Nothing about this is moving goalposts - you and/or the person(s) conducting this study are the ones being misleading!

If you want to measure time to complete a complex task, then measure that. LOC is an intermediate measure. How much more productive is "55% more lines of code"?

I can write a bunch of garbage code really fast with a lot of bugs that doesn't work, or I can write a better program that works properly, slower. Under your framework, the former must be classified as 'better' - but why?

I read the study you reference and there is literally nothing in the study that talks about whether or not tasks were accomplished successfully.

It says: * Junior devs benefited more than senior devs, then presents a disingenuous argument as to why that's the senior devs' fault (more experienced employees are worse than less experienced employees, who knew?!) * 11% of the 55% increase in LOC was attributed directly to LLM output * Makes absolutely no attempt to measure whether or not the extra code was beneficial

Yes, like I said, it’s not hard to provide counterexamples to why more LOC is better, but it’s also missing the forest for the trees to pretend it doesn’t matter at all.