Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lines of code got a better publicist

curlewis.co.nz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 309 posts

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#151

Post by enraged_camel »

I don't know about anyone else, but for me, even though the AI writes a lot of code, the vast majority of that code tends to be... tests. Same with my coworkers.

This morning I reviewed a 1,200 LoC PR. Pretty large by pre-AI standards. But most of it was tests. Before AI, it would be a lot smaller, but only because the PR author wouldn't be nearly as diligent with test coverage as AI tends to be.

And to preempt some common rebuttals:

1. I always read the tests to make sure they are meaningful, and rules and subagent review routines in place to make sure stuff like "assert 1 == 1" or "Process.sleep(5000)" never make it in.

2. Tests do add a maintenance burden as well, but I find that it's pretty easy to refactor and condense tests.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#152

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #105

I kinda feel as if this was the money quote: > If you got a free headcount increase essentially overnight, why wouldn’t you use it to deliver more value to your customers, faster? That shows that, in reality, it's short-sighted profit-taking. Boss just wants another lambo in the garage, and doesn't really plan to be around, when it's time to pay the piper.

[deleted]

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#153

Post by tyre »

sunaurus wrote: post #6

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 had an MoM at Stripe who pushed back on perf designations based on number of PRs.

I wish I were joking.

(The had never been an engineer.)

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#154

Post by californical »

vanuatu wrote: post #107
dakiol wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs) Need more devs? Why? If a company was being profitable just fine prio AI era, they will still be profitable if they decide not to use AI. Shipping crap faster is not a formula for success. Shipping quality faster? I prefer shipping quality at a good pace

youll be outcompeted by companies that do use it (caveat: effectively) growth is much more important than profitability

Will you though? I see this repeated, but I’ve almost never changed products because one has 10x more features than another.

I usually buy and use products that are simple and effective, and that get out of my way to do the thing that I want to do.

For email, I’m a happy customer of Fastmail and I’ve been paying them for years. I don’t care if they ever release a new feature and I’d never switch away from them to a competitor that’s less stable but does more. They release improvements slowly but they are very stable. But I would switch away from them if they start shoving AI into things or delivering subpar features that make my email worse.

For healthcare related websites, I can already see my test results, schedule appointments, and communicate with my doctor. What more could an AI-driven medical platform give me that makes my life better?

For maps — I unfortunately had to move away from Apple recently when they added Ads. So I’m mostly just using OpenStreetMaps. I could see AI improving the OSM functionality by updating the app (OrganicMaps) routing algorithms and such, so there is room for growth there, but it’s not that massive.

Can anyone offer features that Uber can’t now due to LLMs? There are a bunch of local Uber competitors but uber wins because it’s easy and there aren’t major features to differentiate there.

Do you have examples that prove that delivering a bunch of features really fast is going to steal customers from something?

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#155

Post by tracker1 »

If developers burn through thousands in AI tokens a day, does it really matter, and is it a good spend? Are the outputs actually checked for sanity, fitness, qa/qc, security etc. How much rework is coming out because of lack of validation, or too much automation in the soup.

The more I read, the more I feel that 1 dev, 1 ai agent with the dev as a gatekeeper is probably the most appropriate workflow. Where you now treat the single dev + ai as a team in terms of planning and cost analysis and you get about 1.2-1.3x the throughput compared to a traditional team of 3-5 devs with partial PM and partial QA where the Dev now needs to take on those roles too.

The output should include more/better testing, examples, demos etc... since the bus factor is now 1, but AI is expected to be able to do the heavy lift.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#156

Post by eikenberry »

davidclark wrote: post #69

>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. It is weird that the author seems to understand that the pro-AI claims made by AI companies about the product’s necessity are not falsifiable, but then backtracks with “woah woah woah but don’t think I’m anti-AI.” How is the assertion above any more rigorous than the productiv…

> It is not true when the AI CEO says it, and it is not true when the person calling BS on the AI CEO… for some reason also says it…

People do take into account the motivations behind what someone says and to me the motivations here seem different enough to make some difference here. The AI CEO has an obvious motivation to lie, but the person calling BS doesn't have such a clear motive...

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#157

Post by tracker1 »

nyrikki wrote: post #44

More that LoC is a simple metric that has always been a problem. Non-Functional requirements is a vestigial term from ‘function point analysis’ which is from the late 70s, and which also ended up being a proxy for LoC. The entire industry is so focused on measuring now, and incentives are so skewed to short term that lagging indicators like maintainability are a non starter in many organizations that it will be chall…

Which kind of sucks, when you emphasize and steer the agent(s) to more optimal solutions with less complexity and code.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#158

Post by vanuatu »

californical wrote: post #154
vanuatu wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

youll be outcompeted by companies that do use it (caveat: effectively) growth is much more important than profitability

Will you though? I see this repeated, but I’ve almost never changed products because one has 10x more features than another. I usually buy and use products that are simple and effective, and that get out of my way to do the thing that I want to do. For email, I’m a happy customer of Fastmail and I’ve been paying them for years. I don’t care if they ever release a new feature and I’d never switch away from them to a c…

your personal experience is clearly in the techie bubble

ai is more than delivering features fast (thats probably one of the lowest priorities for companies)

right now its a race to automate work, especially back office. companies already are seeing 10M+ in savings and revenue growth and we're barely starting. workflows in sales, outbound, gtm, marketing, eng, operations, compliance, kyc etc

consumer is a different beast, consumers want convenience which has already been hyperoptimized and the big consumer cos run on network effs instead of features

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#159

Post by chris_money202 »

LoC by itself is useless and so is AI LoC, it doesn't really show anything by itself.

But if you pair AI LoC in a range and also task completed in the same range and then compare that with historical data over a similar range without AI, then you have something tangible.

You also need to look at defect reports to understand the full picture of is AI being helpful.

So, we do need to measure AI LoC and AI PR counts, but we also need to make sure we are using other metrics to help paint the full picture.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#160

Post by prodigycorp »

getnormality wrote: post #5

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 reality distortion field is strong around anthropic. Anthropic posts tons of equally bullshit blog posts, written entirely by AI, saying absolutely nothing, to the front page and they consistently average many hundreds of upvotes.
Post reply on HN