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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You reminded me of a story I recently read, where the author highlighted just how much awesome programming someone had done by describing how their hands were cramping up.
It’s like estimating how well an artist paints by looking at how much paint is on their clothes, or judging how good a cook is by how many cuts and burns they have. The actions that cause those things are incidental to the process, not central, and an excessive amount points to incompetence, not hard and skillful work.
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.
Number of lines of code written is a shitty metric to measure productivity.
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.
If 1 no else if 2 yes else if 3 no…
Exactly…
Are you working with 20 bit integers? You’ll never get it down to a million lines like that…
There’s a million lines of If >4096, subtract 4096
Then a quick lookup case statement for whether the remaining number is even.
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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PR size is an awful metric. The bigger the PR, the less reviewable it is.
Yes, that’s what the comment said — smaller PRs are better.
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.
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.
I’m just a hobbyist, but I’m always more proud of commits that remove stuff.
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.
those aren’t upvotes?
Lines added, lines deleted
You reminded me of a story I recently read, where the author highlighted just how much awesome programming someone had done by describing how their hands were cramping up.
It’s like estimating how well an artist paints by looking at how much paint is on their clothes, or judging how good a cook is by how many cuts and burns they have. The actions that cause those things are incidental to the process, not central, and an excessive amount points to incompetence, not hard and skillful work.
Big Diff Energy
Might as well be bragging about pictures they’ve taken of their bowel movements.
Please tell me this subreddit is satire
No, this is the most serious subreddit in all of reddit.