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Lines of code got a better publicist

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Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#141

Post by sebastialonso »

TheGRS wrote: post #135

It is pretty funny how this whole industry in a very short amount of time, with tons of experience and knowledge to lean on, reverted back to dubious measurements of productivity. If you track LoC and tokens used as productivity measurements, developers are going to max their LoC and token usage! Its so predictable that we have a Law named after this phenomenon! The fallout was so predictable I feel like I should hav…

This is the way. If the C-suite idiocy is inevitable, as I believe it is, the more moral thing to do is to take advantage of such idiocy.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#142

Post by embedding-shape »

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?

No, it's the perspective of a programmer who wants the project to not be bogged down too much in technical debt so every change gets slower and slower to implement, as everything gets more intermingled. A clean design helps you move faster for a long time, compared to a design that is fast to implement but makes it hard to move forward properly in the future, without resorting to shortcuts and/or hacks.

> Some things just take lots of code.

True. Rich Hickey does a good job differentiating between what's complicated because the domain is complicated, VS what's complicated because the implementation just ended up that way, even though with some more thought and design, could have been made a lot simpler.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#143

Post by sebastialonso »

nlitened wrote: post #124
palmotea wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Because labor gets exploited to make the owners richer Only a person who never tried to organize labor into a company could ever have such a couch-sitter opinion

Honestly expanding this point for the joy of debating.

Granted, grandparent comment used _charged_ words. Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in.

Is that not a fair assesment of the real world? Who starts a company to lose money? Who starts a company solely for "creating jobs"?

What exactly is the beef with grandparent comment? Is it just the negatively charged words? It's the rephrased version beef-inducing as well?

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#144

Post by ryandrake »

the_af wrote: post #97
bee_rider wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 movin…

It's like we've all forgotten what technical debt means. We just say the phrase, but we have forgotten that it is analogous to actual debt. Every line of code produced should be treated as a liability to the company, like a bond they issued that they have to pay interest on in the future. You only take on the liability if it produces more business value than it costs to maintain. The goal is not to issue as many bonds as you possibly can.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#145

Post by DrewADesign »

pyrale wrote: post #116
DrewADesign wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

> My guess is it’s an email filter. 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.

It’s true. They’re all go-getters destined for big things. Look at those token burn rates!

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#146

Post by japhyr »

> But adoption is the starting line, not the scoreboard.

Yes yes, shout it from the rooftops! Over the next few years I think we're going to see that companies that get this point will keep doing meaningful things, and stand a chance of weathering this transition period.

I think we're going to see a bunch of companies that went all in on AI for AI's sake go under because they've lost their mission, lost their implementation, and won't have a way to get those back in a reasonable timeframe and at a reasonable cost.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#147

Post by jghn »

sanderjd wrote: post #133
jghn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing the AI tools have taught me is that it hasn't been my personal bottleneck for at least a very long time. It's made that part faster for me, and that allows me to take bigger bites at the apple each iteration, but it's not meaningfully speeding me up in the way people claim.

I disagree that it's not meaningfully speeding me up. I'm definitely doing a lot more, and more quickly. But the benefit is definitely smaller at the team and organization level, because we still have all the same serialization points - review, validation, decision making - downstream of my work.

I realized after I posted that it didn't quite capture what I meant. For instance if I'm able to do a more complex piece of work all at once in about the same amount of time as it'd previously take me to do a simpler piece of work, than that is a speedup. And that's what I am able to realize.

But what's not as much the case is that if I did an A/B test on the same task that I'd be massively sped up because so much of my day to day work are the things you mentioned as being serialization points. The time I take to figure out what needs doing, what the best approach would be, making sure it was actually the right thing to have done in the first place once I'm done, all that stuff. I use AI assistance for those tasks too but it's not the same effect as when I just hand off the pure implementation phases. So it winds up being "faster" and you'll have to pry my AI assist tools out of my cold, dead fingers - but if I'm being honest with myself by *that* metric it's not a huge gain.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#148

Post by robotresearcher »

bluGill wrote: post #77
jcelerier wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can deliver the same thing in fewer correct lines of code it really depends on what you're doing. If your goal is "become interoperable with the N different and incompatible network protocols that people have devised for doing task X" I'd really like to know a solution that doesn't have at least some part of the amount of code that scales with N. Example: consider https://bitfocus.io/connections which connec…

Without looking at the details, I expect that each network protocol has a checksum of some form, and there are likely a lot less than N different checksum algorithms. Similarly I expect several will have encryption - using one of a few standard algorithms (if any doesn't use a standard algorithm you have a strong case to say not supported). I also expect that there is a lot of protocol parsing - this can be done as c…

Parent said "I'd really like to know a solution that doesn't have at least some part of the amount of code that scales with N."

You're arguing the inverse: that at least some parts of the code are independent of N. Sure. But the topic is the part that isn't.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#149

Post by DrewADesign »

getnormality wrote: post #101
DrewADesign wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Your hilariously specific hypotheses remind me of how little I know about technology.

> how little I know about technology.

Probably because you smoked too much weed in school.

Remember, this is the tech industry! An abject lack of knowledge is no impediment for people with boundless confidence in their assumptions!

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#150

Post by palmotea »

sebastialonso wrote: post #143
nlitened wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because labor gets exploited to make the owners richer Only a person who never tried to organize labor into a company could ever have such a couch-sitter opinion

Honestly expanding this point for the joy of debating. Granted, grandparent comment used _charged_ words. Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in. Is that not a fair assesment of the real world? Who starts a company to lose money? Who starts a company solely for "creating jobs"? What exactly is the beef with grandparent comment? Is it just the negatively charged words? I…

> Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in.

I'd rephrase that: labor is used to provide the owners the maximum amount of money they can manage to extract from the people doing the labor.

A technology 10x's worker productivity? That means 9x more goes to the owners, and 0x (zero) more goes to the workers. Maybe the workers get even less, because now you can fire some.

> Who starts a company to lose money? Who starts a company solely for "creating jobs"?

A more equitable distribution of company profits does not imply the company loses money. It does not imply useless make-work jobs.

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