-2000 Lines of code

Software metric are hard, indeed :) Be prepared in a ai-code world when more code does not mean better code.

I've been watching my colleagues' adoption of Copilot with interest. From what I can tell, the people who are the most convinced that it improves their productivity have an understanding of developer productivity that is very much in line with that of the managers in this story.

Recently I refactored about 8,000 lines of vibe-coded bloat down into about 40 lines that ran ten times as fast, required 1/20 as much memory, and eliminated both the defect I was tasked with resolving and several others that I found along the way. (Tangentially, LLM-generated unit tests never cease to amaze me.) The PHBs didn't particularly appreciate my efforts, either. We've got a very expensive Copilot Enterprise license to continue justifying.

I see a stratified software market in the future.

There will be vibe and amateur banged out hustle trash, which will be the cheap plastic cutlery of the software world.

There will be lovingly hand crafted by experts code (possibly using some AI but in the hands of someone who knows their shit) that will be like the fine stuff and will cost many times more.

A lot of stuff will get prototyped as crap and then if it gets traction reimplemented with quality.

Back in the day, if you went to a website you could always tell who wrote their HTML by hand and who used a tool like GruntPage, Dreamweaver, etc. even without looking at the META tags. The by-hand stuff was like a polished jewel that had only as much layout, styling, and markup as needed to get the desired effect. The proprietary web editor stuff was encrusted with extraneous tags and vendor-specific extensions (like mso: attributes and styles in GruntPage).

Then as now, if you let the machine do the thinking for you, the result was a steaming mess. Up to you if that was accessible (and for many, it was).

You can make the same claim about compiled code vs hand written assembly, and yet the vast majority of software is compiled or interpreted.

A compiler is written by very smart humans to a spec written by humans, also probably smart but I don’t know enough to claim that bit.

An LLM is just displaying the next statistical token.

Completely different.