alt Hacker News> We had weeks to ship what ended up being a million lines of code... Five months later, the repository contains on the order of a million lines of code across application logic, infrastructure, tooling, documentation, and internal developer utilities. Over that period, roughly 1,500 pull requests have been opened and merged with a small team of just three engineers driving Codex. This translates to an average throughput of 3.5 PRs per engineer per day, and surprisingly the throughput has increased as the team has grown to now seven engineers. Importantly, this wasn’t output for output’s sake: the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users.
That's an insane level of throughput. What's a good baseline? Prior to agentic coding, whats the typical number of PRs engineers were expected to push? Maybe a 2-10?
Do people feel the software has gotten better in the last 6 months? The number of engs is prob the same so we should expect maybe 5x faster cycle in major software apps, but I don't see it. The AI apps do change very fast but given its a very new field, I'd expect as much. But outside of that, I don't see it.
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They never specified what exactly the product was, without which it's impossible to judge the post.
For some reason most of the uses of "agents" are to build yet other AI products, it's turtles all the way down. Maybe that says more about the field of harnesses than it does about the power of "agents".
I’ve been vibe coding a lot over the past year or so, and I think I’m going to stop. In fact, I sort of want to challenge myself to see, can I go back to a sort of the fork in the road with the old copilot autocomplete workflow and really maximize that. Be in the drivers seat for most of the code being written, but find ways to use AI to really enhance the flow state / remove blockers. Tools only minimal actual code generation.
> ended up being a million lines of code
This almost reeks of "I've never cleaned up our code base because there is too much code, and didn't even bother having agents/LLM cleaning them up".
You almost never need a million lines of code - this includes your software, infra, testing and operational tools. You didn't ship the linux kernel in 3 weeks and you know it. The code is already speghetti and it achieve the basic functions OK but it will harder and harder to simplify and untangle and maintain.
> should expect maybe 5x faster cycle in major software apps
To what end and what would that even look like though? Enshittifying everything at maximum speed? The apps/platforms I use regularly - GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times.
This is a lot tamer than what Claude Code's team claims tbf.
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It is likely better because AI agents make access to domain knowledge easier. However, I would wager that the problem is people don’t remember the code well. The problems are going to be long-term as the pace of change increases.
If you think about it, successful products rely on designing well-thought-out experiences, customer discovery (see all the Forward-Deployed Enginneer job listings at OpenAI) so the code velocity somewhat becomes irrelevant.
If you’re solving the right problem and you’ve got a good team then competitive advantage comes from somewhere OUTSIDE of code velocity.
The more important question I think is does faster code yield more value long-term? At the moment, it’s like yeah we do 3.5 pull requests per day.
I’m thinking, great, good for you. You could also combine three pull requests into one and then you’re doing 1 per day. This is quantitative data that doesn’t really mean anything tangible.
Here's a fun one: firefox lists its current count at about 2.5M LOC, from roughly 1M commits during the years.
You end up with about 3 lines added per commit, which is not ridiculous when you consider that most would be editions rather than full additions.
Here, we have 1500 PRs and 1M LOC, which is about 650 added LOC per PR. Remember, not 650 lines total in the PR, but +650 balance after additions-removals.
Fun questions for attentive readers:
- What does a project growing at a rate of one full firefox-codebase worth of LOC per year look like, a decade down the line?
- What does the line count say about the verbosity of the tool, and what does it say about outcomes that the purpose of the project isn't clearly disclosed?
- Do we have reasons to care about LOC in a world where we don't write code manually? What happens to token usage numbers when the codebase is significantly larger?
- If it was confirmed that LLM usage blows up your line count, what's the implication for codebases that want to return to manual coding after months of usage? (Say, because the tool gets expensive).