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How I'm Productive with Claude Code

neilkakkar.com

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Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#111

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

aguimaraes1986 wrote: post #11

This is the "lines of code per week" metric from the 90s, repackaged. "I'm doing more PRs" is not evidence that AI is working, it's evidence that you are merging more. Whether thats good depends entirely on what you are merging. I use AI every day too. But treating throughput of code going to production as a success metric, without any mention of quality, bugs, or maintenance burden is exactly the kind of thinking de…

To me commit volume and similar metrics are something that indicate ai adoption, nothing more. And for a lot of people right now that is the goal - however short or long sighted that it might be.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#113

Post by duskdozer »

tecleandor wrote: post #90
the_arun wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using AI we can make 1000s of commits per day. This metric becomes even more pointless in the days of AI. If we increase sales, New subscription count, reduced bug count, reduced incidents etc., those can be real metrics. I'm sure I am preaching to the choir.

I have coworkers commiting tens or hundreds of thousands of "lines of code" a week, because they'll push whatever the AI gives them, including dependencies and virtualenvs, without any review. Of course, at the same time we're getting dozens of alerts a week about services deployed open to the Internet without authentication and full of outdated vulnerable libraries (LLMs will happily add two or three years old depen…

Set the AIs off on those alerts and look at how many more alerts per week are now getting solved due to AI!

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#114

Post by jwilliams »

dakiol wrote: post #41

Honest question: if you're using multiple agents, it's usually to produce not a dozen lines of code. It's to produce a big enough feature spanning multiple files, modules and entry points, with tests and all. So far so good. But once that feature is written by the agents... wouldn't you review it? Like reading line by line what's going on and detecting if something is off? And wouldn't that part, the manual reviewing…

It’s a blend. There are plenty of changes in a production system that don’t necessarily need human review. Adding a help link. Fixing a typo. Maybe upgrades with strong CI/CD or simple ui improvements or safe experiments.

There are features you can skip safely behind feature flags or staged releases. As you push in you fine with the right tooling it can be a lot.

If you break it down often quite a bit can be deployed safely with minimal human intervention (depends naturally on the domain, but for a lot of systems).

I’m aiming to revamp the while process - I wrote a little on it here : https://jonathannen.com/building-towards-100-prs-a-day/

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#115

Post by nprateem »

keeda wrote: post #79
dakiol wrote: post #41

Honest question: if you're using multiple agents, it's usually to produce not a dozen lines of code. It's to produce a big enough feature spanning multiple files, modules and entry points, with tests and all. So far so good. But once that feature is written by the agents... wouldn't you review it? Like reading line by line what's going on and detecting if something is off? And wouldn't that part, the manual reviewing…

> you know, it's more difficult to read other people's/machine code than to write it yourself Not at all, it's just a skill that gets easier with practice. Generally if you're in the position to review a lot of PR's, you get proficient at it pretty quickly. It's even easier when you know the context of what the code is trying to do, which is almost always the case when e.g. reviewing your team-mates' PR's or the code…

I'll often run 4 or 5 agents in parallel. I review all the code.

Some agents will be developing plans for the next feature, but there can sometimes be up to 4 coding.

These are typically a mix between trivial bug fixes and 2 larger but non-overlapping features. For very deep refactoring I'll only have a single agent run.

Code reviews are generally simple since nothing of any significance is done without a plan. First I run the new code to see if it works. Then I glance at diffs and can quickly ignore the trivial var/class renames, new class attributes, etc leaving me to focus on new significant code.

If I'm reviewing feature A I'll ignore feature B code at this point. Merge what I can of feature A then repeat for feature B, etc.

This is all backed by a test suite I spot check and linters for eg required security classes.

Periodically we'll review the codebase for vulnerabilities (eg incorrectly scoped db queries, etc), and redundant/cheating tests.

But the keys to multiple concurrent agents are plans where you're in control ("use the existing mixin", "nonsense, do it like this" etc) and non-overlapping tasks. This makes reviewing PRs feasible.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#116

Post by kqr »

dakiol wrote: post #22

I don't understand the "being more productive" part. Like, sure, LLMs make us iterate faster but our managers know we're using them! They don't naively think we suddenly became 10x engineers. Companies pay for these tools and every engineer has access to them. So if everyone is equally productive, the baseline just shifted up... same as always, no? Mentioning LLM usage as a distinction is like bragging about using a…

> like bragging about using a modern compiler instead of writing assembly.

Yet people look at me like I'm the odd one out when I say I am more productive with a modern compiler like GHC.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#118

Post by renegade-otter »

williamcotton wrote: post #50
aguimaraes1986 wrote: post #11

This is the "lines of code per week" metric from the 90s, repackaged. "I'm doing more PRs" is not evidence that AI is working, it's evidence that you are merging more. Whether thats good depends entirely on what you are merging. I use AI every day too. But treating throughput of code going to production as a success metric, without any mention of quality, bugs, or maintenance burden is exactly the kind of thinking de…

Lines of code are meaningful when taken in aggregate and useless as a metric for an individual’s contributions. COCOMO, which considers lines of code, is generally accepted as being accurate (enough) at estimating the value of a software system, at least as far as how courts (in the US) are concerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO

I am writing a book! I used AI to write 1 billion words this morning!

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#119

Post by berkes »

duskdozer wrote: post #113
tecleandor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have coworkers commiting tens or hundreds of thousands of "lines of code" a week, because they'll push whatever the AI gives them, including dependencies and virtualenvs, without any review. Of course, at the same time we're getting dozens of alerts a week about services deployed open to the Internet without authentication and full of outdated vulnerable libraries (LLMs will happily add two or three years old depen…

Set the AIs off on those alerts and look at how many more alerts per week are now getting solved due to AI!

The good old Cobra effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive?wprov=sfla1

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#120

Post by renegade-otter »

scuff3d wrote: post #65
aguimaraes1986 wrote: post #11

This is the "lines of code per week" metric from the 90s, repackaged. "I'm doing more PRs" is not evidence that AI is working, it's evidence that you are merging more. Whether thats good depends entirely on what you are merging. I use AI every day too. But treating throughput of code going to production as a success metric, without any mention of quality, bugs, or maintenance burden is exactly the kind of thinking de…

Multiple agents in parallel "working on different features" is where people lose me. I don't care how much friction you've eliminated from the loop, eventually that code has to be looked at. Trying to switch between 5 different feature branches and properly review the code, even with AI help, if done properly is going to eat up most of not all the productivity improvements. The only way around it is to start pencils…

Yes. Your brain, your clear thinking and your focus are the ultimate scarce resource. Writing code is easy, but I review one large PR from a coworker, and I need a nap.

Claiming that you have "ten agents writing code at night" is not the flex you think it is. That's just a recipe for burnout and bad design decisions.

Stop running your agents and go touch grass.

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