Oracle pins hopes on 'Star Wars' productivity jump to lightspeed from AI-assisted engineering

Oracle is betting that AI coding will deliver "Star Wars" levels of software engineering productivity, CEO Mike Sicilia told investors last week. With its shares sharply down over the past year, Big Red claims its engineers' productivity will skyrocket as the company mainlines the AI wonder drug it prescribes to customers. …

[cyberdemon]

More like Death Star levels of wasted resources

How much does it cost to build something the size of a moon, only for it to explode.. Twice!

Popcorn icon sorely needed

[Paul Herber]

Re: More like Death Star levels of wasted resources

Sounds like a Disaster Area to me!

[Julz]

Would

That be the plutonium rock band?

[Snowy]

Re: More like Death Star levels of wasted resources

Three times if you include Starkiller Base:)

[A. Coatsworth]

Perhaps we can encase all tech bros in carbonite, we'll get nice coffee tables out of it and a somewhat saner world too

[SoSoTired]

I like where your head’s at, but surely there’s a setting to mold the carbonite into toilets. We’d probably put that one as the default.

[Paul Herber]

You'll have to flush the tech-bros out of their lairs first.

[Bebu sa Ware]

encase all tech bros in carbonite

Carbonite being unobtainium, I would be just as happy to use the readily available clear craft resin (epoxy) which also has the advantage of not being reversible thus would make "carkoon" an apt portmanteau of "cark" and "cacoon."

[Dan 55]

Customers, however, complained that the AI was "not working that well." Support note numbers had disappeared, automatic service requests could no longer be created, and users reported wasting time on broken or internal links and limited patch searches and downloads.

As a company we've never been so productive! Now pay your Oracle licence for this great service or we'll send the auditors around.

[elDog]

And those auditors all look like Larry. Identical Larry's with leisure suits and Tommy guns.

[andy the pessimist]

auditors

At the end of the movie the hogfather, DEATH kills off some of the auditors. Now how do we do the rite of ashkente.

[Pete 2]

Baby + bathwater

> we're able to disrupt ourselves and become so productive is because we have decades of experience

Only someone who doesn't have the slightest clue about the reality of working in a company could say such a thing.

Companies do not have experience. The employees are the sole holders of all that value. And when they leave, get fired or retire, that experience goes with them. Sure, some things will be written down, but that tends to be the "what", not how, why or when. Information that might look impressive to a bean-counter (behold! the weight of our documentation) but even if someone does find what looks like the correct action in a given situation, there is no guarantee they will know how to apply it.

[steviebuk]

Re: Baby + bathwater

And you can have another situation. Where they get in replacements for you/me who have less experience and appear to have a weird mentality. Where, when given a problem to solve at a department where I made sure, because it was important, to take good notes and document them. So the next engineer didn't spend hours looking for what I've already spent hours on and solved. So the replacement visits, can't work out the fix (its in my documentation), gets another 2 engineers to take a look, none of them work it out. Then the staff in that department say "The last engineer we had fixed that and its in his documentation", and get the reply "Oh, him, we don't look at his documentation".

Fucking idiots.

[Like a badger]

Re: Baby + bathwater

The employees are the sole holders of all that value

Up to a point. If you want to build a long term sustainable business that evolves its products to market needs and customer requirements then it is 100% the case. On the other hand, for a product with a large installed customer base, selling mainly to deep-pocketed and risk averse corporates, has high costs and time to switch, and limited competition, then sod the employees and the future, all the value is the future income stream of a largely locked in customer base, out to a say seven year time horizon. On a discounted cash flow basis, that value is then easily maximised and commercial risks reduced by sacking almost all your staff to slash costs now, and jacking up fees until customers start to leave. Then just bathe in the excess profits because the death of the product may be inevitable, but it will be slow.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you Broadcom and VMWare!

[breakfast]

Re: Baby + bathwater

If that was the case surely a company like Oracle would have lost a lot of value with these shenanigans. For example, if their share price hit a peak this exactly a year ago, we might expect them to have lost 60% of that by now.

*Takes a look at the graph of Oracle's share price over the last 12 months*

Well.

[steviebuk]

Re: Baby + bathwater

They pissed away money on data centres that mostly aren't built yet and no market for. Getting in massive debt for it so their bonds are currently only just above junk.

[breakfast]

Re: Baby + bathwater

If the AI bubble only serves to kill Oracle it will have had at least some positives for humanity.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Remember when...

Once upon a time we built frameworks and code libraries to improve productivity. Solve common difficult problems once and do it right.

Now AI blasts out massive amounts of buggy regurgitated code to solve problems that it has already seen the solution for. It this point, AI is practically an extremely unreliable compiler.

[takno]

Re: Remember when...

That's very unfair. The AI solutions often manage to drag half a dozen frameworks *as well as* needlessly re-implementing things which have been in the standard library for 10 years.

[bronskimac]

AI desgins the Death Star

That explains how the Death Star had a vulnerability that nobody but the meat sack rebels could spot.

[EdSaxby]

What does that even mean?

Is the software industry all completely drug-dependant now? WTF does "Star Wars" level productivity mean?

[Andrew Hodgkinson]

Re: What does that even mean?

> WTF does "Star Wars" level productivity mean?

It means "fictional", so on this occasion Oracle might actually - albeit, I suspect, accidentally - be telling the truth.

[EricM]

Re: What does that even mean?

I think it's even worse.

Star Wars isn't even proper SF (S=Science), it is more like Fantasy or a faiy tale decorated with space ships and robots.

This naming (much like "Stargate") shows, how much they misunderstand/misrepresent AI output as factual results and assume/pretend they can build engineering on it. Honestly, these days, I can no longer distinguish between naive mis-applications of AI and intentional marketing stunts. One half is trying to pretend AI is working great using well-controlled environments and specific settings, the other half stumbles over reality, trying to actually apply AI as advertised...

If this is true, Oracle seems to be putting all its anergy into reaching the productivity oasis shown by a the AI-mirage in the IT-desert... with predictable results.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"Fantasy or a faiy tale decorated with space ships and robots."

Space Opera I believe was the term coined for the Star Wars genre. Much of it subsequently more of the traditional cat strangling Chinese variety rather than anything in Puccini's line.

[that one in the corner]

Re: "Fantasy or a faiy tale decorated with space ships and robots."

Star Wars is indeed Space Opera, but in case anyone misreads your comment as meaning "Soace Opera was coined in order to describe Star Wars" instead of being a term that predates SW by - quite a bit - I recommend the writings of, say, E.E. "Doc" Smith.

The key to Opera being that each aria is bigger and better and louder than in the previous Act (WARNING: Spoilers ahead):

* Skylark moving from a sphere that fits in the backyard to a craft that contains the backyard - and the entire house - as the obvious solution to the question "what do our quarters look like?"

* Lensmen starting with "coruscating beams" (the coruscation is vital to its operation) to making a slightly ludicrous thermionic valve ("What are we using for a heater? Well, you are quite familiar with it already...")

* Death Star 1, half a Death Star 2, Death Planet (which can now shoot superluminal and to multiple targets at once)

[Bebu sa Ware]

"Is the software industry all completely drug-dependant now?"

Appears so. Not just software… the whole techbro loony bin..

Definitely not "Spice" — these clowns would be able to perceive the future if it were and desist from their lunacy, but then perhaps not.

I recently read that one favourite amongst that circus, ketamine actually binds opioid receptors^† which I guess makes the whole special-K crew little better than your common garden variety smackhead.

"We're able to disrupt ourselves and become so productive" — "Disrupt ourselves" ? Wakey, wakey, hand off snakey ! Productive of what ?

_{† from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-026-01874-9, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-026-01839-y}

[ITMA]

Re: "Is the software industry all completely drug-dependant now?"

"I recently read that one favourite amongst that circus, ketamine"

That would explain them, at times, acting like "A-holes in a K-hole".....

[steviebuk]

Marketing BS because

they know they are going bankrupt when the bubble bursts. Was hoping would take Larry with it but I forget, it will just be the company that goes bust.

[That Badger]

Re: Marketing BS because

It would be a shame if the nepo baby had to offload Paramount Pictures for pennies on the dollar and that merger with Warner Bros. would ofcourse be cancelled too...

[IGotOut]

Let's see...

...the most exposed company to the software bubble explosion, desperately spews out meaningless drivel to stop the company getting into massive financial collapse.

[Rosietk]

They've already put all their eggs on the AI basket

Big Red has invested so much money on data centres that they literally can't afford for AI not to be the golden goose.

Unfortunately saying something doesn't make it true (else we'd all be in real trouble, just like Oracle). You'd think with a name like that they'd have seen this coming...

"Our periodic workforce restructurings and reorganizations can be disruptive," Oracle UNDERstated.

Disruptive is probably not the word that those being laid off would use...

[munnoch]

"we're able to disrupt ourselves"

Maybe he needs to look up the definition of disrupt. Being disrupted usually isn't a positive experience. Even if you're self-disrupting...

[cyberdemon]

Re: "we're able to disrupt ourselves"

Larry is always self-disrupting. Several times a day. He thinks it's a pleasurable experience, but it's not.

But because he thinks so, everyone should do it. Several times a day.

[cyberdemon]

Re: "we're able to disrupt ourselves"

To follow up my joke post with a serious one:

There's something inherently masturbatory about training a generative model on your own code, documentation, internal procedures and contracts. It's like you have resigned to the fact that you as a Chairman/CEO, and your company itself, will never produce anything genuinely innovative ever again. In that regard it's little wonder why Oracle Corp is the world's biggest AI cheerleader!

It's also a bit like a smack, crack or meth addiction. These drugs (so I am told) feel like Heaven when measured on the scale of hours, and Hell-on-Earth on the scale of weeks. As long as you can keep on increasing the dose it feels great, until you can't, because you suddenly have a choice between death by overdose, or Hell on Earth in the form of a massive crash.

So-called "AI" is like a narcotic addiction only on an organisational scale rather than a personal one. It seems great for the first few months, but then you hit its inherent limitations and need to spend double, quadruple, octouple what you budgeted for, in order to eke out any more magic juice (which it turns out, was obtained by slurping the souls of others and is inherently limited by what Humans have done before. Its own output is poisonous to itself).

To sack -all- of your staff and hand the whole company over to the bullshit generator would obviously mean death, but to back off means acknowledging its limitations and looking at the enormous mountain of technical debt (and financial debt!) you have just accumulated, having laid off most of your staff.

[Sok Puppette]

> we have decades of experience with building and delivering mission-critical applications and infrastructure like Oracle Database,

... that being the last thing of any value to come out of the company...

[anatak]

CVE for oracle.

How many critical CVE’s for oracle have been reported the last few months?

So they are training their AI on code that has proven to be extremely sloppy/buggy. That must inspires confidence.

[anatak]

Futuristic?

Wasn’t the Star Wars setting ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far away’?

Looks like knows as much about business as about Star Wars.

[just4this]

Thumbnail (at time of posting)

How long have Kirk and Spok been Jedi?

[deadlockvictim]

Re: Thumbnail (at time of posting)

I was amused by the picture for the article.

This is not the space cowboy drama that you are looking for, perhaps?

[David 132]

Re: Thumbnail (at time of posting)

It is - or was, at least - a running in-joke at El Reg that whenever a story had a Star Wars angle, they'd deliberately use Trek stock photos to accompany it. Just to make the Star [Wars|Trek] fans among their readership twitch, By Grabthar's Hammer!

[just4this]

Re: Thumbnail (at time of posting)

It’s very effective.

[VoiceOfTruth]

If I had a guess...

>> It cited risks involving review workloads, safety, security, and intellectual property.

The risk is heavily weighted towards intellectual property. Safety and security does (or should) form part of the review workloads anyway. But IP? That requires checking third parties, which is time-consuming.

[Darkone-dx]

Why does this article have a picture depicting Star Trek when it mentions Star Wars in the title and article?

[Excellentsword]

Tradition

[Anonymous Coward]

TRAaaaaaa-ditttttionnnnn*

* if you know, you know

[Bebu sa Ware]

Disrupt ourselves able we are

About the only commonality between this delusional would·be jedi and the genuine article might be that both were fished out of a swamp.