

I’ve done it because work is ✨desparate✨ and required I try it to learn it for some reason. I’m at a senior level. Generally I instructed it on the exact architecture and patterns I wanted, along with the broad classes and algorithms required. That meant it was left to do the individual procedure implementation that I might have instructed a junior developer to do while I managed more macro level concerns. It did surprisingly well, but this was on a greenfield project, so It would probably become excessively slow and error prone on a sufficiently large project.



There’s also a big push internally to add AI features to their products. I don’t think this was some shadowy push to discredit satellite imagery (to help Israel I guess?) - the more mundane explanation that this was a poorly conceived feature thought up by some team internally to meet business demands unfortunately rings far more likely to me.
Edit: I want to make it clear that I’m not defending Google or the team that made this feature here. This is awful, and they should have seen it coming. But falling into conspiracies and looking for the man behind the curtain just leads to overlooking the mundane people who just follow orders or fail to consider the impact and ethics of their actions. We can’t reach these people (or consider these lessons for ourselves) if we talk past them (especially if they dismiss criticism as coming from it off touch conspiratists).