All articles tagged with #code quality
A recent study by METR found that AI coding tools like Claude 3.5 and Cursor Pro actually increased task completion times by 19% for experienced developers working on real open-source projects, highlighting a gap between perceived and actual productivity gains and emphasizing the need for rigorous real-world evaluation of AI tools.
Google Cloud experienced a major outage caused by a code change in its Service Control system that lacked proper error handling and feature flag protection, leading to a three-hour service disruption. The incident was triggered by a failed rollout of new quota policy checks, which caused crashes and infrastructure overloads. Google has committed to improving its operational procedures and communication to prevent similar incidents in the future.
A recent bachelor's thesis by an undergraduate student from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology suggests that the average quality of open source C code containing swears is significantly higher than the average quality of code that does not. The study used a program called SoftWipe to measure adherence to coding standards and found that code containing swears scored about half a point higher on its 10-point scale of code quality than code that did not. Psychologists suggest that swearing may relieve pain, increase physical performance, and help people shape their personas, but the link between swearing and code quality has not been examined before.