Confusing skeptic and sceptic will never not be funny to me (edit: I now live in shame)
Sure, live in shame, but don't let go of the humor in it all :)
I did get quite a laugh when the comments made me realize what an asshat I was
Lines of code got a better publicist
81–90 of 309 posts
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#82>When a company says “AI made everyone more productive, so we need fewer people”,
They are implicitly saying that as a company, they don't want to be more productive. They want the same productivity by paying fewer more productive people.
Why is there an imbalance between what an employer gets paid for a unit of production and what an employee gets paid for a unit of production?
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#83I'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 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 things just take lots of code.
Which seems to leave room for these agent salesmen to pitch SLoC as a plus. We just have to believe those lines are all good ones. I that case, it would be impressive. I don’t believe it, but they are probably pitching to people who do.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#84It 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 out…
All that to shill slop machines so the billionaire class can throw people out on the street.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#85Weird baseless push for AI on the end, with no reasoning, no goal, no claim of gain. "Just go and use AI, people, developers must adopt new things." It's not the first article I've read recently that is an ad for AI after a short context pretending to criticize it, with nothing connecting them.
AI is the new cloud. There's no market for people or companies who aren't committed to it. If you're a dev who refuses to use AI, no company will hire you; and should a company decide not to use AI they will have a hard time retaining devs (and they will need more devs). Their investors and big-ticket customers will also think twice before signing off on major commitments.
So yes, use AI. Don't nitpick the costs and benefits. The world is headed this way; if you want to develop software for a living and afford to eat, you need to be too.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#86Another AI slop article urging me to use AI on the orange AI fanboy site which has guidelines against AI slop comments, but AI slop submissions, that's just fine I reckon... Screenshot since the share button demands I have some social media login.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#87Bragging about an AI agent generating a million lines of code is exactly like bragging about an automated factory generating a million tons of airplane weight. It completely misses the point of engineering. The bottleneck in software development hasn't been "typing speed" for a very long time; it's domain understanding, system design, and long-term maintenance.
Every line of code an LLM instantly spits out is a line a human engineer will eventually have to read, understand, debug, and migrate when the underlying business logic changes. The "better publicist" might be successfully selling these generation metrics to executives, but it's the actual engineering teams who are going to be paying the maintenance tax on all this auto-generated sprawl for the next decade.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Clarification: Google claimed to have 2 billion lines of code in their repo ten years ago, and a commit rate of 50,000 changelists per day, both on exponential growth trends.
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#89"As someone who spends a lot of time writing x86_64 Assembly and optimizing pure-JAX code for TPU clusters, this recent obsession with LLM-generated 'Lines of Code' metrics feels like a massive step backwards.
In High-Performance Computing (and especially things like quantum simulation, which I work on), the entire goal is reducing complexity and overhead. The magic of frameworks like JAX/XLA isn't how many lines of code you write, but how elegantly a few purely functional lines can compile down to highly parallelized hardware instructions.
If an LLM writes 100,000 lines of boilerplate for a project, someone eventually has to maintain, debug, and pay for the compute to execute that bloat. The real value of AI in engineering shouldn't be churning out a million lines of CRUD per month; it should be helping us build better differentiable systems, grokking complex mathematical landscapes, or spotting inefficiencies in low-level execution.
We spent decades learning that Goodhart's Law applies heavily to software engineering (more code != better software). It’s strange seeing leadership forget that just because the code is now generated by an agent."
Re: Lines of code got a better publicist
#90> When a company says “AI made everyone more productive, so we need fewer people”, They are implicitly saying that as a company, they don't want to be more productive. They want the same productivity by paying fewer more productive people. Why is there an imbalance between what an employer gets paid for a unit of production and what an employee gets paid for a unit of production?
> Why is there an imbalance between what an employer gets paid for a unit of production and what an employee gets paid for a unit of production?
Because labor gets exploited to make the owners richer. That's the basic fact, even though the owners (as a class) have financed a lot of propaganda to justify and obscure it.