dhruv3006Mar 11

Amazon AI

https://lemmy.world/post/44099386

Show threadCXORAMar 11
People who share the size of a codechange as a mark of how effective ai coding agents are truly miasbthe point of code changes.
Show threadfckredditMar 11
Number of lines of code written is a shitty metric to measure productivity.
Show threadViatorOmnium
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.
Mar 11 at 5:42amWeb
Show threadRustyNovaMar 11
Then Devs focus on minifying the code into an unreadable mess
Show threadViatorOmniumMar 11
That’s the beautiful thing about mandatory reviews. If I can’t understand the PR, I just veto it until it’s fixed.
Show threadViatorOmniumMar 11

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 shorter PRs is a proxy measure for how easy changes are to review and rollback.

Goodhart's law - Wikipedia

Show threadShayetaMar 11
Hah, if those pesky devs think that they can play the system by just rolling up the code into a single line they got another thing coming - we’re actually tracking PR character count, NOT LOC like some other companies!
Show threadKairuByteMar 11

Yeah, I’ve been guilty of coming up with “cute” solutions that are extremely optimized and concise, but you needed to take a hundred times as long to work through what was going on.

Usually I would put an explanation comment, but sometimes a less optimized solution is the better option for readability sake.

Show threadEthanMar 11
PR size is an awful metric. The bigger the PR, the less reviewable it is.
Show threadPoolloverNathanMar 11
Yes, that’s what the comment said — smaller PRs are better.
Show threadEthanMar 11
PR size is still an awful metric. It should be within bounds but it should never be an actual metric. Treating it as a metric is an idiotic idea.
Show threadSlotosMar 12

I’m working with a legacy codebase for the last few months, where a simple PR often ends up crossing a 1000 lines count due to testing and commenting, and I can’t stop apologizing for those.

Yet there are people out there bragging about 10x changesets.