Comment by jmmv
6 hours ago
If we have been complaining about bloat before, the amount of bloat we are going to witness in the future is unfathomable. How can anyone be proud of a claim like "It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files." _especially_ when a lot of this code is relying on external dependencies? Less code is almost always better, not more!
I'm also getting really tired of claims like "we are X% more productive with AI now!" (that I'm hearing day in and out at work and LinkedIn of course). Didn't we, as an industry, agree that we _didn't_ know how to measure productivity? Why is everyone believing all of these sudden metrics that try to claim otherwise?
Look, I'm not against AI. I'm finding it quite valuable for certain scenarios -- but in a constrained environment and with very clear guidance. Letting it loose with coding is not one of them, and the hype is dangerous by how much it's being believed.
I mostly agree with you but I AM super productive with AI. I'm working on a side-project and have built in 2-3 months what my quite productive team of 3-4 people would take 4-6 months to build in 2016. And I'm not talking to generative slop but real production grade code that I have reviewed+approved or manually refactored before merging. Like you I'm not impressed by these toy projects but the productivity gain is very real. At least has been for me.
I don't disregard what you are saying and believe that being more productive with sufficient quality is _possible_.
But how do you measure it? All the metrics I see being chased (metrics that were never accepted as productivity measurements before) can be gamed with slop, and so slop is what we'll get.