alt Hacker NewsWhen I was just beginning, all of the productivity measures would be 0 and I felt like a failure. The most attainable was lines of code. Currently, it's not a great measure of productivity as I'm achieving more advanced tasks. I've heard so many opinions about how LOC isn't a great measure and then the same people get to trample on all of the work I've done out of spite because I've written more code than them. I think LOC is great because productivity measures are for beginners and people who don't understand code. The audience doesn't know the difference between writing a hundred or thousands of lines of code, both are trophies for them.
These metrics for advanced roles are not applicable, no matter what you come up with. But even lines of code are good enough to see progress from a blank slate. Every developer or advanced AI agent must be judged on a case by case basis.
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No one judges a painting by the amount of paint, or a wooden chair by the number of nails in it. The amount of LoC doesn’t matter. What matters is that the code is bug-free, readable, and maintainable.
But reducing the amount of LoC helps, just like using the correct word helps in writing text. That’s the craft part of software engineering, having the taste to write clear and good code.
And just like writing and any other craft, the best way to acquire such taste is to study others works.
But if removing 1kLOC and replacing them with 25 for a much better function, there is a -975 LOC report. Does this count as negative productivity? Having brackets start and stop on their own lines could double LOC counts but would that actually improve the code base? Be a sign of doubling productivity?
The OpenBSD project prides itself on producing very secure, bug free software, and they largely trend towards as low of lines of codes as they can possibly get away with while maintaining readability (so no codegolf tricks for the most part). I would rather we write secure bug free software than speed up the ability to output 10kLOC. The typing out code isn’t the difficult part in that scenario.