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Lines of code got a better publicist
31–40 of 309 posts
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#32If your A+ senior developer spends 8 months working on a feature that ultimately doesn’t get shipped or a MVP that gets killed, then you wasted that A+ senior developer and their productivity was the same as the other two B+ engineers that also worked on the project. This is actually a very common issue and usually ignored when it comes to things like hiring or assigning resources to a project. AI won’t change that in a meaningful way, your team may just finish their tasks a lot faster but the bureaucratic layer above will likely remain the same, which will make any AI coding gains negligible. Companies would have to be rebuilt from the top down for AI and that’s very unlikely to happen.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#33Confusing skeptic and sceptic will never not be funny to me (edit: I now live in shame)
Sceptic is the UK spelling of skeptic.
Maybe you've confused it with septic?
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#34I'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…
> 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 had shit out, and these were supposedly engineers, really strange to see.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#35Confusing skeptic and sceptic will never not be funny to me (edit: I now live in shame)
I think you’re reading “sceptic” as “septic”. They are not the same word.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#36Writing. 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…
Was writing code ever the bottleneck for anyone other than raw juniors and non-programmers?
One thing the AI tools have taught me is that it hasn't been my personal bottleneck for at least a very long time. It's made that part faster for me, and that allows me to take bigger bites at the apple each iteration, but it's not meaningfully speeding me up in the way people claim.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#37I'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 think the reliability struggles of Github may have helped with this
I can't help but wonder if the causation is backwards here and the millions of lines of slop had more to do with the Github struggles than the reverse
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#38Confusing skeptic and sceptic will never not be funny to me (edit: I now live in shame)
About as funny as “confusing” color and colour. Which is to say: not very.
Skeptic and sceptic are pronounced identically, because they are just different spelling of the same word.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#39Writing. 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…
> Engineers don't want to do QA because it's "beneath them"..
I’m fine with doing QA. But the fact is that it’s not how management measure my productivity. Spending hours doing QA looks like wasting time to them because it’s not an activity they track. They track my tickets so any hours not spent on them is literally harmful.
Also there’s the fact that you can’t QA your own output. It’s easy to overlook mistakes and defects.
> and most engineers don't like performing or are not Sr enough to do extensive or high quality code review.
Just like QA, code review takes time. It’s easy to justify that time when the submitter has put in the effort to ensure that the contribution is worthwhile. Or can explain the design clearly. Not so much when it’s slop thrown over the wall.
> Deciding what to build. Reviewing Code. And testing code. Are the new bottleneck.
None of those are truly bottleneck. Deciding what to build is obvious: Something that solve a user problem. Reviewing code is easy when the intent of the code is clear (with additional prose if needs be). Testing code is equally easy and should already be automated.
The one slow activity has always been about designing the solution. And it has no relation to code. It’s mostly deep thinking and research. I do it on the sofa or in front of a whiteboard. If I’m typing, I already have a solution in mind.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#40I'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'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 Did those engineers not actually read the complete tweet? Because it wasn't about "engineers should write 1M LOC per month of product code" it was "we want to scale automated porting of code to safe languages so that 1 engineer managi…
> Because it wasn't about "engineers should write 1M LOC per month of product code" it was "we want to scale automated porting of code to safe languages so that 1 engineer managing 1M LOC of automated conversion can work".
Making a grand claim of a goal and not really having an explanation on how to achieve it isn't really much better. I could say "we want to scale food production so that one farmer could manage a million acres of corn a month", but that wouldn't really be sensible. A line of code is less work than an acre of corn of course, but I don't think it's at all apparent what upper bound for how much code is actually plausible for a single engineer to generate in a month and have any degree of confidence in. Given the absurd levels of hype around AI from non-engineering management in the past couple of years, it's not clear why the benefit of the doubt is earned here when there legitimate are managers and executives claiming pretty much exactly what you're claiming this guy wasn't.