You say that, but I asked Codex to build a Asteroids (but FPS) as a web app, and it wrote it in under 4K LOC, and a Tempest implementation in 6.5K LOC. Those seem like really reasonable line counts to me.

I also built a caching proxy server for apt packages, that's a bigger project, and that is 30.5K lines of golang, which doesn't seem bad compared to apt-cacher-ng which is 19.3K of C++ (my project does significantly more).

Yeah came here to say the same thing. The Hard Problem of software engineering isn't making a complex monstrosity with millions of lines of code and endless feature creep, but not doing that. This was as true 20 years as it is today.

The benchmark does not reward producing more code.