5 ms·
It is kind of funny that throughout my career, there has always been pretty much a consensus that lines of code are a bad metric, but now with all the AI hype,
by smoe 8mo ago
It is kind of funny that throughout my career, there has always been pretty much a consensus that lines of code are a bad metric, but now with all the AI hype, suddenly everybody is again like “Look at all the lines of code it writes!!”
I use LLMs all day every day, but measuring someone or something by the number of lines of code produced is still incredibly stupid, in my opinion.
- reactordev 8mo agoMicrosoft never got that memo. They still measure LoC because it’s all MBAs.
- walt_grata 8mo agoFuck is there a way to have that degree and not be clueless and toxic to your colleagues and users.
- chillfox 8mo agoAll evidence continues to point towards NO.
- bluGill 8mo agoIt all comes from "if you can't measure it you can't improve it". The job of management is to improve things, and that means they need to measure it and in turn look for measures. When working on an assembly line there are lots of things to measure and improve, and improving many of those things have shown great value. They want to expand that value into engineering and so are looking for something they can measure. I haven't seen anyone answer what can be measured to make a useful improvement though. I have a good "feeling" that some people I work with are better than others, but most are not so bad that we should fire them - but I don't know how to put that into something objective.
- mwigdahl 8mo agoYes, the problem of accurately measuring software "productivity" has stymied the entire industry for decades, but people keep trying. It's conceivable that you might be able to get some sort of more-usable metric out of some systematized AI analysis of code changes, which would be pretty ironic.
- reactordev 8mo agoThere’s this really awful MBA tool called a “9-box”…
- groundzeros2015 8mo agoThey seem better at working in finance and managing money. Most models of productivity look like factories with inputs, outputs, and processes. This is just not how engineering or craftsmanship happen.
- stoneforger 8mo agoIt's because the purpose of engineering is to engineer a solution. Their purpose is to create profit, engineering gets in the way.
- groundzeros2015 8mo agoHow do you create profit?
- heliumtera 8mo agoNo man, it's in the title, master bullshit artist
- Findecanor 8mo agoIf so, it hasn't always been that way. Steve Ballmer on IBM and KLoC's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0 (I think it is from "Triumph of the Nerds" (1996), but I can't find the time code)
- reactordev 8mo agoBallmer hasn’t been around for a long long time. Not since the Red Ring of Death days. Ever since Satya took the reins, MBAs have filled upper and middle management to try to take over open source so that Sales guys had something to combat RedHat. Great for open source. Bad for Microsoft. However, Satya comes from the Cloud division so he knows how to Cloud and do it well. Azure is a hit with the enterprise. Then along comes AI… Microsoft lost its way with Windows Phone, Zune, Xbox360 RRoD, and Kinect. They haven’t had relevance outside of Windows (Desktop) in the home for years. With the sole exception being Xbox. They have pockets of excellence. Where great engineers are doing great work. But outside those little pockets, no one knows.
- martinflack 8mo agoIronically, AI may help get past that. In order to measure "value chunks" or some other metric where LoC is flexibly multiplied by some factor of feature accomplishment, quality, and/or architectural importance, an opinion of the section in question is needed, and an overseer AI could maybe do that.
- austinthetaco 8mo agoI believe the "look at all the lines of code" argument for LLMs is not a way to showcase intelligence, but more-so a way to showcase time saved. Under the guise that the output is the/a correct solution, it's a way to say "look at all the code I would have had to write, it saved so much time".
- SoftTalker 8mo agoThe line of code that saves the most time is the one you don't write.
- stoneforger 8mo agoReason went out of fashion like 50 years ago, and it was never really in vogue.
- austinthetaco 8mo agoIt's all contextual. Sometimes, particularly when it comes to modern frontends, you have inescapable boilerplate and lines of code to write. Thats where it saves time. Another example is scaffolding out unit tests for series of services. There are many such cases where it just objectively saves time.
- jayd16 8mo agoI think the charitable way to read the quote is that 1M LOC are to be converted, not written.
- make3 8mo agoit's still a bad metric and OP is also just being loose by repeating some marketing / LinkedIn post by a person who uses bad metrics about an overhyped subject
- randusername 8mo ago> measuring someone or something by the number of lines of code produced is still incredibly stupid, in my opinion. Totally agree. I see LOC as a liability metric. It amazes me that so many other people see it as an asset metric.
- torginus 8mo agoYeah. I honestly feel 1m LOC is enough to recreate a fully featured complete modern computing environment if one goes about it sensibly.
- snovv_crash 8mo agoI wonder if we can use the compression ratio that an LLM-driven compressor could generate to figure out how much entropy is actually in the system and how much is just boilerplate. Of course then someone is just going to pregenerate a random number lookup table and get a few gigs of 'value' from pure garbage...