[SCdF]

It is endlessly... amusing (?) to me, that we as a community spent decades trying to make it clear that our productivity is not easily measured because what we're doing is complicated and long running, only for AI to come along and suddenly LoC, Nx multipliers, tickets / week etc are held up as useful if not objective measurements.

The reasons we rejected LoC and other measurements have not changed (broadly: code output isn't important, quality output is). AI has all the same problems people do. But for whatever reason we are throwing what we've learnt away. It's kind of embarrassing.

[fasterik]

The non-technical people are in charge and they're not tethered to reality in the same way that engineers are. Objective reality will win in the end, but that doesn't prevent damage being done in the short term.

[SCdF]

IDK, I do think a lot of it is LLMs enable people who were not in our community to come into it (in an eternal september kind of way) and they are going through all this from first principals and ignoring their elders, but I've also seen technical people suddenly measuring themselves this way. The most optimistic read of this is that they _feel_ productive, and that feels nice, and they want to share how that feels, and so they are reaching for these garbage metrics because they have nothing else.

[Terr_]

> The most optimistic read of this is that they _feel_ productive

In addition to "feel productive", two other feels I think are flying under the radar:

1. You get a parasocial relationship with a "friend" (or at least conversation partner) who seems to "understand" you.

2. You get some form of gambling entertainment when you pull the lever and the output keeps landing on different sides of the jackpot you want.

While #2 has some overlap with classic creative struggle, I think it can at least be seen as a kind of junk-food verson, where the frequency is different and the health-promoting parts aren't present.

[joe_the_user]

Maybe a particular group of software engineer cultivated the need for careful measures. But the programming field never escaped the idea of simple metrics.

That's because you would always have loosely involved but aggressive and demanding bosses (there is unfortunately an economic value to the boss whose primary task is forcing more effort out of the employee and who doesn't help coordination or anything else). So at best you had two intersecting clouds of approaches with actual accomplishment intersecting with LoC and related measurements.

The thing AI is that it provides all the tools to satisfy that loosely involved but demanding boss. So suddenly you are going to have a larger demographic of people who like LoC and feature-additions as metrics 'cause now they are easy.

[cyberrock]

>we as a community spent decades trying to make it clear that our productivity is not easily measured

Did we? All I saw the last decade was increasing worship of the Github activity grid, from both engineers and non-engineers. IMHO the bazaar had already lost its way before this.

[SCdF]

I had seen, up until LLMs, posts in this theme: https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/ pretty regularly. This one was only a few years ago!

Maybe we run in different circles. Or did, anyway.

[Laurel1234]

All that to shill slop machines so the billionaire class can throw people out on the street.