[JCTheDenthog]

The entire Linux kernel is about 40 million LoC, and only something like 16 million LoC after you remove drivers. I have a hard time imagining whatever OpenAI was talking about there having anywhere close to 6% as much utility as the Linux kernel, despite having 6% as many lines of code. And I have a hard time imagining it's anywhere close to maintainable, regardless of how powerful their LLMs might be.

[esperent]

To be fair, few things of any number of LOC have as much utility as the Linux kernel, and it's also a particularly dense example of code. There's plenty of other examples that have higher LOC / utility ratio without being vibe coded. For example, Google's monorepo famously has 2 billion LOC, which is a statistic I've heard long before LLM coding took over.

[jeffbee]

Clarification: Google claimed to have 2 billion lines of code in their repo ten years ago, and a commit rate of 50,000 changelists per day, both on exponential growth trends.

[zaphar]

That's a monorepo with hundreds if not thousands of different applications. It's not even close to an apples to apples comparison.

[jeffbee]

That's certainly a way to look at it. And that repo contains a "third party" directory which itself contains Linux, LLVM, and much of the rest of the open source world. But I would suggest that the largest of those thousands of applications probably has a transitive closure of hundreds of millions of lines of code.

[zaphar]

I'm aware. I worked on that specific project (assuming we are talking about the same one) back in the day. :-)

There are certainly very large applications in that repo in the hundreds of millions of lines of code. But comparing the entire repo to single applications is not an apt comparison.

[esperent]

Ok, then we can still compare one of those very large applications that have hundreds of millions of lines.

[strulovich]

The Linux kernel is not in any way at top of big projects. A kernel, as the name suggests, deals with specific issues and tries to remain small.

The world’s biggest software is usually built over endless adapters of different data and a need to reconcile endless edge cases with laws, regulations and real world complexities.

[m463]

When I was young, I remember a (joke) program from a book or magazine, called something like report writer or something. It was written in basic and you typed it in.

You would run it and it would say:

how many pages? _

You would type in a number, and it would generate that many pages of a complex-sounding report.

something like "the subsystem design interface is ..." blah blah

similar?

[dist-epoch]

Chrome has 50 mil LoC

https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summa...

[skydhash]

Chrome is basically reinventing each OS API and libraries. One day they’ll have their own tcp stack and packet filter.

[getnormality]

It kinda makes sense given that one of their major products is a computer that runs an operating system literally called ChromeOS.

[robotresearcher]

Chrome still has a way to go until Zawinski's Law is satisfied natively.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

[jeffbee]

Arguably with QUIC it already does.