From: sc@fiat-linux.fr

Le 25-01-2026, Charlie Gibbs  a écrit :
> On 2026-01-25, Stéphane CARPENTIER  wrote:
>
>> Well, a lot of times, the process stops when it works. I don't remember
>> who said that code is not finish when there is nothing more to add but
>> when there is nothing more to remove.
>
> Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

OK, I'm not proud to have forgotten that. He was probably more speaking
about writing books than writing code, but there are a lot of
similarities in the two processes.

>> That's why it's stupid to consider the best programmer as the one who
>> produce more lines of code than others.
>
> Unless you're being paid by the line.

If that exist for writing articles in some newspapers (well more
precisely they are payed by the word which is strongly correlated), I
never heard of it for writing code.

Which would be a very bad idea because people would start to put one
word by line every time it's possible (it looks easy in C or javascript,
I'm not sure it's possible in python). And the programs would be
unreadable. It would encourage obfuscation.

So, I'm happy I never heard about a programmer paid by the line and I
strongly hope I'll never heard about that.

>> And, from what I saw, actually, the AI produce a lot of code which must
>> be removed.
>
> Reminds me of my early days when I'd take over maintenance of someone
> else's code - or code that "just grew".  I'd typically reduce the line
> count by 30% - or even 50% in some cases.

I never saw your code, but I'm pretty sure it's not the same garbage.

More than often I saw AI code putting useless lines decreasing the speed
of the program. For example, one unused variable initiated in a very
strange way looking for unheard environmental variables treating them
complexly and, to the end, even if the environmental variable did exist,
replace its value by an empty string. So, if a modern computer this
useless initiation doesn't take much time, it obfuscates the code and if
too many of them are present, it can start to have some impacts.

I never saw anything like that in code written by humans.

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