Comment by mediaman

The 40k lines of code a day crows are amusing. In solving any problem solvable by code, there's a ratio of non-coding work to coding work, and codex et al all help immensely with the coding work but help less with the non-coding work.

Non-coding work is thinking about the system architecture, thinking about how data should flow, thinking about the problem to be solved, talking with people who will use it, discovering what their objectives are.

Producing 40k lines a code per day simply means you're not doing any of that work: the work that ensures you're building something worth building.

Which is why the result is massive, pointless things that don't do the things people actually need, because you've not taken any time to actually identify the problems worth solving or how to solve them.

It's a form of mania that recalls Kafka's The Burrow, where an underground creature builds and builds an endless series of catacombs without much purpose or coherence. When building becomes so easy when it was so hard -- and when it becomes more fun to build and watch codex's streams of diffs fly by, than to plan -- we forget the purpose of building, and building becomes its own purpose, which is why we usually so little actual productive impact on the world from the "40k lines of code a day" cohort.