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getnormalitytoday at 12:42 PM2 repliesview on HN

This weird trend reached an apex in a Feb 2026 OpenAI blog post [1], recently on the front page [2], which describes the process for building... something... written 100% by agents.

There is no description of what the thing is, no indication of what value it provides its users. The closest it gets is "the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users".

But the fact that the thing has a million lines of code is repeated twice in the first few hundred words.

[1] https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416264


Replies

DrewADesigntoday at 1:59 PM

> "the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users".

My guess is it’s an email filter.

> million lines of code

> written 100% by agents

Yeah, probably an email filter. Or maybe a JS menu for a departmental wiki that basically recreates jquery using MS JScript and transpiles it into JS 5.

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JCTheDenthogtoday at 1:59 PM

The entire Linux kernel is about 40 million LoC, and only something like 16 million LoC after you remove drivers. I have a hard time imagining whatever OpenAI was talking about there having anywhere close to 6% as much utility as the Linux kernel, despite having 6% as many lines of code. And I have a hard time imagining it's anywhere close to maintainable, regardless of how powerful their LLMs might be.

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