alt Hacker NewsWell, to be fair, the amount of goalpost shifting that is going on is quite intense. AI not being able to work in a "serious" project, and being limited to "toy projects" has been a long standing critique.
But also, bigger projects need some amount of loc written and it's a bit silly to pretend that this is not the case or a bad thing.
So the answer to the question is roughly: Establishing that an agent can work in a large-ish code base is valuable, because 1) them not being able to do so has been a critique and 2) it's something that is required for a lot of software projects.
Replies
I don’t think it’s solvable. And I think Anthropic etc know it. LLMs can only reconstitute things in its training data and they are so hungry they can’t do a good job in long lived codebase full of complexity and novelty. There’s never going to be enough similar code on the open internet.
Should we not be counting function points rather than LOC’s.
Lines of Code is a meaningless measure. It should also be easy to count function points using AI.