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Comment by kansface | Hacker News Reader

I've generated 250KLoC this week, absolutely no changes in deps or any other shenanigans. I'm not even really trying to optimize my output. I work on plans/proposals with 2 or 3 agents simultaneously in Cursor while one does work, sometimes parallelized. I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at all. Don't wait too long.

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> I've generated 250KLoC this week

It's horrifying, all right, but not in the way you think lol. If you don't understand why this isn't a brag, then my job is very safe.

If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then your job is hardly safe.

Managers jobs are more at risk than senior engineers.

My company, and few others I know reduced the number of managers by 90% or more.

This. We moved to 'agile' roughly at same time llms started coming. You know who is mostly missing from the wider IT teams landscape now? Most of PMs and BAs, on purpose. Who is keeping their work - devs or more like devops, surprisingly testers (since our stuff seems ridiculously complex to test well for many use cases and we can't just break our bank by destroying production by fast half-assed deliveries).

And then admins/unix/network/windows/support team, nobody replacing those anytime soon. Those few PMs left are there only for big efforts requiring organizing many teams, and we rarely do those now.

I don't like it, chasing people, babysitting processes and so on, but certainly just more work for me.

you're not responding to op's point, unless you're insinuating there won't be any managers ever, which won't happen. As long as there is one manager left, OP's point remains.

if the industry got rid of 98% of the managers - the industry's output would go up by 500x

Agents are new, but dumb coding practices are not. Despite what it may seem, the knowledge of how to manage development has increased. One practice I haven't seen for a while is managing by limiting the number of lines changed. (This was a dumb idea because rewriting a function or module is sometimes the only way to keep it comprehensible - I'm not talking about wholesale rewriting, I'm talking about code becoming encrusted with conditions because the devs are worried that changing the structure would change too many lines)

Tell me you're not a SWE without telling me. Engineers hire engineers at tech companies. Managers do the hiring paperwork.

Can you please stop posting so abrasively? It's not that this one comment is so bad, but you have a long pattern of doing so, and we're trying for something else here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Less is more, its not a hard thing to understand. These companies are accumulating record level tech debt.

I use these tools a lot, and one thing that has stood out to me is that they LOVE to write code. A lot of it. And they're not super great at extracting the reusable parts. They also love to over-engineer things.

I've taken great pains to get by with as little code as possible, because the more code you have, the harder it is to change (obviously). And while there are absolutely instances in which I'm not super invested in a piece of code's ability to be changed, there are definitely instances in which I am.

Yea, by my less is more logic its sometimes also difficult to do. With that approach people try to become clever and write shorter code thats unmaintainable due to mental gymnastics other people have to go through when reading it. What LLMs are doing is probably going for some kind of overengineered "best practice" solution. I personally only use them for simple Laravel CRUD apps and they are admittedly pretty good at that.

> I can't do that in less code and cleaner. I can't do it at all.

Can't do what, precisely?

LOL that's it? I generated over 5 million lines of code this week. You need to step it up or you're gonna be left behind.

You mean, you don't have

  yes \; >> main.c

running in the background 24/7?

I left an agent generating code over the weekend, so that I can get to 15 million.

What code? Code!

Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should (add 250kloc)

I've worked with a type of (anti?) developer in my career that seems to only be able to add code. Never change or take it away. It's bizarre. There's some calculation bug, then a few lines down some code which corrects it instead of just fixing the original lines.

It's bizzare, and as horrible as you might imagine.

And it's been more than one or two people I've seen do this.

Now they have agents.

People need to understand that code is a liability. LLMs hasn't changed that at all. You LLM will get every bit as confused when you have a bug somewhere in the backend and you then work around it with another line of code in the front end. line of code

They can always generate a new backend prototype from scratch.

This sounds like some kind of learned risk aversion, like they don’t want to assume the responsibility of altering whats already there.

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