With the rise of agentic coding, this has become a sign of quality for me in my own PRs and reviews: New features implemented in less than a thousand lines of productive code.
When I'm working on code that was heavily vibecoded, most of my PRs are reducing LoC by a couple hundreds of lines while fixing bugs or implementing a new feature.
My job kind of feels like being a garbage man, luckily my current employer appreciates it. Personally I think the current style of vibecoding only kinda works, because models are getting better fast enough to keep the shitpile from overflowing completely. Betting on the harnesses + models getting good enough to clean up after themselves is a bet, and I don't like gambling, but even I admit the odds don't seem to be bad.
"""
Steve Ballmer
In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing.
"""
So many times in my career I have seen a problem that could be handled with two lines of code and a table lookup being handled with 40 lines of code and a switch statement. So the guy writing the 40 lines of codes switch statement would get paid 20 times more money!
With the rise of agentic coding, this has become a sign of quality for me in my own PRs and reviews: New features implemented in less than a thousand lines of productive code.
When I'm working on code that was heavily vibecoded, most of my PRs are reducing LoC by a couple hundreds of lines while fixing bugs or implementing a new feature.
My job kind of feels like being a garbage man, luckily my current employer appreciates it. Personally I think the current style of vibecoding only kinda works, because models are getting better fast enough to keep the shitpile from overflowing completely. Betting on the harnesses + models getting good enough to clean up after themselves is a bet, and I don't like gambling, but even I admit the odds don't seem to be bad.
Slowly and then suddenly :)
""" Steve Ballmer In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. """
From https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
So many times in my career I have seen a problem that could be handled with two lines of code and a table lookup being handled with 40 lines of code and a switch statement. So the guy writing the 40 lines of codes switch statement would get paid 20 times more money!