7 ms·

Man, so many people in this thread just arguing pointless semantics, making weirdo absolutist (and incorrect) statements. Accept that other people may ascribe

by sbarre 1mo ago

Man, so many people in this thread just arguing pointless semantics, making weirdo absolutist (and incorrect) statements. Accept that other people may ascribe different meanings/interpretations to words than you, and that if your reading of their statement doesn't make sense to you, perhaps you are simply reading it wrong. Trying to hold someone else to your definition of words suits what purpose exactly? Are you just trying to "win" ?

loose-cannon 1mo ago
I agree with your larger point. Though I think it's pretty natural to wonder how the poster ended up with a multi million line codebase.
- sbarre 1mo ago
  2M lines of code is 15 people committing ~26k lines of code per year (~100 lines per working day) for 5 years. 15 people is a pretty small startup, what if this is a 50-person startup? Doesn't seem like that much to me, depending on what you're building and the size of your team.
  - sarchertech 1mo ago
    I’ve worked at many startups and consulted at many more over the last 20 years. I’ve never seen 2 million lines of code happen that fast at a small startup. 15 devs putting out 400k LOC a year into the same codebase is not normal at all. I’ve never seen anything close to that kind of rate of growth across that number of people. And 50 engineers is not even remotely close to a small startup. I have worked at a startup that had 50 engineers after a few years, but it was a multi billion dollar unicorn.
extr 1mo ago
Yes lol. Of all things people are getting on me for it's the number of LoC x Years In Business of this startup. I don't fucking know, I didn't start the company and I wasn't here for several of those industrious years. Looking now it looks like we have slightly fewer LoC than that, I was counting some of the generated stuff. But who cares? The point is any codebase over a few years old with lots of customers and a big surface area has lots of code, much of it "legacy" from the standpoint of a guy in 2026.
- dev-slash-zero 1mo ago
  Sounds like you simply don't know what you're talking about.
- rustystump 1mo ago
  You are wrong and they are wrong but that is ok.
rustystump 1mo ago
This is an ultra cop out. There are standards in language that are not all “left means right for me so you cannot assume when i say right it is right and not left” This whole thread around loc is depressing. It speaks volumes of some peoples inexperience working on actual legacy code. Legacy code is not just age or size but that the technical foundation is dated in a fundamental way. A giant monolith running on a now defunk framework using a database only one guy in canada knows about. Case and point in my day job. The org that owns XMM development does not know how to recover a physical bench that is bricked because everyone who knew how has left. So now they just use simulators… Interestingly, AI figured out some of this pretty easily for me. But the org has the exact same AI as i do. At the same time another org is close to a year into a greenfield rewrite that has been developed via agentic swarms. Absolute trainwreck. AI doesnt make bad engineers good. Anyone who says they are doing 4 eng work likely would be without ai too. Those that claim otherwise, are the bad engineers.
- sbarre 1mo ago
  > There are standards in language that are not all “left means right for me so you cannot assume when i say right it is right and not left” Yes of course there are words that have very clear meaning, and that's not the case here. "startup" and "legacy" - used in the context of this discussion - are not words like "left" and "right" where everyone has a universal agreed-upon understanding of their meaning.

by sbarre 1mo ago

loose-cannon 1mo ago

I agree with your larger point. Though I think it's pretty natural to wonder how the poster ended up with a multi million line codebase.

sbarre 1mo ago
2M lines of code is 15 people committing ~26k lines of code per year (~100 lines per working day) for 5 years. 15 people is a pretty small startup, what if this is a 50-person startup? Doesn't seem like that much to me, depending on what you're building and the size of your team.
- sarchertech 1mo ago
  I’ve worked at many startups and consulted at many more over the last 20 years. I’ve never seen 2 million lines of code happen that fast at a small startup. 15 devs putting out 400k LOC a year into the same codebase is not normal at all. I’ve never seen anything close to that kind of rate of growth across that number of people. And 50 engineers is not even remotely close to a small startup. I have worked at a startup that had 50 engineers after a few years, but it was a multi billion dollar unicorn.

extr 1mo ago

Yes lol. Of all things people are getting on me for it's the number of LoC x Years In Business of this startup. I don't fucking know, I didn't start the company and I wasn't here for several of those industrious years. Looking now it looks like we have slightly fewer LoC than that, I was counting some of the generated stuff. But who cares? The point is any codebase over a few years old with lots of customers and a big surface area has lots of code, much of it "legacy" from the standpoint of a guy in 2026.

dev-slash-zero 1mo ago
Sounds like you simply don't know what you're talking about.
rustystump 1mo ago
You are wrong and they are wrong but that is ok.

rustystump 1mo ago

This is an ultra cop out. There are standards in language that are not all “left means right for me so you cannot assume when i say right it is right and not left” This whole thread around loc is depressing. It speaks volumes of some peoples inexperience working on actual legacy code. Legacy code is not just age or size but that the technical foundation is dated in a fundamental way. A giant monolith running on a now defunk framework using a database only one guy in canada knows about. Case and point in my day job. The org that owns XMM development does not know how to recover a physical bench that is bricked because everyone who knew how has left. So now they just use simulators… Interestingly, AI figured out some of this pretty easily for me. But the org has the exact same AI as i do. At the same time another org is close to a year into a greenfield rewrite that has been developed via agentic swarms. Absolute trainwreck. AI doesnt make bad engineers good. Anyone who says they are doing 4 eng work likely would be without ai too. Those that claim otherwise, are the bad engineers.

sbarre 1mo ago
> There are standards in language that are not all “left means right for me so you cannot assume when i say right it is right and not left” Yes of course there are words that have very clear meaning, and that's not the case here. "startup" and "legacy" - used in the context of this discussion - are not words like "left" and "right" where everyone has a universal agreed-upon understanding of their meaning.