221–230 of 309 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 0 x (zero) more goes to the workers. Maybe the workers get even less , because now you can fire some. >…
> A more equitable distribution of company profits does not imply the company loses money. It does not imply useless make-work jobs. I fully agree, and remind you it's completely legal and simple for you to go and start a company that does equitable distribution of company profits. More people should do it instead of complaining that few people do.
No. Instead of doing that, the effort should go into making all companies act that way.
IMHO, what you just did is part-and-parcel of one angle of the "propaganda to justify and obscure it" that I referred to above (e.g. "Don't like it? Then I say your only response should be this ineffective and limited-scope action I specify that strictly adheres to the status-quo").
And it would be ineffective. Building a little oasis in the middle of the status quo would only help a few and is unlikely to resist the tendency of things to eventually revert to the mean. The mean needs to change, and the best path to that is probably through regulation, other kinds of social standards-setting, and increasing the power of the exploited groups (e.g. through unionization).
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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 b…
> right now its a race to automate work, especially back office. companies already are seeing 10M+ in savings and revenue growth What? Where? Citations please. We're seeing big companies massively stall in all traditional sectors except AI which is a irrational market built off hype.
there are no citations yet because this is going on behind closed doors, if you know you know. we'll start seeing it in the financials of companies soon. alternatively you can look at the revenue growth of applied ai companies
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…
1000000/25/8/60 = 83+ lines of code per minute. 100000 LOC per month /25 days per month /8 hours per day / 60 minutes per hour That seems...problematic for anyone doing code reviews.
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…
Like maybe having every engineer generate 1 million lines of code per month every month…with no thought to how those lines of code would make the company money…or how many tokens would be burned to accomplish this at what cost…wasn’t fully thought through.
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…
The word “slop” was a good choice to talk about the mass of code generated by AI. I think it resonates with non-tech people and it conveys disgust. It’s clear that we should avoid slop. “Technical debt” never hooked management in the same way and we have found it hard to convince them that it needs to be addressed. Debt in general is something that can be a problem, but doesn’t need to be avoided or addressed until i…
This approach has always worked for me. Non technical management will never understand technical debt and really shouldn’t need to.
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> 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…
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…
It's not unmaintainable if you have 1000 agents maintain it.
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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.
Well, software presumably has a goal of accomplishing something for some end-user, so the progress should be trivial to measure: are features/changes being completed? 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.
Lines of code is completely irrelevant as a metric.
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…
All else being equal, and assuming you are building the right thing, being able to deliver more correct lines of code is a good thing. The question is how to do it reliably, given that a human cannot possibly read all of it. The answer seems to me to involve spot checks with proofs of correctness and statistical quality control, the latter being things that can be automated. One issue I see is that the models are con…