Comment by qarl
21 days ago
Are you trolling me? Companies (made of humans) write 100,000 LOC all the time.
And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
21 days ago
Are you trolling me? Companies (made of humans) write 100,000 LOC all the time.
And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
No, companies don’t pay people to write 100k LOC. They pay people to write useful software.
We figured out that LOC was a useless productivity metric in the 80s.
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I can't stress enough how much LOC is not a measure of anything.
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Without questioning the LOC metric itself, I'll propose a different problem: LOC for human and AI projects are not necessarily comparable for judging their complexity.
For a human, writing 100k LOC to do something that might only really need 15k would be a bit surprising and unexpected - a human would probably reconsider what they were doing well before they typed 100k LOC. Where-as, an AI doesn't necessarily have that concern - it can just keep generating code and doesn't care how long it will take so it doesn't have the same practical pressure to produce concise code.
The result is that while for large enough human-written programs there's probably an average "density" they reach in relation of LOC vs. complexity of the original problem, AI-generated programs probably average out at an entirely different "density" number.
Your first post specifically stated:
"I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???"
which any reasonable reading would take to mean "paid-by-line", which we all know doesn't happen. Otherwise, I could type out 30,000 lines of gibberish and take my fat paycheck.
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