Reporting on percentage of AI generated lines of code is very different from total lines of code. Yes I know both of them are missing what's the value delivered, but the later assumes the value is the number of lines, while the former assumes value is at least the same but delivered faster.
Lines of code got a better publicist
161–170 of 309 posts
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#162This 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.
I have to wonder if HN is astroturfed. Anthropic and OpenAI can post about a new model and it gets over to HN instantly and is full of glowing reviews of supposedly real people who supposedly have had prior access to it who supposedly think it's the best model yet.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#163I'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 do think that over the past few months, it feels like the hype around producing unmaintainable amounts of LoC has started dying down. 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 th…
I suspect this is it. I'm 40, and the only tech person in my social circle. Many of my friends were all excited about using it for things like basic webdev and home networking. One shotting that type of stuff is very viable even if you don't know anything about the topic. Now that they are trying to use it for something they actually know about, suddenly it's unusable. It's a modification of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#164I guess nobody cares anymore that AI is built on one of the largest thefts in history.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Ya gotta start smoking weed after you're done with school, that's the way to success
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have to wonder if HN is astroturfed. Anthropic and OpenAI can post about a new model and it gets over to HN instantly and is full of glowing reviews of supposedly real people who supposedly have had prior access to it who supposedly think it's the best model yet.
Feels doubly so for Anthropic. There's just unbelievable level of glaze, and insane upvote velocity for "blog posts" that are essentially fluffed up feature documentation.
Somehow everything boris says has become the word of God. The dude is just an engineer, like you and me, who gets unlimited tokens for free.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's a monorepo with hundreds if not thousands of different applications. It's not even close to an apples to apples comparison.
That's certainly a way to look at it. And that repo contains a "third party" directory which itself contains Linux, LLVM, and much of the rest of the open source world. But I would suggest that the largest of those thousands of applications probably has a transitive closure of hundreds of millions of lines of code.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#168I'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.)
Trying to parse your sentence, which is ambiguous...
You're saying that the manager-of-managers would argue that the number of PRs should affect perf ratings? Or the MoM would push back against the line managers who were giving ratings based on # of PRs?
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#169I agree with the main point but this misses something crucial:
> why wouldn’t you use it to deliver more value to your customers, faster? That should show up as MAU, conversion, revenue
Most roadmaps are full of garbage and would be better off being deleted. You get very few truly useful new features in a year.
To paraphrase ESR: the value to your customers is in them being able to know that can rely on your product still operating next year, not in those 20 new features.
Or to think about it another way, maybe block will be better off with fewer developers, but only if they produce sufficiently FEWER features so that they’re forced to prioritize.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#170To play devil's advocate for a moment (although I hate it): LoC often actually means NIH... but NIH suddenly has a pretty big proponent in the form of resistance to supply-chain attacks.
Basically the choices are:
1. Roll your own
2. Lockfile your deps for too long
3. Chase the bleeding edge for every dependency
The first is security-through-obscurity because DIY libs will have bugs and vulns but they won't be well-known. The second means missing known vulnerabilities. The third means supply-chain risk.
The rash of attacks and the ease of LLM-powered roll-your-own has shifted the risk-reward calculus towards 1.
But I hate it. This is the further Peter Pan never-gonna-grow-up of our industry that we cannot develop solid best-practice tools and must churn endlessly.