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.
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.
Of course then someone is just going to pregenerate a random number lookup table and get a few gigs of 'value' from pure garbage...
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.
Most models of productivity look like factories with inputs, outputs, and processes. This is just not how engineering or craftsmanship happen.
(I think it is from "Triumph of the Nerds" (1996), but I can't find the time code)
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.
Totally agree. I see LOC as a liability metric. It amazes me that so many other people see it as an asset metric.
"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.
One of the many reasons why it's such a bad practice (overly verbose solutions id another one of course)
Claude doesn't require paying payroll tax, health insurance, unemployment, or take family leave.
That’s 200 Windows’ worth of code every month.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
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.
Generating bilions of lines of code that is unmaintainable and buggy should easily achieve that. ;-)
> 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 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.
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).
Why would you continue supposing such a thing when both the employee, and the employer, have said that your suppositions are wrong?
As @mrbungie says on this thread: "They took the stupidest metric ever and made a moronic target out of it"
The fact that there are distinguished engineers at MS who think that is a reasonable goal is frightening though.
Any MBAs want to buy? For the right price I could even fix it ...
they're fucked
So with this level of productivity Windows could completely degrade itself and collapse in one week instead of 15 years.
Take some arbitrary scaler and turn it into a mediocre metric, for some moronic target.
This will lead to so much enshitification.