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Lines of code got a better publicist

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Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#251

Post by m463 »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #50
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 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.

When I was young, I remember a (joke) program from a book or magazine, called something like report writer or something. It was written in basic and you typed it in.

You would run it and it would say:

how many pages? _

You would type in a number, and it would generate that many pages of a complex-sounding report.

something like "the subsystem design interface is ..." blah blah

similar?

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#252

Post by jimbokun »

shimman wrote: post #247
jimbokun wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can perfectly predict the future.

So it's best to throw billions of dollars down the drain?

Best to shelve something and not ship it once you know it won’t work, than to continue to throw even more money down the whole after it.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#253

Post by LPisGood »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #195
satnhak wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked in a company where there was an 80% code coverage requirement. Some enterprising contractor had a script that generated a single file with its own covering test suite the size of which could be tuned to achieve 80% over the whole codebase. Mostly the code was untested.

And thanks to AI, we could generate extremely convincing reams of code whose only purpose is to be fake unit tested. Amazing. I sincerely hope I never need to use this nuclear weapon.

Or better yet: effectively fake unit tests. It is almost never the case that tests written by AI detect actual issues. At most they detect that has changed.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#254

Post by LPisGood »

shimman wrote: post #245
sanderjd wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This is like saying "shouldn't scientists figure this out before wasting tons of money running experiments?".

Not the same. Every corporation I've worked at (several dozen in my career across the F500) has had numerous stories about obscene waste in regards to building things in software. Waste at all levels. I've worked at insurance companies that spent $100million on development where only 200 customers signed up (estimated to be 20,000 at start). I've worked at telecoms that spent $25 million developing internal tools tha…

> $10,000 a month on licenses when only 12 devs existed

Depend, depending on the licenses in question, this could be a fantastic deal

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#255

Post by drooby »

adverbly wrote: post #24
drooby wrote: post #14

Writing. Code. Is. No. Longer. The. Bottleneck. Deciding what to build. Reviewing Code. And testing code. Are the new bottleneck. So of course we don't see massive productivity gains. Because these parts of the SCLC were always bottlenecked but their capacity matched the throughout. We fired all the dedicated QAs years ago. Sr+ engineers that do all the code review are limited. Teams have not re-organized to match th…

This. Isn't. News. People. Already. Know. This. It hasn't been the bottleneck for decades for the majority of products.

I put a little too much weight on "the".. sorry..

Reality is that was A bottleneck. Code review has historically been faster than writing the code.

That is no longer true for me. I can complete two to three PRs per day in a span of time that would have historically taken one to three days.

I now sit around doing code reviews and asking for code reviews.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#256

Post by mpyne »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #249
sanderjd wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely that, which is very valuable, but it's also the optionality value additionally. You had the option to launch the thing, which you wouldn't have had if you had never worked on it at all. It's notoriously difficult to properly value optionality, but it definitely has value, and often a lot of value.

sorry, but this just sounds like a rationalisation for "we built the wrong thing". we should just be straightforward, say "we built the wrong thing" and then ask how we built the right-er thing.

> sorry, but this just sounds like a rationalisation for "we built the wrong thing".

If it were so easy to decide what the right thing is to build before you build it then business would be easy.

That's the whole reason options have value. Having 3 shippable products ready to go when you can only effectively ship 1 puts the whole team in a much better position than choosing 1, focusing everyone on it, and hoping you hit the lottery with product-market fit.

So yes, an engineer may work on something that doesn't ship. That doesn't retroactively make their effort worthless, and that's not even counting the experience gained by the endeavor which may well pay off on the next round of products to ship.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#257

Post by mpyne »

shimman wrote: post #247
jimbokun wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can perfectly predict the future.

So it's best to throw billions of dollars down the drain?

No, it's best to manage your software delivery organization to reduce the cost and time of experiments so that you can quickly and cheaply figure out what to build... and then build that.

But there will still necessarily be things that you build that don't ship, and that's inherent to the problem domain.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#259

Post by teleforce »

> Call it AI-first, AI-proficient, whatever you like

Can we just call it AI assistant and since it is really what it is. Just call a spade a spade, call it a day.

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang refer to AI as teammate in his recent COMPUTEX presentation, but it's disingenuous to call that since it's a just tool, but a very potent tool nonetheless. He's obviously biased to a fault but he's literally banking his company on AI now, but for the rest of us AI assistant should do more than fine.

Calling it teammate, workmate or friend is also rather childish. It's like having an imaginary friend that can lead young people to do silly things and this risk probably can be extended to junior developers [1],[2].

[1] Chatbots Can Be Dangerous For Kids:

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/chatbots-can-be-danger...

[2] Why AI companions and young people can make for a dangerous mix:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/08/ai-chatbots-k...

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#260

Post by themafia »

Sesse__ wrote: post #189
tyre wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It's a signal. It's not a strong signal, and you certainly should not base your entire perf on it, but if the number is unusually high or low, it's a signal that could warrant further investigation. (I once worked with an engineer that had two PRs, both fairly small bug fixes, in a given calendar year, and when I looked more carefully, they did not have any other obvious output or impact.)

Let's measure "executive performance" by counting how many "answered phone calls" per hour they have. If they don't answer enough calls, that's a signal, that they aren't doing anything useful, and should be depreciated as a result.
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