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Comment by unknownfuture

3 months ago

Self-reported or observational data capturing time spent for categories of task ala every other similar study in this space?

This isn't exactly novel territory, here, Simon. Let's not pretend I'm asking for something strange, unprecedented, or unreasonable.

14 comments

unknownfuture

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simonw  3 months ago

How's this? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/13/datasette-code-frequen...

I have similar charts across my three main open source projects:

https://github.com/simonw/datasette/graphs/code-frequency

https://github.com/simonw/llm/graphs/code-frequency

https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/graphs/code-frequency

  • the_af  3 months ago

    Isn't this falling into the "lines of code" trap TFA mentions?

    More code written is not a good measure of productivity. It could be garbage, or redundant code, or simply not addressing the real or more pressing needs, it could be building the wrong thing, etc.

    Like TFA mentions, it's been known for decades LoC is a misleading metric for productivity. It's one of the lessons of software engineering.

    • simonw  3 months ago

      I'm planning an article at the moment in defense of lines of code. Saying "lines of code are a bad measurement" is too easy! It's about time someone presented an opposing argument.

      In my specific case, lines of code for my published open source projects is a metric that I trust, because I have high standards for those. I have plenty of other projects where I'll accept poor quality, unreviewed code (almost all of https://github.com/simonw/tools for example), but Datasette, sqlite-utils and LLM are not that.

      Of course, that's only useful for me personally and for people who trust me to stick to my own self-declared high standards!

      5 replies →

  • unknownfuture  3 months ago

    The article mentions that coding is only a fraction of dev time and thus accelerating that part of the job can only create incremental gains, and oh PS, lines of code and similar metrics are a bad way if measuring dev productivity, anyway, and we've known that for decades.

    The OP claims AI accelerates non-coding parts of the job, too, and so the article is misguided.

    I ask for evidence.

    In response you give me... code output metrics?

  • qsera  3 months ago

    I don't think volume of code changed was the metric the other commenter was asking for.