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Re:AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest... by godelski on Thursday August 21, 2025 @07:28PM (#44979418)

  > when people post how many LoC they introduced.
Pretty ironic you and the GP talk about lines of code.

From the article:

  Garman is also not keen on another idea about AI – measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization.

  “It’s a silly metric,” he said, because while organizations can use AI to write “infinitely more lines of code” it could be bad code.

  “Often times fewer lines of code is way better than more lines of code,” he observed. “So I'm never really sure why that's the exciting metric that people like to brag about.”
I'm with Garman here. There's no clean metric for how productive someone is when writing code. At best, this metric is naive, but usually it is just idiotic.

Bureaucrats love LoC, commits, and/or Jira tickets because they are easy to measure but here's the truth: to measure the quality of code you have to be capable of producing said code at (approximately) said quality or better. Data isn't just "data" that you can treat as a black box and throw in algorithms. Data requires interpretation and there's no "one size fits all" solution. Data is nothing without its context. It is always biased and if you avoid nuance you'll quickly convince yourself of falsehoods. Even with expertise it is easy to convince yourself of falsehoods. Without expertise it is hopeless. Just go look at Reddit or any corner of the internet where there's armchair experts confidently talking about things they know nothing about. It is always void of nuance and vastly oversimplified. But humans love simplicity. You need to recognize our own biases.

Re:AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest... by darkwater on Friday August 22, 2025 @04:43AM (#44982227)
> Bureaucrats love LoC

Looks like vibe-coders love them too, now.

Re:AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest... by overfeed on Friday August 22, 2025 @05:54AM (#44982656)
...but you repeat yourself (c:
Re:AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest... by godelski on Friday August 22, 2025 @02:41PM (#44988189)
Made me think of a post from a few days ago where Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy was mentioned[0]. I think vibe coders are the second group. "dedicated to the organization itself" as opposed to "devoted to the goals of the organization". They frame it as "get things done" but really, who is not trying to get things done? It's about what is getting done and to what degree is considered "good enough."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44937893

Re:AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest... by sunrunner on Friday August 22, 2025 @05:17AM (#44982453)
> Pretty ironic you and the GP talk about lines of code.

I was responding specifically to the comment I replied to, not the article, and mentioning LoC as a specific example of things that don't make sense to compare.

Re:AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest... by godelski on Friday August 22, 2025 @02:33PM (#44988055)

  > the comment I replied to
Which was the "GP", or "grand parent" (your comment is the parent of my comment), that I was referring to.