Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it? All jokes aside this is exactly what happens as you build larger monoliths, system complexity and bug surface increases logarithmically… so in all seriousness you want to reduce LOC as much as possible. Maybe this can teach OpenAI a lesson to produce software that’s correct and adhere to established engineering standards over sensationalised “we built so much code” promotional material.

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torben-friis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Did you mean exponentially? Logarithmic increase doesn't sound too bad.

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dahart 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

I’m sure exponential is what parent meant, but geometric is what actually happens, not exponential. Code complexity increases linearly when it doesn’t interact with other features, and geometrically when it does. In the worst case, complexity increases as the square of lines of code. That is still very, very bad, but it’s not exponential.

	▲	ebertucc 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What's the difference? From what I'm reading online geometric is just the discrete version of exponential

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rglover 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like LOEC: Lines of Effective Code.

Much easier to reason and make decisions if the bar is "yeah it exists, but is it effective relative to its intended purpose?" This weeds out buggy code as well as under performant code. If it's not effective (broken, too slow, etc), it either needs a refactor or thrown on the scrap pile.

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Pannoniae 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's not like microservices fare better, when you introduce them, you've traded a hard problem for a hard problem and distributed computing...

	▲	wg0 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Our industry has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on this shit show called Microservices. 99.9% of shops need a monolith with same monolith having entry points for background workers and crons.

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elendilm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Reducing attack surface is a lesson for everyone. Newcomers are impressed by massive piles of code.

Seasoned developers are unimpressed, or even disgusted, by the same massive piles of code.

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someothherguyy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i don't think LoC is the metric. sometimes fewer lines of code results in a larger attack surface through type coercion / widening, poor abstractions, hiding or stuffing behavior (modules that do everything), etc. to me, making code easy to understand, test, fuzz, and verify is more important. sometimes that requires more lines of code.

	▲	brazukadev 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		LoC IS the metric. It is obviously not perfect tho but still the best one to compare software surface. Including to compare the same solution in different languages and platforms. The less code you need to manage, the less code you need to change and the less code you need to hold in your head to understand it (or in the LLM context nowadays).

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latexr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html