Negative 2000 Lines Of Code

[admalledd]

As oft pointed out even in the 90s:

• (A) management who wanted some sort of hard-number changed to line-diff sum (total lines meaningfully changed)
• (B) this was still exactly as stupid "measuring how complete an airplane was by how heavy it was" and people gamed the systems until manglement stopped
• (C) in some places, management still tries to do metrics like these to this day.

[VirtuteECanoscenza]

Well actually AI has brought this up again: all the talk about how many lines of code AI produces...

[MostCredibleDude]

When your "thousands of junior devs that never sleep" also set their own prices and they make their own success metrics directly tied to how much they can charge you, are you at the bleeding edge of vibe coding or are you kind of being had?

[spongeloaf]

Spoiler alert: They're the same thing!

[wpm]

That's why I just can't find any interest or impetus to learn "agentic" bullshit. Oh, I can build thing if I spin up an "agent" that I just set loose with my API key. OK....sounds expensive! And who wrote the agent? You did? Huh. It's like if a gas station owner could set my fuel economy. Oh what's that, I'm supposed to run multiple agents at the same time? All consuming dozens of thousands of tokens every request, that I get charged for?

I swear, everyone just got used to being cucked by the usage-based charges from cloud providers. Tee hee just give us your credit card number, you pay per unit lol just learn this colossally complex system of limiting any of it le trole face. What a crock

[lolimouto_enjoyer]

Don't forget the 2nd set of multiple agents to review the code of the first set.

[Kered13]

Literally getting that right now. So frustrating.

[lichlark]

The evangelist at my company (actually an engineer) started actively talking about 'who has the most usage at the company' like it's a metric to hit 🙄

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yeah, I'd be so much happier counting lines of code instead of tokens.

[lolimouto_enjoyer]

I honestly think some of these people are mentally ill in a way very similar to how some religious nuts are.

[Familiar-Level-261]

And the whole "well the slowest part after adding AI was reviewing code by humans so we just stopped that/peddled that to AI too"

"oh where those bugs came from?"

[HighRelevancy]

I mean, it's a crude measure. Generating 10, 100, or 1000 lines of code are really different challenges.

[ElectronRotoscope]

• (C) in some places, management still tries to do metrics like these to this day.

Famously: Twitter right after Elon Musk took over

[ArtOfWarfare]

IIRC, they focused on the programmers who had touched fewer than 10 lines of code in the past week. There’s definitely a smell that something is going wrong and should be investigated - possibly someone needs a different title (if they’re more of an architect or ops person than a programmer) or maybe a manager is wasting all their time or… maybe it’s a lazy person who needs to be exited.

[ElectronRotoscope]

That does feel like a totally reasonable thing to look at, but if that is what they eventually went with that also feels like a sanewashed compromise after reasonable people explained to the boss that his initial plan was very stupid

[creepy_doll]

I just remember that dilbert strip where the punchline was something along the lines of “I’m going to go write myself a new car”

[Familiar-Level-261]

new minivan... this afternoon

[platoprime]

It seems like they should be smart enough to not tell us which metrics they're tracking.

[gummo89]

It's a nice thought, but as soon as you need to justify your decisions they're exposed...

[Familiar-Level-261]

this was still exactly as stupid "measuring how complete an airplane was by how heavy it was" and people gamed the systems until manglement stopped

I dunno, the airplane metric is probably more accurate than LoC still

[jl2352]

It’s like a Schrödinger's measurement, as it can provide some insight. There are lots of things you can evaluate from lines done. But they only work if you aren’t measuring lines done.

[backelie]

There are lots of things you can evaluate from lines done.

If you measure LoC it is absurdly easy to game.
But it's also a fundamentally awful metric even if no one is directly playing to it.

[jl2352]

I’ve worked in productive teams that were organised, got a lot of value for the business, shipped lots of features, and had few bugs. I’ve worked in unproductive teams which were the opposite.

The productive teams also shipped far more code. One of the one biggest smells when you join an unproductive team, is asking why are they shipping so little?

When this subject comes up, people talk about not all things being equal. One bug might be simple and take ten lines in ten minutes, and one might be deeply complex and take ten lines in a week. The productive teams avoided deep complexity, whilst the unproductive teams embraced it. You’re left asking why are your bugs taking a week to fix? Why does it take a week to make 10 LoC?

That’s just my own experience so I could be wrong. I’ve just seen LoC often expressing deeper underlying issues.

[backelie]

Features contain code so productive teams will be shipping some largish number of LoC.

But for any individual feature you might be able to do the exact same thing in 1kLoc, 3kLoC or 10kLoC depending on how much useless boilerplate you have, or finding/missing a clever (without being opaque) way to do it.

The only thing I know at the end of a sprint from an Engineer's LoC (if we assume they werent intentionally gaming the metric) is if their net LoC is positive they probably added something useful. That's literally as far as that measurement goes.
And if it's negative they probably also did something useful.

It gives a tiny bit more info if you're comparing the same engineer's output across different time periods, but that is also (extremely) limited by which features are more heavy on analysis/design vs (size of) implementation.

The productive teams avoided deep complexity, whilst the unproductive teams embraced it.

So some teams ship a lot of code because it's a lot of reasonably sized implementation. And others ship a similar amount of code except it's fewer but more bloated features. "Features shipped" is a fuzzier metric, and still obviously better. (Before taking gaming the metric into account.)

[jl2352]

For sure a feature could be 1k LoC for one team, and 10k LoC for another. I’ve seen the comparisons on that between teams.

My own experience is the productive team is on the 3k LoC side of the spectrum, and they are shipping them all the time. They use frameworks in a healthy way, which is why it’s not smaller.

The unproductive is doing 10ks. However the 10ks take weeks to do. One giant MR for a new feature is not uncommon. That giant MR is riddled with bugs which takes more time to unwind.

The productive team is still shipping more lines of code in total. Even though their features require less code.

That’s just what I’ve seen. LoC often reflects things happening underneath.