FAANG here (service oriented arch, distributed systems) and id say probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends, works well with test generation, or following an existing paradigm.

I think a lot of people wrote it off initially as it was low quality. But gemini 3 pro or sonnet 4.5 saves me a ton of time at work these days.

Perfect? Absolutely not. Good enough for tons of run of the mill boilerplate tasks? Without question.

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zx8080 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends

Frontend has always been shitshow since JS dynamic web UIs invented. With it and CSS no one cares what runs page and how many Mb it takes to show one button.

But regarding the backend, the vibecoding still rare, and we are still lucky it is like that, and there was no train crush because of it. Yet.

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llbbdd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Backend has always been easier than frontend. AI has made backend absolutely trivial, the code only has to work on one type of machine in one environment. If you think it's rare or will remain rare you're just not being exposed to it, because it's on the backend.

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bopbopbop7 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Might be a surprise to you, but some backends are more than just a Nextjs endpoint that calls a database.

	▲	ivantop 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly, I am also at a faang working on a tier 0 distributed system in infra and the amount of AI generated code that is shipped on this service is probably like 40%+ at this point.

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halfcat 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you’re onto something. Frontend tends to not actually solve problems, rather it’s mostly hiding and showing parts of a page. Sometimes frontend makes something possible that wasn’t possible before, and sometimes the frontend is the product, but usually the frontend is an optimization that makes something more efficient, and the problem is being solved on the backend.

It’s been interesting to observe when people rave about AI or want to show you the thing they built, to stop and notice what’s at stake. I’m finding more and more, the more manic someone comes across about AI, the lower the stakes of whatever they made.

	▲	llbbdd 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Spoken like someone deeply unfamiliar with the problem domain since like 2005, sorry. It's an entirely different class of problems on the front end, most of them dealing with making users happy and comfortable, which is much more challenging than any of the rote byte pushing happening on the backend nowadays.

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8organicbits 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As someone currently outside FAANG, can you point to where that added productivity is going? Is any of it customer visible?

Looking at the quality crisis at Microsoft, between GitHub reliability and broken Windows updates, I fear LLMs are hurting them.

I totally see how LLMs make you feel more productive, but I don't think I'm seeing end customer visible benefits.

	▲	mediaman 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think much of the rot in FAANG is more organizational than about LLMs. They got a lot bigger, headcount-wise, in 2020-2023. Ultimately I doubt LLMs have much of an impact on code quality either way compared to the increased coordination costs, increased politics, and the increase of new commercial objectives (generating ads and services revenue in new places). None of those things are good for product quality. That also probably means that LLMs aren't going to make this better, if the problem is organizational and commercial in the first place.