alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft have a goal that states they want to get to "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code." You can't do that if you write the code yourself. That means they'll always be chasing the best model. Right now, that's Opus 4.5.
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It is kind of funny that throughout my career, there has always been pretty much a consensus that lines of code are a bad metric, but now with all the AI hype, suddenly everybody is again like “Look at all the lines of code it writes!!”
I use LLMs all day every day, but measuring someone or something by the number of lines of code produced is still incredibly stupid, in my opinion.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/welc...
"Microsoft has over 100,000 software engineers working on software projects of all sizes."
So that would mean 100 000 000 000 (100 billion) lines of code per month. Frightening.
I used to work at a place that had the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote painted near the elevators where everyone would see it when they arrived for work:
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
That is what the AI said:
1. Classic Coding (Traditional Development) In the classic model, developers are the primary authors of every line.
Production Volume: A senior developer typically writes between 10,000 and 20,000 lines of code (LOC) per year.
Workflow: Manual logic construction, syntax memorization, and human-led debugging using tools like VS Code or JetBrains IDEs.
Focus: Writing the implementation details. Success is measured by the quality and maintainability of the hand-written code.
Production Volume: Developers using full AI integration have seen a 14x increase in code output (e.g., from ~24k lines to over 810k lines in a single year).
Work Distribution: Major tech leaders like AWS report that AI now generates up to 75% of their production code.
The New Bottleneck: Developers now spend roughly 70% of their time reviewing AI-generated code rather than writing it.
Cf. -2000 Lines Of Code:
Wow such bad practice, using lines of code as a performance metric has been shown to be really bad practice decades ago. For a software company to do this now...
Cool - I was thinking it would be good for them to implode as a company due all the extra harmfull stuff they are doing with Windows recently.
Generating bilions of lines of code that is unmaintainable and buggy should easily achieve that. ;-)
Looks like the guy who posted that updated his post to say he was just talking about a research project he is working on.
No-one can read tens of thousands of lines of code every day, so the code would only be superficially reviewed; spot checked.
Do you have a source for that?
Is 1 million bugs stated implicitly or explicitly?
I've not heard that goal before. If true, it makes me sad to hear that once again, people confuse "More LOC == More Customer Value == More Profit". Sigh.
> “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases.
they're fucked
This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard from microslop this morning. It’s like they are forgetting to be a real software company.
Microsoft went from somewhat good in Windows 7 to absolute dog shit in approximately 10 years.
So with this level of productivity Windows could completely degrade itself and collapse in one week instead of 15 years.
They took the stupidest metric ever and made a moronic target out of it.
We’re back to measuring productivity by lines of code are we? Because that always goes well.
Yay another stupid metric to game!
This will lead to so much enshitification.
> "Microsoft have a goal that states they want to get to "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.""
No, one researcher at Microsoft made a personal LinkedIn post that his team were using that as their 'North Star' for porting and transpiling existing C and C++ code, not writing new code, and when the internet hallucinated that he meant Windows and this meant new code, and started copypasting this as "Microsoft's goal", the post was edited and Microsoft said it isn't the company's goal.