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Comment by throwaway150 | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to trivialize the OP's experience. This is definitely a very important matter and serious issue in the industry. So forgive me for raising a much smaller, side point.

> I've contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade

I have never tracked my own output, but I would be surprised if I have written even a single million lines of code, let alone several.

Out of curiosity, is this common? Have people here actually written millions of lines of code themselves? Even assuming two million lines over thirty years, that still averages to around 180 lines per day, every day. It is doable but it is a very high level of sustained output.

I am not doubting the OP. Just noting that this represents an extraordinary amount of coding by any measure.

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I've been coding for 20 years and I don't think come close personally.

Some napkin math: 100-200 python scripts (maybe 250 lines on average)

Work within 10 or so large repositories. (Probably no more than 5000 lines in any repo) (maybe 750 lines on average)

20 or so hobby project games largest being around 30,000 lines (maybe average around 6000?)

15 websites with back-ends (maybe average around 2000 lines)

50 or so school projects (maybe 100 lines on average?)

Two work projects one a games website around 15,000 and the other a .Net application around 20,000

Looks like around 235,000

Side projects on my laptop in one language I use is currently about 200k lines (as measured by "wc -l" so includes blank lines and such). This covers about a decade and a half. This doesn't count all the lines added/changed/removed in the history, a few other languages I use, or anything for work.

Including all those other excluded things, I could see a million per decade across all languages and personal/work projects pretty easily for myself.

Also I find it interesting describing it carefully written. To me that most likely would indicate something that has been reviewed, rewritten and reconsidered multiple times. Thus bringing down the total number of lines. As there would be significant time spend on same lines.

Or would anyone disagree that carefully written code takes more time and in the end probably results lot less lines produced in total?

Might be true, might not be true. Don't make the mistake of comparing lines of code with quality and usefulness of programs. I'm not saying you do, but don't even entertain that thought. ;)

I have worked in the industry for a little over 20 years, i wouldn't be surprised if I have written between one to two million loc.

I would be surprised if it's significantly above that.

It's almost like the kind of extra filler that an LLM adds because it doesn't understand the meaning behind the words...

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