1. Bill Gates quote: flagged as folklore-grade. Was "Bill Gates put it
more memorably" (firm attribution). Now "The old line (widely
attributed to Bill Gates, sourcing murky) puts it more memorably."
The quote stands; honesty about attribution avoids the same
misattribution trap we just fixed for Kernighan.
2. Capers Jones: "15-50 across thousands of projects" → "roughly 16-38
LOC/day across thousands of projects" — matches his actual published
measurements (which also report as 325-750 LOC/month).
3. Steve McConnell: "10-50 for finished, tested, delivered code" was
folklore. Replaced with his actual project-size-dependent range from
Code Complete: "20-125 LOC/day for small projects (10K LOC) down to
1.5-25 for large projects (10M LOC) — it's size-dependent, not a
single number."
4. Revert rate comparison: "Kubernetes, Rails, and Django historically
run 1.5-3%" was unsourced. Replaced with "mature OSS codebases
typically run 1-3%" + "run the same command on whatever you consider
the bar and compare." No false specificity about which repos.
Net: every quantitative citation in the post now matches primary-source
figures or is explicitly flagged as folklore. Neckbeards can verify.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
1. Citation fix. Kernighan didn't say anything about LOC-as-metric
(that's the famous "aircraft building by weight" quote, commonly
misattributed but actually Bill Gates). Replaced "Kernighan implied
it before that" with the real Dijkstra quote ("lines produced" vs
"lines spent" from EWD1036, with direct link) + the Gates quote.
Verified via web search.
2. Slop-scan direction clarified. "(highest on his benchmark)" was
ambiguous — could read as a brag. Now: "Higher score = more slop.
He ran it on gstack and we scored 5.24, the worst he'd measured
at the time." Then the 62% cut lands as an actual win.
3. Prose/chart skill-usage ordering now matches. Added /plan-eng-review
(28,014) to the prose list so it doesn't conflict with the chart
below it.
4. Cut the "David — I owe you one / GUnit" insider joke. Most readers
won't connect Cramer → Sentry → GUnit naming. Ends the slop-scan
paragraph on the stronger line: "Run `bun test` and watch 2,000+
tests pass."
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Lead with concession (LOC is garbage, do the math anyway)
- Preempt 14 lines/day meme with historical baselines (Brooks, Jones, McConnell)
- Remove 'neckbeard' language throughout
- Add slop-scan story (Ben Vinegar, 5.24 → 1.96, 62% cut)
- David Cramer GUnit joke
- Add testing philosophy section (the real unlock)
- ASCII weekly distribution chart
- gstack telemetry section with real numbers (15K installs, 305K invocations, 95.2% success)
- Top skills usage chart
- Pick-your-priors paragraph moved earlier (the killer)
- Sharper close: run the script, show me your numbers
"You'd need access to my private repos" → "Bookface and Posthaven are
private, but gstack and gbrain are open-sourced with tens of thousands
of GitHub stars and tens of thousands of confirmed regular users, among
the most-used OSS projects in the world that didn't exist three months
ago."
Keeps the `gh repo list` command at the end for the actual
reproducibility instruction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
gstack: "1,000+ distinct project installations" → "tens of thousands of
daily active users" (telemetry-reported, community tier, opt-in).
gbrain: "small set of beta testers" → "hundreds of beta testers running
it live."
Both are the accurate current numbers. The concession paragraph below
(about shipped != adopted at scale for the long-tail repos) still reads
correctly since it's about the corpus as a whole, not gstack/gbrain
specifically.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reframes the thesis as "engineers can fly now" (amplification, not
replacement) and fortifies the soft spots critics will attack.
Added:
- Flight-thesis opener: pilot vs walker, leverage not replacement.
- Second deflation layer for AI verbosity (on top of NCLOC). Headline
moves from 810x to 408x after generous 2x AI-boilerplate cut, with
explicit sensitivity analysis showing the number is still large under
pessimistic priors (5x → 162x, 10x → 81x, 100x impossible).
- Weekly distribution check (kills "you had one burst week" attack).
- Revert rate (2.0%) and post-merge fix rate (6.3%) with OSS
comparables (K8s/Rails/Django band). Addresses "where are your error
rates" directly.
- Named production adoption signals (gstack 1000+ installs, gbrain beta,
resend_robot paying API) with explicit concession that "shipped != used
at scale" for most of the corpus.
- Harder steelman: 5 specific concessions with quantified pivot points
(e.g., "if 2013 baseline was 3.5x higher, 810x → 228x, still high").
Removed factual error: Posterous acquisition paragraph (Garry had already
left Posterous by 2011, so the "Twitter bought our private repos" excuse
for the 2013 corpus gap doesn't apply).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
tax-app is a demo app I built for an upcoming YC channel video,
not an "import-dominated history" as the previous commit claimed.
Excluded because it's not production shipping work, not because
of an import commit.
Updated rationale in scripts/garry-output-comparison.ts's
EXCLUDED_REPOS constant, in docs/ON_THE_LOC_CONTROVERSY.md's
method section + conclusion, and in the README hero wording
("one demo repo" vs the earlier "repos dominated by imported code").
Numbers unchanged — the exclusion itself is the same, just the
reason.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
tax-app's history is one commit of 104K logical lines — an initial
import of a codebase, not authored work. Removing it to keep the
comparison honest.
Changes:
- scripts/garry-output-comparison.ts: added EXCLUDED_REPOS constant
with tax-app + a one-line rationale. The script now skips excluded
repos with a stderr note and deletes any stale output JSON so
aggregation loops don't pick up pre-exclusion numbers.
- README hero: updated to 810× run rate + 240× YTD (were 880×/260×).
Wording updated to "40 public + private repos ... after excluding
repos dominated by imported code."
- docs/ON_THE_LOC_CONTROVERSY.md: updated all numbers, added an
"Exclusions" paragraph explaining tax-app, removed tax-app from
the "shipped not WIP" example list.
New numbers (2026 through day 108, without tax-app):
- To-date: 240× logical SLOC (1,233,062 vs 5,143)
- Run rate: 810× per-day pace (11,417 vs 14 logical/day)
- Annualized: ~4.2M logical lines projected
Future re-runs automatically skip tax-app. Add more exclusions to
EXCLUDED_REPOS at the top of the script with a one-line rationale.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Long-form response to the "LOC is a meaningless vanity metric" critique.
Covers:
- The three branches of the LOC critique and which are right
- Why logical SLOC (NCLOC) beats raw LOC as the honest measurement
- Full method: author-scoped git diff, regex-classified added lines,
aggregated across 41 public + private garrytan/* repos
- Both calculations: to-date (260x) and run-rate (879x)
- Steelman of the critics (greenfield-vs-maintenance, survivorship bias,
quality-adjusted productivity, time-to-first-user)
- Reproduction instructions
Linked from README hero via a blockquote directly below the number.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
