I’m sure exponential is what parent meant, but geometric (edit: polynomial) 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.

What's the difference? From what I'm reading online geometric is just the discrete version of exponential

“Square of the lines of code”

Sounds exponential