What I still can't understand is why is massive amount of code generated is a flex? I don't feel that software has gotten a lot better in past 3 years, only sloppier. It's surprising to me that people who know about reward hacking choose a simple objective like lines of code generated as a signal for quality. I'd argue you have to optimize for less lines generated as possible while secondary optimization should be re…
Don't compare human loc with machine loc. Compare machine to machine (as these headlines come) and discount that by a factor.
This is a problem of conflicting incentives that exists today in my opinion. Companies will market greater human-AI collaboration in science and engineering but focus on releasing things like this where it is clear that downstream goal is complete agent ownership over the product, from inception to testing to monitoring. Maybe the speculative future agents will use their own very efficient language to code that won't be readable for people at all. They focus on agent code being readable by agent in the article, as you've said. But in my mind in at least near future, there is a case where your prod will break, you won't be able to understand it or the attempted fixes. Maybe agent will fail to fix it at all and start a massive rewrite. In any case is this different from kicking technical debt down the road along with worse interpretability of what you have built?
I do think there is a way where agent can write great solid code that we can read, but with the way LLMs are built this requires something new in terms of reward that accounts for "taste" and constant refinement so it might take more than 1/10th of a time to produce something good.