People who share the size of a codechange as a mark of how effective ai coding agents are truly missing the point of code changes.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Number of lines of code written is a shitty metric to measure productivity.
And yet I experience it so often. That or “effort points” as the metric being used to determine who all stars are.
Either as a metric just encourages gaming of the system:
- Why write one line when I can write the same thing in 20?
- Why take this one effort point task I think will take three when I can just skip it and grab these one effort points I think will take 20 minutes?
I’ve been on teams that on the surface didn’t have these metrics matter, but the top effort points achiever got bonuses on the DL.
What did you do?? You refacted the code and now it's better organized but you overall got rid of lines?
I'll set up a PMD meeting to help you out of this problem, but fair to say don't expect a raise or a bonus this year.
In college, on the first day of orientation, someone in my class bragged that they wrote 50,000 lines of code for a game that was similar to tic tac toe, emphasizing that he "wrote a lot of code". A TA told him that it wasn't a sign that his program was decent and that it really didn't seem like it should take 50k lines of code to make something as simple as his game.
He dropped out after the first week of intro to programming.
That's nothing, I wrote the code to return if the input is even or not in 1M lines of code.
I wouldn't say PR size is a bad metric, you usually just need yo read it the opposite of how sloppers do it, i.e. the most productive PRs are short and focused.
Then Devs focus on minifying the code into an unreadable mess
I'm not saying it's a good individual metric. In fact, applying individual metrics to developers (or most workers really), will only land you in Goodhart's hell.
But as part of holistic operational health tracking, it's a useful team level metric, as there is ample evidence that shorter PRs tend to result in less operational issues. And, of course, this is only valid if you don't try to tie financial rewards to it, otherwise people will forget that PR size is a proxy measure for how easy changes are to review and rollback.
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I'm just a hobbyist, but I'm always more proud of commits that remove stuff.
Removing shit and it still working perfectly the same is absolutely a goal everyone should have. Less code means less to maintain.
This. Code is a liability not an asset
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i refactored some web code i wrote ten years ago and it's more elegant and a tenth the size with new features because of language advancements. feels great.
People who've never reviewed a PR be like. Wow green number big, is good.
Didn’t you hear? We’re going back to KLOC for measurement of productivity.
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those aren't upvotes?
Lines added, lines deleted
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Come see why you're all wrong sore losers, here in a lenghty rantarticle I explain why AI is so good and is going to replace you all:
Hey thats my website! Gemini, call the police!
Every breath you take starts playing on the background...
You rang? (My user's name in my laptop is gemini, and in my home pc, and anywhere i use my flake really), btw check out my terminal cool right?:
It doesnt look right in the tty though, i havent bothered to make it change the characters for some it can print, i use oh-my-posh btw, and fish.
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I love the https and port 80 combo. Really sells the incompetence.
That’s what makes it obvious that this person has been around the block. Or a few blocks.
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Goddammit, I clicked.
That page is filthy. You should be ashamed of yourself.
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vibes = vibes-3
if (outage) {
fix()
}
Coding is so easy
You know what's funny?
I use AI to develop software. However when I'm looking for libraries to do things if I see a CLAUDE.md file I have to look and see when it was added and hold it against the library if it's early in the history.
It's like prewar steel.
I also recognize it's hypocritical.
I love this sabotage. Has this worked against anyone that you know of yet?
meow
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It's the difference between checking for questions in stack overflow and implementing solutions VS pasting every SO solution blindly until something works.
I do use autocomplete and ask plenty questions, sometimes even use an agent so it makes small changes that I then review and test, but I would never commit unchecked changes, and a claude.md implies that the AI is coding AND committing without supervision.
I can't stress enough how different those scenarios are.
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We are n weeks away for not needing developers anymore
Let n be a natural number, and b be the time to the next major extinction event.
Positive diff? Pfft, amateurs. If I ever see even a 1000 line PR I'm instantly rejecting and closing it. Learn to code, not generate bullshit.
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Live by the vibes, die by the vibes.
I'm pretty sure the shitty Windows upgrades as of late has been vibecoded as well.
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What could go wrong?
I like that this is lowkey a Polymarket Advertisement too. The internet truly is a wonderous place.
Look mommy, I made big poo poo.
that's good, mandatory meetings always (ALWAYS) solve the problem! /s
Slop points aside, I found 5.4 to be pretty ass compared to 5.3 codex. Took way longer and wasted more tokens.
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Figures Reddit has a Codex sub, where they are all shilling for it.
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