Lines of code are meaningful when taken in aggregate and useless as a metric for an individual’s contributions.
COCOMO, which considers lines of code, is generally accepted as being accurate (enough) at estimating the value of a software system, at least as far as how courts (in the US) are concerned.
No one has any idea how to estimate software value, so the idea that some courts in the US have used a wildly inaccurate system that considers LOC is so far away from evidence that LOC is useful for anything that I can’t believe you bothered including that.
LOC is essentially only useful to give a ballpark estimate it complexity and even then only if you compare orders of magnitude and only between similar program languages and ecosystems.
It’s certainly not useful for AI generated projects. Just look at OpenClaw. Last I heard it was something close to half a million lines of code.
When I was in college we had a professor senior year who was obsessed with COCOMO. He required our final group project to be 50k LOC (He also required that we print out every line and turn it in). We made it, but only because we build a generator for the UI and made sure the generator was as verbose as possible.
They gave a widely accepted way to estimate value, and your counter argument is that that is inaccurate. Fine but how can you be confident about that? I see only one way which is for you to come up with a better way and then show that by your better estimation, COCOMO is bad. Until you do that, all your argument goes down to is vibes.
Your example about OpenClaw works exactly against your own argument by the way: OpenAI acquired it for millions by all accounts.
COCOMO has been shown to be inaccurate numerous times. Google it. Here’s one result.
“A very high MMRE (1.00) indicates that, on average, the COCOMO model misses about 100% of the actual project
effort. This means that the estimate generated by the model can be double or even greater than the actual effort. This
shows that the COCOMO model is not able to provide estimates that are close to the actual value.”
No one in the industry has taken COCOMO seriously for nearly 2 decades.
>OpenClaw
1. OpenAI bought the vibes and the creator. Why would they buy the code? It’s open source.
2. You don’t seriously think OpenClaw needs half a million lines of code to provide the functionality it does do you?
Seriously just go look at the code. No one is defending that as being an efficient use of code.
> No one in the industry has taken COCOMO seriously for nearly 2 decades.
The funny thing is that we've just discussed how people do take it seriously. It's just that you don't like that. And what do you offer as an alternative?
Like I said, vibes. You think that the value of some software is something you can only "feel". That's not how an engineer thinks. If you're engineer you should know that if you can't measure it, you can't say anything at all about it. Which means you cannot discount any alternative method until you've got a better way. But clearly you can't think like an engineer.
I don’t know what to tell you. All the evidence says COCOMO is too inaccurate to use. Show me evidence that says it’s accurate.
Just because someone wrote a book and a few bankruptcy trustees used it doesn’t magically make it accurate. Just because something is systematic doesn’t mean it’s worth using.
If you do a bit of googling you’ll find that the majority of studies show that systemic models don’t outperform expert guesses. So yep vibes are general just as good.
Show me a large tech company that currently uses COCOMO to plan software projects.
Also if you are a dev outside of NASA or another safety critical industry and you think you’re an engineer, you’re kidding yourself.
Oh and try not to sound like an asshole next time.
Many people also take tarot card reading seriously as a way to predict the future.
As an engineer, you are not required to come up with a better way of predicting the future before you can dismiss tarot. You need only show that it doesn't work.
I think that's a "looking under the lamp post because that's where the light is" metric.
I'm not sure most developers, managers, or owners care about the calculated dollar value of their codebase. They're not trading code on an exchange. By condensing all software into a scalar, you're losing almost all important information.
I can see why it's important in court, obviously, since civil court is built around condensing everything into a scalar.
> Lines of code are meaningful when taken in aggregate
The linked article does not demonstrate this. It establishes no causal link. One can obviously bloat LOC to an arbitrary degree while maintaining feature parity. Very generously, assuming good faith participants, it might reflect a kind average human efficiency within the fixed environment of the time.
Carrying the conclusions of this study from the 80s into the LLM age is not justified scientifically.
> Lines of code are meaningful when taken in aggregate and useless as a metric for an individual’s contributions.
Yes, and in fact a lot of the studies that show the impact of AI on coding productivity get dismissed because they use LoC or PRs as a metric and "everyone knows LoC/PR counts is a BS metric." But the better designed of these studies specifically call this out and explicitly design their experiments to use these as aggregate metrics.
COCOMO, which considers lines of code, is generally accepted as being accurate (enough) at estimating the value of a software system, at least as far as how courts (in the US) are concerned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO