alt Hacker NewsI’m super impressed by how "zillions of lines of code" got re-branded as a reasonable metric by which to measure code, just because it sounds impressive to laypeople and incidentally happens to be the only thing LLMs are good at optimizing.
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Every line of code is technical debt. Some of the hardest projects I’ve ever worked on involved deleting as much code as I wrote.
I completely agree. The issue is that some misconceptions just never go away. People were talking about how bad lines of code is as a metric in the 1980s [1]. Its persistence as a measure of productivity only shows to me that people feel some deep-seated need to measure developer productivity. They would rather have a bad but readily-available metric than no measure of productivity.
It's only impressive if you've ever only saw code as a means to an end and SLOC never really mattered.
If you write code in any capacity, you'll know that high LOC counts are usually a sign of a bad time, browsers and operating systems aside.
That's what got me. I've never written a browser from scratch but just telling me that it took millions of lines of code made me feel like something was wrong. Maybe somehow that's what it takes? But I've worked in massive monorepos that didn't have 3million lines of code and were able to facilitate an entire business's function.
Lines of code is just phrenology for software development, but a lot of people are very incentivized to believe in phrenology.
KPIs are slowly destroying the American economy. The idea that everything can be easily measured meaningfully with simple metrics by laypeople is a myth propagated by overpaid business consultante. It's absurd and facetious. Every attempt to do so is degrading and counter-productive.
Citing the ability to turn on an endless faucet of code as a benefit and not a liability should be disqualifying.
These 'metrics' are deliberately meant to trick investors into throwing money into hyped up inflated companies for secondary share sales because it sounds like progress.
The reality was the AI made an uncompilable mess, adding 100+ dependencies including importing an entire renderer from another browser (servo) and it took a human software engineer to clean it all up.
It really is insane. I really thought we had made progress stamping out the idea that more LOC == better software, and this just flies in the face of that.
I was in a meeting recently where a director lauded Claude for writing "tens of thousands of lines of code in a day", as if that metric in and of itself was worth something. And don't even get me started on "What percentage of your code is written by AI?"