121–130 of 309 posts
The paradigm used to be create good enough abstractions you can express what you need in a few dozen lines or whatever. Those lines will be clearer and more precise than English for describing what it does. I wonder if we'll ever get back to that? If it's still relevant?
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…
The non-technical people are in charge and they're not tethered to reality in the same way that engineers are. Objective reality will win in the end, but that doesn't prevent damage being done in the short term.
>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…
> 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?
> 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? Because labor gets exploited to make the owners richer. That's the basic fact, even though the owners (as a class) have financed a lot of propaganda to justify and obscure it.
Only a person who never tried to organize labor into a company could ever have such a couch-sitter opinion
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, few things of any number of LOC have as much utility as the Linux kernel, and it's also a particularly dense example of code. There's plenty of other examples that have higher LOC / utility ratio without being vibe coded. For example, Google's monorepo famously has 2 billion LOC, which is a statistic I've heard long before LLM coding took over.
Clarification: Google claimed to have 2 billion lines of code in their repo ten years ago, and a commit rate of 50,000 changelists per day, both on exponential growth trends.
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.
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…
Is it true that the evidence in tech so far is not encouraging? I was pretty worried about the job market a year or so ago, but it seems pretty good for experienced people at the moment, no? (I do have big concerns about the entry level pipeline though!)
Thats why it is so amazing for speed runs and prototypes. Here it is legitimately > 10X faster.
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.
The world’s biggest software is usually built over endless adapters of different data and a need to reconcile endless edge cases with laws, regulations and real world complexities.