111–120 of 309 posts
It is endlessly... amusing (?) to me, that we as a community spent decades trying to make it clear that our productivity is not easily measured because what we're doing is complicated and long running, only for AI to come along and suddenly LoC, Nx multipliers, tickets / week etc are held up as useful if not objective measurements. The reasons we rejected LoC and other measurements have not changed (broadly: code out…
If your A+ senior developer spends 8 months working on a feature that ultimately doesn’t get shipped or a MVP that gets killed, then you wasted that A+ senior developer and their productivity was the same as the other two B+ engineers that also worked on the project. This is actually a very common issue and usually ignored when it comes to things like hiring or assigning resources to a project. AI won’t change that i…
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…
I wonder if a small part of this is more and more business and product people actually trying to incorporate AI into their daily workflows. I have seen this in both small companies I work for. People were very excited about getting Claude Cowork a couple of months ago, and while they use it daily, I would say they are rather underwhelmed compared to the magic they were expecting. Complaints include the output being mediocre and verbose, it getting the most basic things wrong, hitting token limits all the time, and people going back to doing things themselves because it is faster.
Sure, there is some degree of holding it wrong in the beginning, but people are realizing that maybe, just maybe, there is still somewhat of a gap between what AI CEOs, LinkedIn grifters, and YouTube AI supplement peddlers claim and reality.
This is already changing again now that CEOs have wised up to the fact that they're paying for code by the line but these lines don't translate to profit.
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 product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users". My guess is it’s an email filter. > million lines of code > written 100% by agents Yeah, probably an email filter. Or maybe a JS menu for a departmental wiki that basically recreates jquery using MS JScript and transpiles it into JS 5.
It may also be an email generator.
The email filter team is trying to match the pace of innovation of the email generation team. At stakes is the ability for the employees to process the billions of mission-critical generated emails each of them receives each day.
I wonder if we'll ever get back to that? If it's still relevant?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not unmaintainable if you have 1000 agents maintain it.
It is unmaintainable even if you spend 100k per month on tokens to have LLMs pretend they are maintaining it, if they slow down and make little ACTUAL progress. Sadly real progress is impossible to measure, if all you have is an overexcited """engineer""", a credit card, and so much cash spent you could hire all the best engineers you know and still have money for a porsche.
The marketing ploys of OpenAI/Anthropic where agents build something that nobody uses might be hard to track given that there are zero users. But what about everyone using agents for real software? It's trivial to prove that agents make progress.
> When a company says “AI made everyone more productive, so we need fewer people”, They are implicitly saying that as a company, they don't want to be more productive. They want the same productivity by paying fewer more productive people. Why is there an imbalance between what an employer gets paid for a unit of production and what an employee gets paid for a unit of production?
I believe you mean same output but fewer people? But by definition that would be higher company productivity, as the definition of productivity at the company and/or national level is the ratio of outputs to inputs. If you have fewer people but are getting the same output, then the productivity of the company (or nation) has improved.
If you had fewer people but the same productivity then there would be no benefit to the company as the outputs would correspondingly be reduced (and it may actually be worse for the company if the company has any fixed costs).
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explaine...