They're measuring development speed through lines of code. To show that's true they'd need to first show that AI and humans use the same number of lines to solve the same problem. That hasn't been my experience at all. AI is incredibly verbose.

Then there's the question of if LoC is a reliable proxy for velocity at all? The common belief amongst developers is that it's not.

See also

-2000 lines of code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387179

This is actually one thing I have found LLMs surprisingly useful for.

I give them a code base which has one or two orders of magnitude of bloat, and ask them to strip it away iteratively. What I'm left with usually does the same thing.

At this point the code base becomes small enough to navigate and study. Then I use it for reference and build my own solution.

> They're measuring development speed through lines of code.

Yeah, this is the biggest facepalm.

Didn't we grow out of this idiocy 40 years ago? This shit again? Really?