Live data from Hacker News

Lines of code got a better publicist

curlewis.co.nz

71–80 of 309 posts

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#71

>The difference this time is pace: you could delay adopting “the cloud” for a couple of years and survive. With AI you might get a few months. It is weird that the author seems to understand that the pro-AI claims made by AI companies about the product’s necessity are not falsifiable, but then backtracks with “woah woah woah but don’t think I’m anti-AI.” How is the assertion above any more rigorous than the productiv…

[deleted]

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#72

>The difference this time is pace: you could delay adopting “the cloud” for a couple of years and survive. With AI you might get a few months. It is weird that the author seems to understand that the pro-AI claims made by AI companies about the product’s necessity are not falsifiable, but then backtracks with “woah woah woah but don’t think I’m anti-AI.” How is the assertion above any more rigorous than the productiv…

When the AI CEO says it, its because stock go brrr. I never believed that AI CEOs because they're making unverifiable claims that they never backed up, claiming you're firing people because of AI is so open for interpretation, and it shifts blame from you to the AI, reality is we should not blame AI for something a CEO did, you could have re-trained employees for AI, but you didn't why not? Maybe because it's not about AI is it?

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#73
post #11
post #6

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…

> 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…

I don't care - porting the current architecture - with all the known I wish I had done this differently's - doesn't gain much. See some developers I've worked with who love Rust for "safety", even though they just put everything in unsafe at the first sign of trouble instead of thinking about how this should work safely.

Porting to a new language is easy, but does nothing useful. What we need is to fix the mistakes of the past so we can get to the future. We need to make acceptable performance.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#74

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.

To be fair, few things of any number of LOC have as much utility as the Linux kernel, and it's also a particularly dense example of code. There's plenty of other examples that have higher LOC / utility ratio without being vibe coded. For example, Google's monorepo famously has 2 billion LOC, which is a statistic I've heard long before LLM coding took over.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#75
> When a company says “AI made everyone more productive, so we need fewer people”, I want to see the evidence - and I don’t believe it exists today.

Because they're bullshitting and using AI as an excuse to correct from their covid era over-hiring while simultaneously making themselves look good to investors by showing they're embracing the hip new technologies to become a more streamlined and cost-efficient operation than ever.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#76
It is endlessly... amusing (?) to me, that we as a community spent decades trying to make it clear that our productivity is not easily measured because what we're doing is complicated and long running, only for AI to come along and suddenly LoC, Nx multipliers, tickets / week etc are held up as useful if not objective measurements.

The reasons we rejected LoC and other measurements have not changed (broadly: code output isn't important, quality output is). AI has all the same problems people do. But for whatever reason we are throwing what we've learnt away. It's kind of embarrassing.

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Why? If you can deliver the same thing in fewer correct lines of code wouldn't that be preferable? At a bare minimum if you're still insisting on using AI to slop out your project, having it do things in fewer lines of code means you can fit more into your LLM's context window.

> If you can deliver the same thing in fewer correct lines of code it really depends on what you're doing. If your goal is "become interoperable with the N different and incompatible network protocols that people have devised for doing task X" I'd really like to know a solution that doesn't have at least some part of the amount of code that scales with N. Example: consider https://bitfocus.io/connections which connec…

Without looking at the details, I expect that each network protocol has a checksum of some form, and there are likely a lot less than N different checksum algorithms. Similarly I expect several will have encryption - using one of a few standard algorithms (if any doesn't use a standard algorithm you have a strong case to say not supported). I also expect that there is a lot of protocol parsing - this can be done as custom hand coded for each, or using a parsing framework (and likely there are some places of generic code in between).

Re: Lines of code got a better publicist

#78
I'm reminded of my first tech job about 25 years that had some not very technical manager who had a technical toady write up a script to check lines of code added as a productivity measure. I was in big trouble because it didn't account for lines removed or modified, only new lines added. The copy paste guy was praised of course for how productive he was for.

Funny how AI is continuing the same story of non/semi technical busy bodies with their dumb bullshit.

Post reply on HN