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> It cost $20,000 I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code??? You should look it up. :)
by qarl 9mo ago
> It cost $20,000
I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???
You should look it up. :)
- sarchertech 9mo agoYou wouldn’t pay a human to write 100k LOC. Or at least you shouldn’t. You’d pay a human to write a working useful compiler that isn’t riddled with copyright issues. If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.
- qarl 9mo agoAre you trolling me? Companies (made of humans) write 100,000 LOC all the time. And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
- sarchertech 9mo agoNo, companies don’t pay people to write 100k LOC. They pay people to write useful software. We figured out that LOC was a useless productivity metric in the 80s.
- qarl 9mo ago[flagged]
- rezonant 9mo agoI can't stress enough how much LOC is not a measure of anything.
- qarl 9mo agoOK, well, the people in MY software industry use LOC as an informal measure of complexity. LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD DOES. But hey, maybe it's just the extremely high profile projects I've worked on.
- sarchertech 9mo agoAs an informal measure of the complexity of the code sure 100k lines are inherently more complex than 10k because there’s just more there to look at. And if you are assuming that 2 projects were made by competent teams, saying that one application is 10k LOC and one is 1 million might be useful as a heuristic for number of man hours spent. But I can write a 100k LOC compiler where 90k lines are for making error messages look pixel perfect on 10 different operating systems. Or where 90k lines are useless layers upon layers of indirection. That doesn’t mean that someone is willing to pay more for it. AI frequently does exactly that kind of thing. So saying my AI made a 100k LOC program that does X, and then comparing the cost to a 100k LOC program written by a human is a nonsense comparison. The only thing that matters is to compare it to how much a company would pay a human to produce a program capable of the same output. In this case the program is commercially useless. Literally of zero monetary value, so no company would pay any money for it. Therefore there’s nothing to compare it to. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting and useful experiment. Or that things can’t be different in the future.
- rezonant 9mo agoSuch as?
- icedchai 9mo agoYep. I’ve seen people copy 100’s of lines instead of adding a if statement.
- f1shy 9mo agoIn fact it is. And can be useful. IF you have quality controls in place, so the code has a reasonable quality, the LOC will correlate with amount of functionality and/or complexity. Is a good metric? No. Can be used just like that to compare arbitrary code bases, absolutely no! As a seasoned manager, I have an idea how long a feature should take, both in implementing effort and longness of code. I hace to know it, is my everyday work.
- beowulfey 9mo agoYour first post specifically stated: "I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???" which any reasonable reading would take to mean "paid-by-line", which we all know doesn't happen. Otherwise, I could type out 30,000 lines of gibberish and take my fat paycheck.
- qarl 9mo ago[flagged]
- DSMan195276 9mo agoWithout questioning the LOC metric itself, I'll propose a different problem: LOC for human and AI projects are not necessarily comparable for judging their complexity. For a human, writing 100k LOC to do something that might only really need 15k would be a bit surprising and unexpected - a human would probably reconsider what they were doing well before they typed 100k LOC. Where-as, an AI doesn't necessarily have that concern - it can just keep generating code and doesn't care how long it will take so it doesn't have the same practical pressure to produce concise code. The result is that while for large enough human-written programs there's probably an average "density" they reach in relation of LOC vs. complexity of the original problem, AI-generated programs probably average out at an entirely different "density" number.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Chaosvex 9mo ago> you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k I fork Clang or GCC and rename it. I'll take only $10k.
- f1shy 9mo agoMy question, which I didn’t still find anybody asking: how many compilers, including but not limited to the 2 most famous, were in the training set.
- myng111 9mo agoCertainly tcc. Probably also rui314's chibicc as it's relatively popular. sdcc is likely in there as well. Among numerous others that are either proprietary or not as well known.
- bopbopbop7 9mo ago100k lines of clean, bug free, optimized, and vulnerability free code or 100k lines of outsourced slop? Two very different price points.
- qarl 9mo agoA compiler that can build linux. That level of quality should be sufficient. Do you know any low quality programmers that write C compilers in rust THAT CAN BUILD LINUX? No you don't. They do not exist.
- bopbopbop7 9mo agoDo you think this was guided by a low quality Anthropic developer? You can give a developer the GCC test suite and have them build the compiler backwards, which is how this was done. They literally brute forced it, most developers can brute force. It also literally uses GCC in the background... Maybe try reading the article.
- qarl 9mo ago[flagged]
- bopbopbop7 9mo agoThe trick to not be confused is to read more than the title of the article.
- qarl 9mo ago[flagged]
- bopbopbop7 9mo agoSpeaking of obnoxious
- 9mo ago
- lelanthran 9mo ago> > It cost $20,000 > I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code??? I'll bite - I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k, and it won't be 100k lines of code (maybe 15k, the last time I did this?). It won't take me a week, though. I think this project is a good frame of reference and matches my experience - vibing with AI is sometimes more expensive than doing it myself, and always results in much more code than necessary.
- p-e-w 9mo ago> I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly. Even 10 times that would be seriously lowballing in the realm of contract work, regardless of whether it’s “optimised” or not (most software isn’t).
- lelanthran 9mo ago> You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly. It is now. At any rate, this is my actual rate. I live in South Africa, and that's about 4 weeks of work for me, without an AI.
- qarl 9mo agoDeal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it. You must provide the entire git history with small commits. I won't be holding my breath.
- lelanthran 9mo ago> Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it. > You must provide the entire git history with small commits. > I won't be holding my breath. Sure; I do this often (I operate as a company because I am a contractor) - money to be held in escrow, all the usual contracts, etc. It's a big risk for you, though - the level of performance isn't stated in the linked article so a parser in Python is probably sufficient. TCC, which has in the past compiled bootable Linux images, was only around 15k LoC in C! For reference, for a engraved-in-stone spec, producing a command-line program (i.e. no tech stack other than a programming language with the standard library), a coder could reasonably produce +5000LoC per week. Adding the necessary extensions to support booting isn't much either, because the 16-bit stuff can be done just the same as CC did it - shell out to GCC (thereby not needing many of the extensions). Are you *really* sure that a simple C compiler will cost more than 4 weeks f/time to do? It takes 4 weeks or so in C, are you really sure it will take longer if I switch to (for example) Python?
- etler 9mo agoIf my devs are writing that much code they're doing something wrong. Lines of code is an anti metric. That used to be commonly accepted knowledge.
- PostOnce 9mo agoThat's irrelevant in this context, because it's not "get the humans to make a working product OR get the AI to make a working product" The problem is you may pay $20K for gibberish, then try a second time, fail again, and then hire humans. Coincidentally yes, I am aware, my last contract was building out a SCADA module the AI failed to develop at the company that contracted me. I'm using that money to finance a new software company, and so far, AI hasn't been much help getting us off the ground. Edit: oh yeah, and on top of paying Claude to fuck it up, you still have to also pay the salary of the guy arguing with Claude.
- AlfeG 9mo ago> The problem is you may pay $20K for gibberish, then try a second time, fail again, and then hire humans. You can easily pay humans $20k a day and get gibberish in output. Heck, this happen all the times. This happens right now in multiple companies. Yes sometime humans produce nice code. This happens from time to time...
- psychoslave 9mo agoWell, if these humans can cheat by taking whatever needed degree of liberty in copycat attitude to fit in the budget, I guess that a simple `git clone https://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git https://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git SomeLocalDir` is as close to $0 as one can hope to either reach. And it would end up being far more functional and reliable. But I get that big-corp overlords and their wanna-match-KPI minions will prefer an "clean-roomed" code base.
- m00x 9mo agoIt really depends on the human and the code it outputs. I can get my 2y old child to output 100k LoC, but it won't be very good.