And if you're saying (based on your other comments) that a 6 month window is enough to create a legacy codebase...that indicates a serious lack of experience or understanding as to what a legacy codebase is, or why they exist.
Accept that other people may ascribe different meanings/interpretations to words than you, and that if your reading of their statement doesn't make sense to you, perhaps you are simply reading it wrong.
Trying to hold someone else to your definition of words suits what purpose exactly? Are you just trying to "win" ?
15 people is a pretty small startup, what if this is a 50-person startup?
Doesn't seem like that much to me, depending on what you're building and the size of your team.
15 devs putting out 400k LOC a year into the same codebase is not normal at all. I’ve never seen anything close to that kind of rate of growth across that number of people.
And 50 engineers is not even remotely close to a small startup. I have worked at a startup that had 50 engineers after a few years, but it was a multi billion dollar unicorn.
But who cares? The point is any codebase over a few years old with lots of customers and a big surface area has lots of code, much of it "legacy" from the standpoint of a guy in 2026.
This whole thread around loc is depressing. It speaks volumes of some peoples inexperience working on actual legacy code. Legacy code is not just age or size but that the technical foundation is dated in a fundamental way. A giant monolith running on a now defunk framework using a database only one guy in canada knows about.
Case and point in my day job. The org that owns XMM development does not know how to recover a physical bench that is bricked because everyone who knew how has left. So now they just use simulators…
Interestingly, AI figured out some of this pretty easily for me. But the org has the exact same AI as i do. At the same time another org is close to a year into a greenfield rewrite that has been developed via agentic swarms. Absolute trainwreck.
AI doesnt make bad engineers good. Anyone who says they are doing 4 eng work likely would be without ai too. Those that claim otherwise, are the bad engineers.
Yes of course there are words that have very clear meaning, and that's not the case here.
"startup" and "legacy" - used in the context of this discussion - are not words like "left" and "right" where everyone has a universal agreed-upon understanding of their meaning.