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You start a project knowing how many LOC it will take?

I want to assume you’re being sarcastic but it really doesn’t sound like it

not knowing exactly, but with an estimate of the software size. sure. how else do you reliably estimate the projects cost and schedule. "engineering" not "programming"

Difficulty of the problem you’re trying to solve.

Just like it could take 5 hours to come up with 5 lines of code, it could also take 5 minutes to produce another 5 lines. All depends on how complicated the task is.

yep. and when you need to write 300K SLOC, the average takes care of the outliers.

Interesting. I can estimate time by gauging complexity but LOC (for me) is usually not exactly correlated to time or complexity

It's responding to the analogy.

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