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Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code written was a poor metric for productivity... https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code
by namesbc 10mo ago
Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code written was a poor metric for productivity...
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
- actionfromafar 10mo agoSo, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.
- wyre 10mo agogonna tell claude to write all my code in one line
- lomase 10mo agoImagine you are a Perl programmer writing js...
- NitpickLawyer 10mo agoThey can already do that. A few months ago I played around with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50 without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not). No idea why you'd want this in a normal job, but the capabilities are here.
- actionfromafar 10mo agoLLMs won't ever shut up. That seems unfixable. But a "hack" would perhaps be to train them to make longer patches but which actually removes code.
- underyx 10mo agoCtrl-F 'lines', 0 results Ctrl-F 'code', 0 results What is this comment about?
- kalkin 10mo agoCharitably I'm guessing it's supposed to be an allusion to the chart with cost per word? Which is measuring an input cost not an output value, so the criticism still doesn't quite make sense, but it's the best I can do...
- anon7000 10mo agoMaybe it was edited. I count at least 6 instances of the word “code”
- Thorrez 10mo agounderyx was doing the ctrl+f on the original (horses) article, not the negative 2000 lines of code article. It's a confusing comment. I misinterpreted it myself too originally.
- pmg101 10mo ago"The LLM can write lines of code, sure, but can it be productive?" is, I think, the implied question.
- chongli 10mo agoThe linked short story is barely 5 paragraphs long. You could have just read it instead of writing an insubstantial remark like this. It’s a fun anecdote about a famous programmer (Bill Atkinson).
- underyx 10mo agoI’ve read it multiple times before, it’s irrelevant in this discussion.
- namesbc 10mo agoMeasuring productivity by number of words written per day is as useless of a measure as number of lines of code written per day