Comment by strix_varius
7 hours ago
I'm sure this is gated by where you work (especially by how technically savvy your manager is), but the most effective contributors at my job tend to be the ones with near-zero (or sub-zero!) net LoC.
LLMs are prolific and they love to add shit. Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more business outcomes with less code / fewer moving parts.
"Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more business outcomes with less code / fewer moving parts"
I'd simplify to "Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more positive outcomes" - half of what makes a capable, dependable engineer is knowing what outcomes are needed and making them happen.
Good revision!
I really can't agree with this. Sure pure LoC is a bad metric. But there is a correlation between output and LoC. Outside of a very senior developer, maybe a Principal or Lead that is spending all day in architecture meetings and reviewing PRs, most high performers are also outputting code.
This is exactly what the article is addressing:
> But there is a correlation between output and LoC.
That is less true today than it ever has been, due to LLMs.
"High performers". Can't believe we have normalized this vocabulary, among us, "hackers".
Most of us work for business and on teams where performance matters.
2 replies →
The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add? That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them. Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.
We had a library written by a former employee who was a prolific producer of code. He insisted we needed it and spent over a year developing it in company time.
The library was a masterpiece of what if driven development. It was about 50k LoC, and it had 300k LoC of dependencies. It was a nightmare to modify. And no one wanted to take over maintenance so people would submit PRs to the former employee when they did modify it.
I wanted to change something in the library to support a large migration I was in charge of. When I went digging it turned out that we were barely using any of the features in the 2 years since he’d finished it. I replaced the 50k LoC library and 300k LoC of dependencies with 300 lines in less time than it would have taken me to modify the library (a few days).
Every line of code is a liability. A potential security breach. An error waiting to corrupt customer data. A maintenance burden.
> The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add?
Yes.
> That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them.
It sounds effective to me, like removing garbage from sidewalks so people can walk straight instead of walking around the trash.
> Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.
Correct. Today I cleaned up
to
and contributed various other negative lines of code in multiple areas.
Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.
Do you have any experience coding before LLMs?
Written exactly like that, yours is obviously cleaner.
But, if that original code had comments and traceability of each condition and return to a specific domain scenario, you would be doing a disservice by collapsing it to the one flat boolean expression. In that case, it may be better in its expanded form, and you should let an optimizing compiler do the collapsing.
Turning inefficient, unreadable code into efficient, readable code often results in an overall reduction in LoC.
High-quality code and high-volume code are highly anti-correlated. Incidentally, low-quality code that is excessively long just so happens to be common complaint with AI-generated code.
Rewriting code to be more compact is orthogonal to productivity.
6 replies →
> The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add
Perhaps they tackle non-code-editing tasks like architecture, design, mentoring and code review (think staff and principal tasks)
> Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added
Yes. This os not a failure. Code has a surprisingly short half-life.
It’s not a failure that resources were spent writing code that was not needed?
3 replies →
I definitely agree with the GP, and the point is that most often someone else (or an LLM) added all those LOC that are removed to make the system sensible.
… by some fool who didn’t know what they were doing, since evidently the same behavior could be done with less.
> That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them. Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.
Because they were added doesn't mean they were needed and even if the same person added and then removed them, it doesn't mean they are digging ditches to fill them.
The idea that "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time" also applies to code, and sometimes later you are blessed with more time than you had when implementing something under deadline pressure.
> Because they were added doesn't mean they were needed and even if the same person added and then removed them, it doesn't mean they are digging ditches to fill them.
Huh? If LoC weren't needed then adding them was unnecessary and a waste of time. Someone who is known at an organization for removing unnecessary code screams inefficiency to me. It's paying one person to create a mess then another to clean it up.
1 reply →
if you're trying to use sloc as a proxy for productivity in any way, shape or form you've already lost the game.
i tend to find that the most productive teams make better decisions and work fewer hours. the quality of decisions is such a huge force multiplier that it renders actual hours worked almost an irrelevant variable.
• LoC/LOC = Lines of Code
• sloc = Source Lines of Code
.. so I suppose nloc would mean Net LoC
[dead]