[pianopatrick]

I can believe that the difference between the slowest programmer in the world and the fastest AI aided programmer in the world is now 100x in terms of lines of code output. Like I can imagine a programmer writing 250 lines of code per week by hand and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

[nunez]

But we spent decades as an industry trying to dispel of the notion that SLOC/KLOC does not matter.

I still believe that. 250 lines of tight code that solves a specific problem in a way that others can maintain will always be better than 25k lines of code that's difficult to review and consume (and, therefore, becoming a liability).

[torben-friis]

>and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

A year of that is 1.3M code: the size of systemd, or postgres.

Can you imagine a single person writing systemd (not a POC, the current version feature complete and battle tested) from scratch in a year? If so can you point me to any such project?

[pianopatrick]

Well, as a thought experiment, I'd say that depends on if the measure is "1.3M lines of production code" or "1.3M lines of code (test code, comments and production code combined)".

I don't think you could get to 1.3M lines of production code, but people say AI agents are good at writing tests. I could imagine that if you had an unlimited budget you could set up agents to generate lots and lots of tests and comments, inflating your weekly total. Like, maybe you can set up an agent to loop against a code coverage tool trying to generate more and more tests to hit MC / DC levels of testing.

In the extreme / absurd case, if you could hit the SQLite ratio of 590x lines of test code vs real code then 25,000 lines of code per week could be 43 lines of production code and 24,958 lines of test code.

You'd be a "100x programmer" in terms of lines of code output, but that would not get you to SystemD levels of production code in a year.

I can't point you to a project taking that route, and I don't have the budget to try it, but I can imagine someone hitting 25k lines of code per week with lots of tests and comments padding the numbers.

I am not sure software written that way would be any good though.

[sph]

I have seen people with that kind of AI assisted productivity-by-volume, building eldritch abominations like Gas Town.