Lines of code got a better publicist

Posted by RyeCombinator 8 hours ago

Lines of code got a better publicist(curlewis.co.nz)

304 points | 200 commentspage 3

grahamgooch 3 hours ago|

Large enterprises class systems are notoriously difficult to work Ai. It’s the context window limitation. Assuming 10 tokens per LoC. The best models today cannot wrangle 100k distributed LOC across multiple repos. It’s great for building new and maintaining smallish codebases. All this code being written is fantastic, but maintaining them efficiently over the code lifecycle is tricky.

sbarre 8 hours ago||

We're still in the FA phase of FAFO when it comes to LLM code generation, aren't we?

strix_varius 6 hours ago||

> Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536587-measuring-programmin...

chris_money202 4 hours ago||

LoC by itself is useless and so is AI LoC, it doesn't really show anything by itself.

But if you pair AI LoC in a range and also task completed in the same range and then compare that with historical data over a similar range without AI, then you have something tangible.

You also need to look at defect reports to understand the full picture of is AI being helpful.

So, we do need to measure AI LoC and AI PR counts, but we also need to make sure we are using other metrics to help paint the full picture.

TheGRS 5 hours ago||

It is pretty funny how this whole industry in a very short amount of time, with tons of experience and knowledge to lean on, reverted back to dubious measurements of productivity. If you track LoC and tokens used as productivity measurements, developers are going to max their LoC and token usage! Its so predictable that we have a Law named after this phenomenon! The fallout was so predictable I feel like I should have been positioning myself for all of the potential consulting work that's about to be needed.

sebastialonso 5 hours ago|

This is the way. If the C-suite idiocy is inevitable, as I believe it is, the more moral thing to do is to take advantage of such idiocy.

nlawalker 7 hours ago||

Not a better publicist, but:

A) a newly-receptive audience - engineers who have discovered that they very much enjoy and appreciate the tradeoff of proximity to the code for amplified velocity and impact, now that it's possible to achieve without being a manager of messy human teams.

B) an ecosystem in which it's grown nearly impossible to connect a functional description of something to how much bespoke construction and effort was involved, partially because of marketing and partially because of how much software already exists to be built on top of. It's impossible to tell from a few paragraphs of functional description whether something was built in a weekend or took a team 4 years to ship, so volume of code is the natural fallback for describing complexity.

inerte 4 hours ago||

Reporting on percentage of AI generated lines of code is very different from total lines of code. Yes I know both of them are missing what's the value delivered, but the later assumes the value is the number of lines, while the former assumes value is at least the same but delivered faster.

jasondigitized 5 hours ago||

My old CTO has a spiritual metric that always resonated with me: Revenue / Lines of Code. The higher the number the better.

jdw64 8 hours ago||

When I read recent news on HN, I feel it is a fable about Goodhart's Law. The law says: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' The dog should wag its tail. But the tail is wagging the dog.

dakiol 6 hours ago|

>The difference this time is pace: you could delay adopting “the cloud” for a couple of years and survive. With AI you might get a few months.

I don't think so. Take a good company A (with a good product and a good pace of good features) of today. Take the extreme case they decide not to use AI at all. Well, they will still be shipping good features at their current pace.

No amount of AI will make a bad company ship a better product than A's. If any, bad/mediocre companies will be pushing crap faster than they did before, but that's it.

AI can make good companies better, but cannot make bad companies good. Why does company A need to worry about shitty companies using AI? Sure, other good competitors could be using AI, but all in all, shipping "faster" is not the "mark" of good quality

gamerdonkey 6 hours ago||

Yeah, that closing message was a little weird to me. I understand framing the article as "not anti-AI", especially if the author uses and enjoys the tools. But the end sounds like a call to blindly adopt the tools and figure out the justification later.

sanderjd 5 hours ago||

Yeah I think it also really depends on what your business is. Many or most of us here (and likely also the author) work in the kinds of tech-forward businesses where competition is fierce and velocity is essentially. But there are many many businesses, and also tons of public sector organizations, where this is not the case. Leadership in those organizations should probably be going a lot more slowly, waiting and seeing, letting all the fast movers fight it out through all this churn, and adopting only whatever eventually rises to the top.

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