@tante to quote the aws ceo: “It’s a silly metric,” he said, because while organizations can use AI to write “infinitely more lines of code” it could be bad code.

“Often times fewer lines of code is way better than more lines of code,” he observed. “So I'm never really sure why that's the exciting metric that people like to brag about.”

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/aws_ceo_entry_level_jobs_opinion/

@tante Another non-dev commenting on what he doesn’t know.

There is a well-known saying: ”The last 10% of a product’s development takes 90% of the time.”

Even if that was true by line-count (and it won’t be, just another Elonism), it still wouldn’t make much difference.

Further, a lot of lines in industry codebases arent handwritten even now! ”Code Generators” provide devs with great options to avoid writing boilerplate code themselves. But they don’t make random mistakes.

@tante

He doesn't care about reality. He got his gigantic investments and he got his big pay bonus. Results do not matter, especially when he can say "another 6 months" and the cycle repeats.

@tante
I am a software engineer. 80% of the time I do not write code, but talk to people about what the code should do.

If "AI" would write 50% of the code, that would "save me" 10% of my time, or most likely less, all under the assumption that the code is perfect, which of course is just a wet dream of some managers that don't know shit about technology.

@tante In a similar timeframe my employer's CEO told us he's planning for 100% AI written code. Meanwhile the organization can't reliably document an internal API or library for human consumption.

There's zero possibility of it happening without major investment in the infrastructure they already refuse to do for humans.

@tante a former coworker was continuing her CS degree. She related a story of chatting with a prof about students using #AI to do their homework. Prof related giving an intro assignment: create a function that will return true or false if a submitted text string contains a vowel.

Instead of 1 function, the students who used AI to do their work returned a 7 function program: contains_vowel(txt) which in turn called contains_a(txt), contains_e(txt) contains_i(txt)....

@tante All you have to do is to generate 10 times more slop code than are currently written by humans, and these systems are certainly capable of that, no?

No one said anything about the quality or even usefulness of said code?

@tante
I actually now imagine they have an LLM sitting in a box just outputting like, 1 billion lines of code each day.

'Our metric shall rule them all!'

It doesnt' do anything, of course, but still.

@tante And in the same 6 months close to 100%, if not exactly 100%, of that LLM generated code will need to be debugged, at great expense, by someone who learned how to do this by writing code that LLM's are now producing

When these people, who learned their craft by doing it, retire or give up because idiot managers replace them with LLM's & they can't get jobs

Who will fix the bugs then ?

There won't be any new experienced people who know how to debug & all the rest will be gone

@tante this will depend a lot on the definition of "writing" and "lines of code". If you count individual characters, autocomplete probably has been "writing" the majority of code for quite some time. Lots of autocomplete functionality gets meshed in with LLMs these days, and so, without representing any major shift in the way we write code, you can massage the statistics to make it look like AI is "writing" a lot more code than we would otherwise say.

In the end, a lot of writing code is about the code that isn't written, and hand edited automatically generated code has been with us pretty much since the time text editors were powerful enough to support it.

@tante AI will be producing 90% of the puke. Not that drunkards are going to produce less puke, but AI will start producing 10 times more puke than we currently have

The world will be awash in fake stomach acid, they will paint the walls in technicolor puike, bile will run in the streets

Mr Creosote has met his match.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxRnenQYG7I

#MrCreosote #AIeeeee