Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by viktorcode 142 days ago
It's the second time today when I see that the higher number of LoC is served as something positive. I would put it strictly in "Ugly" category. I understand the business logic that says that as long as you can vibe code away from any problems, what's the point of even looking at the code.
3 comments
dkersten 142 days ago
As the saying goes:

   Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs.
150k sounds like a lot. I do have to wonder what the program does exactly to see if that’s warranted, but it sounds bloated.
link
esafak 142 days ago
Think of it as 60 man-years of work.
link
idle_zealot 142 days ago
If that's true then I can ship 60 man-years of work with

  yes 'println("a very important and useful line of code");' >> main.c
in under a second!
link
esafak 141 days ago
How is that 60 man-years of work? You are not going to replicate what the LLM generated in under a second without the LLM.
link
pjmlp 142 days ago
Remember, there used to be a time programmers productivity was measured in LoC per hour.

As such, this is high productivity! /s

link
michaelcampbell 142 days ago
> Remember, there used to be a time programmers productivity was measured in LoC per hour.

Do you remember such a time or company? I have been developing professionally since the early 1990's (and hobbyist before then), and this "truth" has been a meme even back then.

I'm sure it happened, but I'm not sure it was ever as widespread as this legend would make it sound.

But, there were decades of programmers programming before I started, so maybe it just predated even me.

link
pjmlp 142 days ago
I do, besides the sibling comment, there is hacker lore about these kind of issues,

> They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

link
kryptiskt 142 days ago
IBM had such a culture back in the day, where they feted 1 kloc/day programmers. That was what Bill Gates sneered at with the "Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs" quote.
link