alt Hacker NewsIt 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?"
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"What percentage of your code is written by AI?"
"I don't know, what percentage of your sweater is polyester?"
"I don't know, I think it's all cotton, why do you ask me such a random question?"
"Well surely you know that polyester can be made far cheaper in a plastics factory than cotton? Why do you use cotton?"
LOC per day metrics are bovine metrics: how many pounds of dung per day.
As Dijkstra once opined in 1988: "My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."