Comment by onion2k 14 hours ago
Microsoft have a goal that states they want to get to "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code." You can't do that if you write the code yourself. That means they'll always be chasing the best model. Right now, that's Opus 4.5.
That's still writing new code. Also, its kind of an extremely bad idea to do that because how are you going to test it? If you have to rewrite anything (hint: you probably don't) its best to do it incrementally over time because of the QA and stakeholder alignment overhead. You cannot push things into production unless it works as its users are expecting and it does exactly what stakeholders expect as well.
No no, your talking common sense and logic. You can't think like that. You have to think "How do I rush out as much code as possible?" After all, this is MS we're talking about, and Windows 11 is totally the shining example of amazing and completely stable code. /s
Porting legacy code is definitely one of its strengths. It can even... do wilder things if you're creative enough.
It is kind of funny that throughout my career, there has always been pretty much a consensus that lines of code are a bad metric, but now with all the AI hype, suddenly everybody is again like “Look at all the lines of code it writes!!”
I use LLMs all day every day, but measuring someone or something by the number of lines of code produced is still incredibly stupid, in my opinion.
Microsoft never got that memo. They still measure LoC because it’s all MBAs.
Fuck is there a way to have that degree and not be clueless and toxic to your colleagues and users.
It all comes from "if you can't measure it you can't improve it". The job of management is to improve things, and that means they need to measure it and in turn look for measures. When working on an assembly line there are lots of things to measure and improve, and improving many of those things have shown great value.
They want to expand that value into engineering and so are looking for something they can measure. I haven't seen anyone answer what can be measured to make a useful improvement though. I have a good "feeling" that some people I work with are better than others, but most are not so bad that we should fire them - but I don't know how to put that into something objective.
They seem better at working in finance and managing money.
Most models of productivity look like factories with inputs, outputs, and processes. This is just not how engineering or craftsmanship happen.
It's because the purpose of engineering is to engineer a solution. Their purpose is to create profit, engineering gets in the way.
If so, it hasn't always been that way. Steve Ballmer on IBM and KLoC's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0
(I think it is from "Triumph of the Nerds" (1996), but I can't find the time code)
Ballmer hasn’t been around for a long long time. Not since the Red Ring of Death days. Ever since Satya took the reins, MBAs have filled upper and middle management to try to take over open source so that Sales guys had something to combat RedHat. Great for open source. Bad for Microsoft. However, Satya comes from the Cloud division so he knows how to Cloud and do it well. Azure is a hit with the enterprise. Then along comes AI…
Microsoft lost its way with Windows Phone, Zune, Xbox360 RRoD, and Kinect. They haven’t had relevance outside of Windows (Desktop) in the home for years. With the sole exception being Xbox.
They have pockets of excellence. Where great engineers are doing great work. But outside those little pockets, no one knows.
I believe the "look at all the lines of code" argument for LLMs is not a way to showcase intelligence, but more-so a way to showcase time saved. Under the guise that the output is the/a correct solution, it's a way to say "look at all the code I would have had to write, it saved so much time".
The line of code that saves the most time is the one you don't write.
It's all contextual. Sometimes, particularly when it comes to modern frontends, you have inescapable boilerplate and lines of code to write. Thats where it saves time. Another example is scaffolding out unit tests for series of services. There are many such cases where it just objectively saves time.
Reason went out of fashion like 50 years ago, and it was never really in vogue.
I wonder if we can use the compression ratio that an LLM-driven compressor could generate to figure out how much entropy is actually in the system and how much is just boilerplate.
Of course then someone is just going to pregenerate a random number lookup table and get a few gigs of 'value' from pure garbage...
> measuring someone or something by the number of lines of code produced is still incredibly stupid, in my opinion.
Totally agree. I see LOC as a liability metric. It amazes me that so many other people see it as an asset metric.
Ironically, AI may help get past that. In order to measure "value chunks" or some other metric where LoC is flexibly multiplied by some factor of feature accomplishment, quality, and/or architectural importance, an opinion of the section in question is needed, and an overseer AI could maybe do that.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/welc...
"Microsoft has over 100,000 software engineers working on software projects of all sizes."
So that would mean 100 000 000 000 (100 billion) lines of code per month. Frightening.
With those kinds of numbers you don’t need logic anymore, just a lookup table with all possible states of the system.
No, no. 100 trillion lines of code per day is great! The only thing better would be 200 trillion ;)
CEO: I want big numbers of things. Big numbers = success.
Thats still 10 billion lines of code per month if that insane metric were a real goal (it’s not).
That’s 200 Windows’ worth of code every month.
Maybe they can use 5 - 10 loc to move the classic window shell button so it's not on top of the widgets button
I used to work at a place that had the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote painted near the elevators where everyone would see it when they arrived for work:
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Cf. -2000 Lines Of Code:
Looks like the guy who posted that updated his post to say he was just talking about a research project he is working on.
Which is a bald-faced lie written in response to a PR disaster. The original claims were not ambiguous:
> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”.
Obviously, "every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" is not contained within a single research project, nor are "Microsoft's largest codebases".
The original claims were not ambigious, it's "My" goal not "Microsoft's goal".
The fact that it's a "PR disaster" for a researcher to have an ambitious project at one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, or to talk up their team on LinkedIn, is unbelievably ridiculous.
One supposes, when a highly senior employee publicly talks about project goals in recruitment material, that they are not fancifully daydreaming about something that can never happen but are in fact actually talking about the work they're doing that justifies their ~$1,000,000/yr compensation in the eyes of their employer.
Talking about rewriting Windows at a rate of 1 million lines of code per engineer per month with LLMs is absolutely going to garner negative publicity, no matter how much you spin it with words like "ambitious" (do you work in PR? it sounds like it's your calling).
The authentic quote “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code” as some kind of goal that makes sense, even just for porting/rewriting, is embarassing enough from an OS vendor.
As @mrbungie says on this thread: "They took the stupidest metric ever and made a moronic target out of it"
I mean 100% that was his goal. But that was one guy without the power to set company wide goals talking on LinkedIn.
The fact that there are distinguished engineers at MS who think that is a reasonable goal is frightening though.
I mean, if 1% out of 8 billion is "top" and that applies to Lines of Code, too, than ... more code contains more quality, ... by their logic, I guess ...
What if the % declines proportionally (or worse) to the growth in code.
it might, but not if you isolate/repurpose that % (over time), which is the promise
I've written a C recompiler in an attempt to build homomorphic encryption. It doesn't work (it's not correct) but it can translate 5 lines of working code in 100.000 lines of almost-working code.
Any MBAs want to buy? For the right price I could even fix it ...
> “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases.
they're fucked
Eliminate C/C++ in favor of what? Perhaps the plan is to use AI to write plain assembler? Why stop there, maybe let's do prompt in - machine-code out?
Yeah. It's using AI agents to rewrite C/C++ to Rust. https://x.com/gounares/status/2003543050698809544
Microsoft went from somewhat good in Windows 7 to absolute dog shit in approximately 10 years.
So with this level of productivity Windows could completely degrade itself and collapse in one week instead of 15 years.
We’re back to measuring productivity by lines of code are we? Because that always goes well.
Yay another stupid metric to game!
This will lead to so much enshitification.
That is what the AI said:
1. Classic Coding (Traditional Development) In the classic model, developers are the primary authors of every line.
Production Volume: A senior developer typically writes between 10,000 and 20,000 lines of code (LOC) per year.
Workflow: Manual logic construction, syntax memorization, and human-led debugging using tools like VS Code or JetBrains IDEs.
Focus: Writing the implementation details. Success is measured by the quality and maintainability of the hand-written code.
Production Volume: Developers using full AI integration have seen a 14x increase in code output (e.g., from ~24k lines to over 810k lines in a single year).
Work Distribution: Major tech leaders like AWS report that AI now generates up to 75% of their production code.
The New Bottleneck: Developers now spend roughly 70% of their time reviewing AI-generated code rather than writing it.
> "Microsoft have a goal that states they want to get to "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.""
No, one researcher at Microsoft made a personal LinkedIn post that his team were using that as their 'North Star' for porting and transpiling existing C and C++ code, not writing new code, and when the internet hallucinated that he meant Windows and this meant new code, and started copypasting this as "Microsoft's goal", the post was edited and Microsoft said it isn't the company's goal.