a day.First they made it so when it came to rest it would then start scrolling again and overshoot by 2 lines before coming to a halt.They fixed that after a few weeks then it worked until last week and now it’s left in a state where as it’s coming to a halt it jerks every time like dropping frames of the scroll almost.I know it’s not my machine, config or trackpad because I’m seeing it on multiple computers.
• Arshad-Talpur
  The article is great reflection how LLMs are actually doing Quality assurance on both security and codebase sides, but i still doubt the creative part that means UI side, So far in my experience LLMs at best are unable to determine what the good UI is , may be its not inherently a bug detection rather a creative process
• brtkwr
  I assume this was thanks to Project Glasswing + Mythos Preview?
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  fuadnafiz98
  Sad they didn't say `Thanks to Gemini`
• running101
  I recently switched from Chrome to Edge after using Chrome for decades. It is so bloated and slow. I can have same number of tabs open in both and Edge is always 30% to 50% more efficient.
• benob
  The next step is to build software without bugs
• cahoot_bird
  spent a several months working on their bug bounty program earlier this year while working full time and lost a lot of motivation after a duplicate combined with lower bounty awards and claude safety guards all at the same time
• adam12
  Interesting to see how many new bugs were created from all these changes.
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  cyberjunkie
  Still can't stand Chrome.
• josefresco
  Did they fix spell check? Because it still doesn't work and all the solutions are basically "wipe and start over".
• throwatdem12311
  And how many vulnerabilities did they introduce ;)
• qarl2
  Lies, obviously. AI is worthless.
• pshirshov
  Did they fix that bug with ublock not working properly on Chrome?
• lapcat
  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?
• galkk
  Good. Now please fix youtube. Amount of bugs that I'm getting in youtube app on iphone should be embarassing for company like Google. I cannot believe how bad it become in last couple years.
• ppljudge
  I’d rephrase this to something like: “People fixed more Chrome bugs (…), thanks to people who leveraged AI tools”
• cshores
  lol given the state of Gemini at the moment, they probably used Claude.
• greenimpala
  a lot of these bugs wouldn't have ever been found without AI
• ymolodtsov
  I wish they'd spent more time on improving the UI now. It's largely been the same since Chrome appeared. Their recent vertical tabs are so much inferior to Dia, which is built by a much smaller team.
• feverzsj
  Maybe fix all the decade-long old bugs first.
• righthand
  So Google could have been using AI to fix the XSLT bugs instead of acting like a cult and forcing everyone to remove it? What does this mean for things Google deems too bug riddled to be a viable feature? Will they remove the HTML surface now or fix it? I would love for the geniuses on the WHATWG to answer.
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  ed_mercer
  AI meaning Claude or Codex, because Gemini is a laughingstock for coding. Also Gemini was mentioned only once in the article.
• lilerjee
  More important thing:Do you import new more bugs?
• gverrilla
  Earlier today I opened Chrome on my iPhone, went to the Reading List. It started flicking fast and then the phone restarted. That's a first for me on iPhone.
• ahartmetz
  Maybe they could ask the AI to fix their atrocious build times. Only in Chrome do you have 300 line source files that blow up to 20 megabytes after preprocessing as a matter of course. 3 GB per compile job is getting more common - and RAM is expensive right now!
• brazukadev
  This makes zero sense with the amount of engineers they have, most of those bugs even would be fixed for free by highly competent people.
• jongjong
  But how many new ones did it introduce?
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  nalekberov
  Real question is: how much those "fixed" bugs actually bothered the users to begin with?But since Google cares mostly about its investors, the numbers and a mention of Gemini in such a blog post are more important.
• Razengan
  Me too! It's actually tiring! In a good wayI've mostly only used Codex for reviews, for Godot/GDScript code, and it helped me catch bugs that would've taken me ages to even notice on my own; games be tricky like that.Claude was mostly useless or annoying up until the last time I tried it (about 3 months ago)You have to be vigilant though: Codex often picks out obscure edge cases and suggests adding multiple new functions and flags to avoid issues that would be better off left as fast-failure crashes. Maybe that's because of the 5.6 Sol Max I leave it on.
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  shevy-java
  The biggest bug still has not been fixed here, which is:Google.We really need an alternative to this greedy and evil corporations de-facto controlling a huge portion of the modern www stack. All decision-making processes are here subjugated to what fits Google's adEmpire. This is a perpetual system of control amplifying abusive systems in place. We already see this with the recent age sniffing; Google just yesterday announced that all android users must hand over their age to everyone else. Before that google kicked out or locked out open source alternatives to android (or, at the least, made their life significantly harder than before). These are not isolated ways of abuse - this is systematic abuse.We really need alternatives to Google here. It can not be that one tyrant company dictates so much of people's open lives (and no, Firefox is no alternative; Mozilla is basically a nerfed and bribed entity that has given up on firefox many years ago already; ladybird may become an alternative at one point in time, but right now is not and there are questions over how Kling handles the overall project, but these complaints are significantly below what Google is doing globally here).Fixing more bugs in the adChromium code base does not change the underlying problem at hand.
• anon
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  kotaKat
  Seems like they have enough AI they could find a way to put ManifestV2 back into the browser and fix things we actually wanted instead of putting more bullshit "AI improvements" we didn't?
• luciana1u
  give it another year and AI will be filing bugs faster than humans can merge the fixes, and the Chrome team will need a separate AI just to triage the first AI's bug reports
• sevenzero
  Big AI player promotes AI through blog to make AI look better woo
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  paganel
  A company valued at $4+ trillion based on the recent AI hype alone is touting the benefits of using said AI, and we're supposed to take this shit for granted.I'm wondering what the Alphabet employees still commenting on this forum have to say about it? I guess for the right comps they can keep their mouths shut no matter the high level of idiocy involved.
• anon
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• Conol_ai
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• hndbwksam7
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• diwesh871
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• rarestoma
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• heiogalma
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• mnmnmn
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  asdaqopqkq
  Did anyone check the code changes manually? What if it is just slop code?
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  TuxPowered
  So will the Chromium bug 5569 finally get fixed?
• mlacks
  I am actually using AI to learn about Windows OS performance. I have a couple of prompts scheduled to research, test, and implement performance gains in the OS, then post them here [0] and here [1]. I always admired Brendan Greg and Bryan Cantrill at Sun/Illumos/ for their work on OS performance but never had the time to sit down and catch up to their level due to my time in the military.I got Codex to find and apply a bunch of settings I didn't know about and in the future I hope to use AI to make real changes in performance that venders probably don't have time or resources for.that being said, what I've learned so far is essentially WhyIsItAlwaysHN's entire comment "The place to find them would be performance profiles, query plans, telemetry."I just find it so frustrating that for a user interface that was basically solved in the 90s, Windows GUI still struggles to survive on hardware exceptionally more powerful than what we had 30 years ago0 - https://www.lacksan.com/updates/ 1 - https://github.com/Lacksan-Dev/HP-ZBook-Performance