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Lines of code got a better publicist

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Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#91

Post by the_af »

I think this is important:

> When a company says “AI made everyone more productive, so we need fewer people”, I want to see the evidence - and I don’t believe it exists today. Show me that x% of your workforce is genuinely idle (or even just underutilised) because the work can now be done by fewer people. Even then: I’ve never seen a product/SaaS company that didn’t have an endless roadmap. If you got a free headcount increase essentially overnight, why wouldn’t you use it to deliver more value to your customers, faster? That should show up as MAU, conversion, revenue.

I see some people calling for calm instead of AI panic by invoking Jevons Paradox. But at least within these companies there's no good evidence of Jevons in action, is there? The roadmap is endless, but when employees are perceived to be idle they get fired instead of being assigned more (or more ambitious) tasks.

To be fair, one could claim Jevons applies to "the market" at large, but at least we can say the evidence from tech companies is not encouraging. So maybe it is, indeed, time to panic a bit?

> Choosing the layoff instead tells me the productivity claim is doing PR work for a decision that was already made for other reasons (over-hiring, investor pressure, take your pick).

Yup, I think we all suspect this. Though it's probably a mix of the two factors.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#92

Post by strix_varius »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #61
tikkabhuna wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word “slop” was a good choice to talk about the mass of code generated by AI. I think it resonates with non-tech people and it conveys disgust. It’s clear that we should avoid slop. “Technical debt” never hooked management in the same way and we have found it hard to convince them that it needs to be addressed. Debt in general is something that can be a problem, but doesn’t need to be avoided or addressed until i…

Technical debt is a indefinable quantity which makes it very prone to be abused to mean "I wish I could rewrite this in [insert some fashionable language, framework or coding style]". AI slop is an easier concept to quantify. It's basically the code for which insufficient people in the organisation have a meaningful understanding of how it works or what it does.

> It's basically the code for which insufficient people in the organisation have a meaningful understanding of how it works or what it does.

Its connotation also includes being vastly larger than needed for the purpose it serves, _if_ there is even any purpose.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#94

Post by Trasmatta »

weakfish wrote: post #67
Trasmatta wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be based on some idea that there's no way you can be productive enough without AI. But I've yet to see any companies really shipping meaningful software at some unprecedented speed that was not possible pre-AI. Instead, I see a lot of half baked features and buggy apps. I am not convinced that those that choose to either NOT use AI or use it more sparingly / judiciously (my preference), are somehow going…

Yeah, I’ll second that. I see folks moving _fast_, but boy oh boy are they breaking things (or delivering something that never worked) which if anything makes _me_ slower lol

And also delivering things nobody wants or will use, just because they can.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#95

Post by dist-epoch »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #50
getnormality wrote: post #5

This weird trend reached an apex in a Feb 2026 OpenAI blog post [1], recently on the front page [2], which describes the process for building... something... written 100% by agents. There is no description of what the thing is, no indication of what value it provides its users. The closest it gets is "the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users". But the fact that t…

The entire Linux kernel is about 40 million LoC, and only something like 16 million LoC after you remove drivers. I have a hard time imagining whatever OpenAI was talking about there having anywhere close to 6% as much utility as the Linux kernel, despite having 6% as many lines of code. And I have a hard time imagining it's anywhere close to maintainable, regardless of how powerful their LLMs might be.

Chrome has 50 mil LoC

https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summa...

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#96

Post by dist-epoch »

sunaurus wrote: post #6

I'm constantly thinking about that Microsoft guy who posted something like "we want 1 million LoC per engineer per month", which basically read as satire to most engineers I talked to, except apparently it was not satire at all, and indeed seemed to reflect the position of many CEOs etc when it comes to LLM code generation. I do think that over the past few months, it feels like the hype around producing unmaintainab…

It's not unmaintainable if you have 1000 agents maintain it.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#97

Post by the_af »

bee_rider wrote: post #83
embedding-shape wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which basically read as satire to most engineers I talked to Seemingly engineers get this wrong too. I'm reminded of when Cursor bragged about how many lines of code a group of agents could produce, with the underwhelming results of a barely working browser, when the same could be built with much less code. But they highlighted the amount of code as they were proud over how much slop their constellation of agents h…

“Less is better” is sort of… the position of the engineer who enjoys the craft of programming, right? I don’t think this is universally believed. And anyway, I’m pretty sure what people really mean by this “less is better” mantra is: the lowest amount of code that still accomplishes the goal and is still readable is preferred. Linux apparently has 40M lines of code, and I bet most of it is better than mine. Some thin…

> “Less is better” is sort of… the position of the engineer who enjoys the craft of programming, right? I don’t think this is universally believed.

I think it is (or should be) a goal & business-oriented concern as well, not just an engineer's who enjoys their craft.

More complex systems are worse than simpler systems (that accomplish the same), in cost, maintenance, fragility, ease of understanding, etc. Fewer moving parts usually result in higher reliability, fewer things that can break down or fail to interact properly, etc. That's a business concern too, not just engineering craftmanship or whatever. Business people should care about this too.

I don't think this is the same as bikeshedding over irrelevant details, something we software engineers are often prone to. Monstrous complexity does impact the business!

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#98

Post by dakiol »

>The difference this time is pace: you could delay adopting “the cloud” for a couple of years and survive. With AI you might get a few months.

I don't think so. Take a good company A (with a good product and a good pace of good features) of today. Take the extreme case they decide not to use AI at all. Well, they will still be shipping good features at their current pace.

No amount of AI will make a bad company ship a better product than A's. If any, bad/mediocre companies will be pushing crap faster than they did before, but that's it.

AI can make good companies better, but cannot make bad companies good. Why does company A need to worry about shitty companies using AI? Sure, other good competitors could be using AI, but all in all, shipping "faster" is not the "mark" of good quality

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#99

Post by dakiol »

bitwize wrote: post #85
marcosdumay wrote: post #19

Weird baseless push for AI on the end, with no reasoning, no goal, no claim of gain. "Just go and use AI, people, developers must adopt new things." It's not the first article I've read recently that is an ad for AI after a short context pretending to criticize it, with nothing connecting them.

AI is the new cloud. There's no market for people or companies who aren't committed to it. If you're a dev who refuses to use AI, no company will hire you; and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs). Their investors and big-ticket customers will also think twice before signing off on major commitments. So yes, use AI. Don't nitpick the costs and…

> and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs)

Need more devs? Why? If a company was being profitable just fine prio AI era, they will still be profitable if they decide not to use AI. Shipping crap faster is not a formula for success. Shipping quality faster? I prefer shipping quality at a good pace

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#100

Post by bachmeier »

the_af wrote: post #91

I think this is important: > When a company says “AI made everyone more productive, so we need fewer people”, I want to see the evidence - and I don’t believe it exists today. Show me that x% of your workforce is genuinely idle (or even just underutilised) because the work can now be done by fewer people. Even then: I’ve never seen a product/SaaS company that didn’t have an endless roadmap. If you got a free headcoun…

> So maybe it is, indeed, time to panic a bit?

Anyone relying on a steady paycheck from an employer should panic a bit all the time, because nothing can save them from bad management. The reference to Jevons Paradox doesn't say anything about individual managers responding correctly. If 30% of managers screw up, that's a lot of collateral damage.

Now to respond to your actual point, I don't think software developers should panic. Even if pure software engineering gets hit hard, I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where years of software development skills plus knowledge in a specific domain isn't a good thing for current software developers. This is unlike what happened with international trade, where you had 60-year old textile workers losing their jobs, no alternative jobs, and no policy being offered to compensate them for the effects of trade.

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