3 ms·

Ok? No one is saying that all LOC are equal. Ceteris paribus, 2000 lines is 10x more time consuming to review than 200

• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > 2000 lines is 10x more time consuming to review than 200 Very far from the truth in practice, every line of code isn't as difficult/easy to review as the other.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • jimbokun 6mo ago
    But why would the lines in the 2000 case be easier to review per line?
    • squeaky-clean 6mo ago
      Which of these programs is easier to review {x{x,sum -2#x}/0 1} or def f(n): if n <= 1: return n else: return f(n-1) + f(n-2) They're both the same program
      • jimbokun 6mo ago
        Good question. 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.
  • mcmcmc 6mo ago
    Holy shit, read the words I wrote. Ceteris Paribus. Assume the 200 lines and 2000 lines have a similar distribution of complexity.
    • badc0ffee 6mo ago
      Romanes eunt domus
• jazzypants 6mo ago
  The point is that LOC is never a good metric for any aspect of determining the quality of code or the coder because it ignores the nuance of reality. It's impossible to generalize because the code can be either deceptively dense or unnecessarily bloated. The only thing that actually matters is whether the business objective is achieved without any unintended side effects.
  • mcmcmc 6mo ago
    > The only thing that actually matters is whether the business objective is achieved without any unintended side effects. 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?
    • jazzypants 6mo ago
      > Objectives change; timeliness matters. The speed at which you deliver value is incredibly important, which is why it matters to measure your process. 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.
      • mcmcmc 6mo ago
        You seem determined to misinterpret. I’m not talking about LOC as a measure of productivity. The ratio of LOC needing review to the capacity of reviewers (using how many LOC can be read/reviewed over the sampling period) is what’s being discussed. Agentic AI/vibe coding has caused that ratio to increase and shows a bottleneck in the SDLC. It’s a proxy metric, get over yourself. “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.