alt Hacker NewsIt's actually incredible the extent to which non devs imposing KPIs on devs underestimate how badly this will get gamed, whether it's AIs, PR/line counting or whatever.
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Exactly. At Cerebras I know of several people who burn tokens on completely USELESS tasks (randomly changing pixels in an image) just to keep them high up on the token leaderboard.
I suspect the other tokenboard leaders are doing the same. They made the metric "token usage" (which is just a proxy for LOC) so that's what they're gonna get.
Someone at my job uses AI tools to reformat his code...
I think PRs is pretty good, IF
1. you sample a few to see that they are actually meaningful,
2. they go to prod and are validated without having to roll back.
Still needs to be managed. But it should be much easier for a manager to catch an engineer gaming PRs than something like AI use or lines of code.
Easily fixable with another KPI to measure the gaming itself :P
Gaming is one thing, fundamentally not understanding how engineering works will lead to shittier outcomes and cost the company in ways the management will never understand.
Management in the age of AI is falling for the doorman fallacy wrt engineering. If lines of code were the most valuable aspect of software engineering, my front end JavaScript intern would’ve been the most valuable person in the company. https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy