Comment by simonw

Comment by simonw 5 days ago

I have a fun little tool which runs the year-2000-era sloccount algorithm (which is Perl and C so I run it in WebAssembly) to estimate the time and cost of a project here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount

If you paste https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser into the "GitHub Repository" tab it estimates 4.58 person-years and $618,599 by year-2000 standards, or 5.61 years and $1,381,079 according to my very non-trustworthy 2025 estimate upgrade.

pizlonator 5 days ago

I pasted a subset of the Fil-C source code into your tool and it says 6 person years. I just pasted the compiler pass and the obvious parts of the runtime.

Note that I started the project in Nov 2023 and can only work on it maybe 1-2 hours a day because it's just a side project.

So I think your tool either estimates based on very bad programmers, or it's just wrong. Or maybe 10x programmers are real and I am him

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lifthrasiir 5 days ago

These metrics necessarily have to underestimate programmer skills because those are not directly controllable. If there is any sort of rigor in these metrics (i.e. I don't know if COCOMO is one of them) they will probably assume, say, a mundane programmer whose performance is worse than 90/95/99% of all other programmers.

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simonw 5 days ago

Here's more about the COCOMO model it uses: https://dwheeler.com/sloccount/sloccount.html#cocomo

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- pizlonator 5 days ago
  
  Sounds like nonsensical pseudoscience
  
  Reply View | 2 replies
  
  simonw 4 days ago
  
  I don't take those results very seriously myself, but have you seen anything better?
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  pizlonator 4 days ago
  
  No
  To me this is a case where knowing that you don't have data is better than having data and pretending it means anything
  
  Reply View | 0 replies