At Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and other large companies, devs are purposefully burning tokens (and money!) to inflate their AI usage and hit AI usage metrics which they treat as targets.
I’m no developer, just so some casual scripting for my job, but lines of code being a performance metric is a hilarious notion. Like, the indicator of good code is that it’s efficiently written in a small number of lines. It’s similarly just as easy to waste tokens on nothing of value.
I wouldn’t mind seeing lines of comments and external documentation as metrics. Perhaps as a ratio to functions or sections. I know, requiring it would just lead to crappy documentation, but that’s typically better than none at all, and there’s a lot of folks out there just too busy with their brilliance to write up what they just coded.
A division of AppleComputer started having developers report LinesOfCode written as a ProductivityMetric. The guru, BillAtkinson, happened to be refactoring and tuning a graphics library at the time, and ended up with a six-fold speedup and a much smaller library. When asked to fill in the form, he wrote in NegativeLinesOfCode. Management got the point and stopped using those forms soon afterwards.
I’m no developer, just so some casual scripting for my job, but lines of code being a performance metric is a hilarious notion. Like, the indicator of good code is that it’s efficiently written in a small number of lines. It’s similarly just as easy to waste tokens on nothing of value.
I wouldn’t mind seeing lines of comments and external documentation as metrics. Perhaps as a ratio to functions or sections. I know, requiring it would just lead to crappy documentation, but that’s typically better than none at all, and there’s a lot of folks out there just too busy with their brilliance to write up what they just coded.
I love this story: