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Lines of code got a better publicist

curlewis.co.nz

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Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#291

Post by [deleted] »

sanderjd wrote: post #288
dijksterhuis wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, optionality very literally has value. If I buy an option to purchase some commodities at some price, and the market moves against me, I lose the price of the option. By your logic here, the thought should be "buying the option was wrong, because it didn't go my way and I lost the price of the option". But it's often the case that actually buying that option was a good move. The kind of optionality I'm talking abo…

[deleted]

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#292

Post by sanderjd »

shimman wrote: post #246
dijksterhuis wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story time. small business. less than 30 people. ceo had invested £1 million to build a data analytics platform. "democratising data analytics" in a very specific domain. essentially, competing with someone like databricks in a niche. although they had never heard of databricks before i showed up. For that million pounds they got a job scheduler written in pure django with a halfway finished react frontend. the whole…

Yes, thanks for the story. This is what I was trying to say. The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness. I worked at a company that had an $80,000 monthly AWS spend when the total users in question was less than 100,000. The most concurrent users was This ob…

Ah I see the point you're making now. Yes, sometimes (often) businesses make very bad decisions.

But that doesn't imply that every project that does not ship was a poor investment of time and resources.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#293

Post by dijksterhuis »

sanderjd wrote: post #290
dijksterhuis wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it were so easy to decide what the right thing is to build before you build it then business would be easy. It's not easy. That's why it's important to be straightforward and just move on without all the navel gazing. > ... hoping you hit the lottery with product-market fit. There's this thing called "research" where you talk to real people, instead of guessing. > That doesn't retroactively make their effort wor…

I don't understand why you interpret "we should recognize that it's worth paying for optionality and sometimes we decide not to exercise the option and that's normal and fine" as naval gazing. I think it's the opposite, that feeling butt hurt about the projects you work on not shipping is what is naval gazing. To me all your "I prefer being plain and direct" just sounds like someone who hasn't thought much about why…

> It does seem like you aren't really disagreeing with us here.

I'm not.

> But you're just saying "don't make me think about why we agree about this!"

My position is that you're overcomplicating it with business doublespeak.

----

edit

> someone who hasn't thought much about why building the wrong thing is not worthless, and why those continuous mistakes in life are worthwhile, and isn't really interested in thinking about things at more than the surface level.

I have just spent the last two years writing over a thousand pages of very heavy introspective stuff about a bunch of stuff i've done, and things that have happened to me, over the last thirty years.

"surface level" is most definitely not the person you're speaking to.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#294

Post by sanderjd »

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…

It is true that businesses tend to have more money than scientists so the numbers are bigger, but scientists pursue failed experiments that are "waste" in just this same way.

"It only got 200 users" is the business version of the null hypothesis.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#295

Post by dijksterhuis »

sanderjd wrote: post #288
dijksterhuis wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, optionality very literally has value. If I buy an option to purchase some commodities at some price, and the market moves against me, I lose the price of the option. By your logic here, the thought should be "buying the option was wrong, because it didn't go my way and I lost the price of the option". But it's often the case that actually buying that option was a good move. The kind of optionality I'm talking abo…

see my reply further down the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48503075

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#296

Post by sanderjd »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #293
sanderjd wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you interpret "we should recognize that it's worth paying for optionality and sometimes we decide not to exercise the option and that's normal and fine" as naval gazing. I think it's the opposite, that feeling butt hurt about the projects you work on not shipping is what is naval gazing. To me all your "I prefer being plain and direct" just sounds like someone who hasn't thought much about why…

> It does seem like you aren't really disagreeing with us here. I'm not. > But you're just saying "don't make me think about why we agree about this!" My position is that you're overcomplicating it with business doublespeak. ---- edit > someone who hasn't thought much about why building the wrong thing is not worthless, and why those continuous mistakes in life are worthwhile, and isn't really interested in thinking…

Yes I understand that. The tendency of engineers to willfully refuse to understand what's going on in their businesses and scoff at the things they are refusing to understand by dismissing them as "overcomplicated" and "business doublespeak" is what my comment that started this thread was about.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#297

Post by dijksterhuis »

sanderjd wrote: post #296
dijksterhuis wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does seem like you aren't really disagreeing with us here. I'm not. > But you're just saying "don't make me think about why we agree about this!" My position is that you're overcomplicating it with business doublespeak. ---- edit > someone who hasn't thought much about why building the wrong thing is not worthless, and why those continuous mistakes in life are worthwhile, and isn't really interested in thinking…

Yes I understand that. The tendency of engineers to willfully refuse to understand what's going on in their businesses and scoff at the things they are refusing to understand by dismissing them as "overcomplicated" and "business doublespeak" is what my comment that started this thread was about.

Did you see the part in my big story time comment where i convinced the ceo his business strategy was wrong? do you think i did that with a flippant and dismissive comment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497153

i get the sense that you think i'm "one of those engineers". I am not.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#298

Post by shimman »

LPisGood wrote: post #254
shimman wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thought I wrote it, but this was for Postman (yes the GUI curl software).

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#299

Post by bitwize »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #268
jimbokun wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying productivity is strictly greater for developers who don’t use AI?

AI makes people think they are being productive, but in reality is a drain on productivity.

That METR study was retracted, dude.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#300

Post by weakfish »

davenz wrote: post #277
weakfish wrote: post #52

> But! Hold my beer… in February 2026 METR effectively walked it back : their follow-up estimates flipped to a speedup (with error bars wide enough to ride a Moto Guzzi, with panniers, through!), and they abandoned the study design entirely - because developers now refuse to work without AI, and can’t reliably self-report time on agentic work. Their latest position: AI probably speeds developers up in 2026, and we ca…

Author here. Thanks, this is a useful addition I'd missed. The 40-point overestimate from their early-2025 work is exactly why I read METR's current position as "we can no longer cleanly measure this" rather than "AI definitely speeds you up now"; self-reports are doing a lot of load-bearing work in every direction, including in my own sense of my productivity.

Good input, and thanks for sharing & writing the article!
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