Yes lol. Of all things people are getting on me for it's the number of LoC x Years In Business of this startup. I don't fucking know, I didn't start the company and I wasn't here for several of those industrious years. Looking now it looks like we have slightly fewer LoC than that, I was counting some of the generated stuff.

But who cares? The point is any codebase over a few years old with lots of customers and a big surface area has lots of code, much of it "legacy" from the standpoint of a guy in 2026.

This is an ultra cop out. There are standards in language that are not all “left means right for me so you cannot assume when i say right it is right and not left”

This whole thread around loc is depressing. It speaks volumes of some peoples inexperience working on actual legacy code. Legacy code is not just age or size but that the technical foundation is dated in a fundamental way. A giant monolith running on a now defunk framework using a database only one guy in canada knows about.

Case and point in my day job. The org that owns XMM development does not know how to recover a physical bench that is bricked because everyone who knew how has left. So now they just use simulators…

Interestingly, AI figured out some of this pretty easily for me. But the org has the exact same AI as i do. At the same time another org is close to a year into a greenfield rewrite that has been developed via agentic swarms. Absolute trainwreck.

AI doesnt make bad engineers good. Anyone who says they are doing 4 eng work likely would be without ai too. Those that claim otherwise, are the bad engineers.

I agree with your larger point. Though I think it's pretty natural to wonder how the poster ended up with a multi million line codebase.