[osigurdson]

I'm already at the point where I get frustrated when GPT writes some incorrect code - despite it saving me enormous amounts of time. The appetite for productivity seems to be insatiable. I want to be able to create a million lines of code per month by myself.

[tlrobinson]

> I want to be able to create a million lines of code per month by myself.

That sounds terrible. Who is going to read all that code when you need to understand and modify it? The LLMs, I guess?

I'd much rather be able to write 10,000 lines of code that can do what your million lines of code does. Better programming languages, libraries, and other abstractions are what we need.

[osigurdson]

>> I'd much rather be able to write 10,000 lines of code that can do what your million lines of code does.

Sure, who wouldn't. Unfortunately this is my hypothetical and I get to control what I mean by it. The million lines of code in my hypothetical is good quality, maintainable with reasonable density.

>> Better programming languages, libraries, and other abstractions are what we need.

In the entire history of languages, we've only managed about a 10X improvement via these mechanisms (that is being charitable probably). Several important things are still written in C which would mostly be recognizable to a programmer from 40 years ago. There are still problems to solve but I feel we are on the asymptotic section of the curve in this regard.

[zenlikethat]

So relatable! I find myself getting irritated when it gets stuck on something and I have to intervene, yet it helps absolutely shred LOCs in some other cases.

[tablatom]

"If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent." — Dijkstra

[osigurdson]

I think these days, LOC is a reasonable metric for a peer-reviewed code base. It is unlikely that the lines of code in a given project can be reduced by 10X in a maintainable way. Can we easily reduce the LOC in the Linux kernel or Postgres by 10X for example? It seems unlikely.

LOC is a fuzzy proxy for the amount information in a code base. It should never be used for any kind of productivity metric however since that is obviously dumb and easily gameable (win by writing terrible code). Of course most productivity metrics are fall into the dumb/gameable category so lets not use them.