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Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

It really is insane. I really thought we had made progress stamping out the idea that more LOC == better software, and this just flies in the face of that.

I was in a meeting recently where a director lauded Claude for writing "tens of thousands of lines of code in a day", as if that metric in and of itself was worth something. And don't even get me started on "What percentage of your code is written by AI?"

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As Dijkstra once opined in 1988: "My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."

In an adage: code is a liability, not an asset.

As a fun exercise, I tried to see how close I could get to Cursor's results without using any Rust crates, and by making the agent actually care about the code. End results: 20K LOC for a browser that more or less works the same, on three platforms, leveraging commonly available system libraries and no 3rd party Rust crates: https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522)

I'm not entirely sure what the millions of lines of code is supposedly doing.

"What percentage of your code is written by AI?"

"I don't know, what percentage of your sweater is polyester?"

"I don't know, I think it's all cotton, why do you ask me such a random question?"

"Well surely you know that polyester can be made far cheaper in a plastics factory than cotton? Why do you use cotton?"

LOC per day metrics are bovine metrics: how many pounds of dung per day.

I'd argue porcine: how many pounds of slop per day.

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