Objectives change; timeliness matters. The speed at which you deliver value is incredibly important, which is why it matters to measure your process. Deceptively dense is what I’d call software engineers who can’t accept that the process is actually generalizable to a degree and that lines of code are one of the few tangible things that can be used as a metric. Can you deliver value without lines of code?
This assumes that shorter code is faster to write. To quote Blaise Pascal, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
> Can you deliver value without lines of code?
No, but you can also depreciate value when you stuff a codebase full of bloated, bug-ridden code that no man or machine can hope to understand.
“All models are wrong, some are useful”. What’s not useful is constantly bitching about how there’s no way to measure your work outside of the binary “is it done” every time process efficiency is brought up.
Very far from the truth in practice, every line of code isn't as difficult/easy to review as the other.
{x{x,sum -2#x}/0 1}
def f(n):
if n <= 1:
return n
else:
return f(n-1) + f(n-2)
But it is orthogonal to the question of evaluating 2000 lines of AI code vs 200 lines of human written code. Either the human or the AI could produce idiomatic code for either language, given sufficient training data in the AI’s corpus for the language.
My guess is that the first one is much quicker to review, for a human equally fluent in both languages.
I have worked with code where 1000s of lines are very straightforward and linear.
I’ve worked on code where 100 lines is crucial and very domain specific. It can be exceptionally clean and well-commented and it still takes days to unpack.
The skills and effort required to review and understand those situations are quite different.
One is like distance driving a boring highway in the Midwest: don’t get drowsy, avoid veering into the indistinguishable corn fields, and you’ll get there. The other is like navigating a narrow mountain road in a thunderstorm: you’re 100% engaged and you might still tumble or get hit by lightning.
So I’m pretty skeptical that reviewing 2000 lines of code won’t take any more time than reviewing 200 lines of code.
Furthermore how do you know the AI generated lines are the open highway lines of code and not the mountain road ones? There might be hallucinations that pattern match as perfectly reasonable with a hard to spot flaw.
It depends on the code. If you’re comparing code of the same complexity then, sure, 2000 lines will take longer than 200.
I was comparing straight linear code to far more complex code. The bug/line rate will be different and the time to review per line will be different.
> Furthermore how do you know the AI generated lines are the open highway lines of code and not the mountain road ones?
Again, it depends on the code. Which was my point.
Linear code lacks branches, loops, indirection, and recursion. That kind of code is easy to reason about and easy to review. The assumptions are inherently local. You still have to be alert and aware to avoid driving into the cornfields.
It’s a different beast than something like a doubly-nested state machine with callbacks, though. There you have to be alert and aware, and it’s inherently much harder to review per line of code.
We should have gone the other way; generated a lot of code and demanded pay raises; look at the LOC I cranked out! Company is now in my debt!
If they weren't going to care enough as managers to learn and line go up is all that matters to them, make all lines go up = winning
You all think there's more to this than performative barter for coin to spend on food/shelter.
Although this requires you to take pride in your profession and what you do.
Got it.
...ok fine; lack of political action to put us all on the hook for your healthcare is your choice to take a gamble on a paycheck. It's a choice to say your own existence is not owed the assurance of healthcare.
So I will honor your choice and not care you exist.
Good way of putting it.
We're also assuming LOC vibe coded by competent engineers who should be able to tell when something is overengineered.
I rewrote the same program using my own brain and just using ChatGPT as google and autocomplete (my normal workflow), I produced the same thing in 1500 LOC.
The effort difference was not that significant either tbh although my hand coded approach probably benefited from designing the vibe coded one so I had already though of what I wanted to build.
My experience was the same as you when I started using agents for development about a year ago. Every time I noticed it did something less-than-optimal or just "not up to my standards", I'd hash out exactly what those things meant for me, added it to my reusable AGENTS.md and the code the agent outputs today is fairly close to what I "naturally" write.
Do you reject all stats that treat the number of people involved (eg. 2 million pepole protested X) as "embarrassing" ... because they lump incredibly varied people together and pretend they're equal?
It's still useful, however, because that is the only metric that is instantly intuitively understandable and comparable across a wide variety of contexts, i.e. across companies and teams and languages and applications.
As we know, within the same team working on the same product, a 1000 LoC diff could take less time than a 1 line bug fix that took days to debug. Hence we really cannot compare PRs or product features or story points across contexts. If the industry could come up with a standard measure of developer productivity, you'd bet everyone would use it, but it's unfeasible basically for this very reason.
So, when such comparisons are made (and in this case it was clearly a colloquial usage), it helps to assume the context remains the same. Like, a team A working on product P at company C using tech stack T with specific software quality processes Q produced N1 lines of code yesterday, but today with AI they're producing N2 lines of code. Over time the delta between N1 and N2 approximates the actual impact.
(As an aside, this is also what most of the rigorous studies in AI-assisted developer productivity have done: measure PRs across the same cohorts over time with and without AI, like an A/B test.)
AI helps eng ship more and faster, I think that’s the takeaway.
> It is so embarrassing that LOC is being used as a metric for engineering output.
In one of my previous org, LOC added in the previous year was a metric used to find out a good engineer v/s a PIP (bad) engineer. Also, LOC removed was treated as a negative metric for the same. I hope they've changed this methodology for LLM code-spitting era...
It is so embarrassing that LOC is being used as a metric for engineering output.