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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> 15k LOC codebase

I wish articles about AI assistance would caveat this at the start. 15k LOC is a weekend hackathon project, which is all well and good, but not reflective of the work that 99% of developers are doing in their day jobs.

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I, too, habitually write 7500 lines of code per day.

For a brand new project that you're trying to get done in a weekend--aka a weekend hackathon project--it's very doable. Would not recommend committing 7500 lines of code per day at your day job though.

If you work 8 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday and each line has on average 40 characters, then on average you have to type about 5 characters a second to hit 7000 lines of code.

There's some heavy assumptions about boilerplate or autogenerated code going on in that estimate, as I don't think very many average 5 characters a second over 16 hours.

40 seems way too much. “}” alone probably makes up a significant portion of lines. Another thing is auto-complete that does the majority of typing anyway.

In English, the average word length is 5 characters. If you can type 60 WPM that means you're typing on average at least 300 characters per minute or at least 5 characters per second (at least because this is not counting the needed whitespace and punctuation). That makes it technically possible for a moderately capable typist to pull off 7000 lines in a day using your numbers. Pair that with IDEs and autocomplete and it becomes much more feasible, if you have a solid understanding of the objective for your code.

The two assumptions that aren't quite right are the number of characters per line and the number of hours per day. For most work it's hard to spend more than four to six good hours per day just doing actual work; but when kicking tires on a hobby project, it is easily possible to stay engaged for an unhealthy amount of hours in a row.

I write 1000 lines of code per second, bud. It's called ctrl+c and ctrl+v. In all seriousness, with autocompletion, snippets, and AI, I don't think you can measure this accurately in the way you're doing it.

Haha, I appreciate the math, fair enough. We can change the caveat to "it's a project you worked on every weekend for a few months" if that helps. The point still stands that 15k LOC doesn't represent the type of codebases worked on by companies that employ multiple full-time software developers, much less long-lived enterprise codebases (which is Fowler's famed area of expertise, ironically).

"all work and no play makes jack a dull boy" x5 = 30 secs. x7500 = 12.5 hours.

honestly, i don't see it. don't you stop to pee?

I'm sorry but unless you count framework bootstraps for models and configs and stuff like that as "coding" nobody is legitimately writing 7500 lines in a day. At my most productive, powering through real problems, debugging issues and making stuff solid, I've hit ~3500 with marathon code sessions and ChatGPT. I've seen industry leaders and competitive coders in action, and none of them were significantly faster - any speed difference is more due to taking fewer incorrect solution paths.

Everyone is missing the point. Fine, maybe the math is off and it took 3 days instead of 2.

The issue is that Cursor tends to be demoed for incredibly small, green, and simple projects.

Most of us are working on codebases with at least over 10 million lines. I would love an AI agent that can massive infrastructure migrations with only a bit of oversight. Didn’t Shopify do something like that recently?

I think this is still an area that needs a lot of work.

I've been personally surprised that this doesn't come up more often. Most mature codebases span a decade or more, and especially in the web, there's so many layers of evolving technologies that were introduced during this time, resulting in complex geological layers forming in the codebase as the patterns evolved. That is not only a lot of lines of code, but a lot of nuance as well. Even a basic problem like routing can make these AIs fall flat on their face because of the sheer context and complexities involved

Post your github

The message you're replying to is sarcasm.

what are you guys writing? is this like unit tests/generated files or something? or some non-reusable constant definitions(CSS/JSON/YAML)?

Yeah especially in the context of multiple contributors, 15k is so small it's almost hard to do collaborative coding (apart from pair programming).

15k LOC is an entire enterprise SaaS product in the ecosystems I frequent.

Maybe 2-3 week project would be better to say. But yeah it’s quite small.

The industry average seems to be around 100 LOC per day per developer. So if you have a team of 10 that’s only 15 days of work. Once you’re involved in some existing legacy code base it’s likely in the millions.

you seem to be projecting your own experience rather than giving an accurate representation of developer productivity - 15k is not the norm at all or even close to it.

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