Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheCoreh | Hacker News Reader

It's not impossible, or even that hard to review the entire rewritten codebase.

10 engineers each reviewing 5,000 LoC a day for 20 days can do it.

And that is being highly conservative with the estimate. A good chunk of the the code is probably highly trivial boilerplate one can easily skim over in minutes.

View on HN

And five engineers reviewing 20 thousand LoCs would get the job done in ten days, but both numbers are just as BS when it comes to actually understanding the codebase. No one is comprehensively reading 5k lines per day for a month straight.

Seriously, “just review 5k lines a day for a month” is the most out of touch manager suggestion I’ve seen in a hot minute. As though you only need to read each line one single time in a review before magically committing its exact purpose, content, and overall implications to memory. The absurdity of which is multiplied for AI generated code which, based on what I see from my coworkers, is clunkier and weirder and less focused even than regular human code, on average.

This is not a regular code review of new code. The original code still exists, and is sitting side by side, just in a different language.

You'd be just looking at both files, side by side, to make sure nothing was lost in translation or newly introduced.

20 days is rookie numbers. I can get a million engineers to each review a single line and finish code reviewing the entire code base in a minute.

the code base was rewritten file by file, so parallelizing individual files makes sense, but lines is just BS

5k LoC review every day is absolutely absurd, nobody who has actually worked as a software engineer would suggest that is reasonable

Reply on news.ycombinator.com