Did you manage not to stumble on a dramatic post explaining how someone generated 10,000 lines of code with AI while wasting time on your LinkedIn feed? Congratulations, you’re lucky.

However, as Nathaniel Fishel explained in his Your Code Is Worthless article, the “lines of code” is a useless vanity metric that sounds great in a LinkedIn self-promotion, but doesn’t matter when one has to maintain the product one has shipped to the customers. Add the natural laziness, and you have a perfect storm. As he wrote:

Evolution taught us that cognitive energy is a scarce resource. If we can avoid thinking deeply about a complex architectural trade-off by pressing a “magic solve it for me” button, we usually will.

Some people (including some managers) understand that; others (as in previous hype cycles) are bound to learn the lesson the hard way unless they’re fortunate enough to change jobs before the skyscraper of cards collapses.