Prediction certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Companies pushing AI code volume metrics will drown in unmaintainable slop

Quentin Anthony · How Zyphra went all-in on AMD + Why Devs feel faster with AI but are slower — with Quentin Anthony · Nov 3, 2025 · at 47:30

Quentin Anthony discusses the organizational risks of evaluating engineering productivity by raw volume of AI-assisted code output.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.0s
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“I think actually there's a lot of big tech examples where they're kind of pushing really hard for their teams to use more code. They're being evaluated on how much code they're using. And they're just kind of getting more and more slop that nobody understands. I think a lot of organizations will find themselves in this sort of case, unless they push better practices on their teams.”

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