Comment by throwaway2037
2 days ago
> I’ve written millions of lines of revenue generating code
This is a wild claim.
Approx 250 working days in a year. 25 years coding. Just one million lines would be phenom output, at 160 lines per day forever. Now you are claiming multiple millions? Come on.
It's impossible as an IC on a team, or working where a concept of "tickets" exists. It's unavoidable as a solo founder, whether you're building enterprise systems or expanding your vision. Some details -
1. Before wife&kids, every weekend I would learn a library or a concept by recreating it from scratch. Re-implementing jQuery, fetch API via XHR, Promises, barebones React, a basic web router, express + common middlewares, etc. Usually, at least 1,000 lines of code every weekend. That's 1M+ over 25 years.
2. My last product is currently 400k LOCs, 95% built by me over three years. I didn't one-shot it, so assuming 2-3x ongoing refactors, that's more than 1M LOCs written.
3. In my current product repo, GitHub says for the last 6 months I'm +120k,-80k. I code less than I used to, but even at this rate, it's safely 100k-250k per year (times 20 years).
4. Even in open source, there are examples like esbuild, which is a side project from one person (cofounder and architect of Figma). esbuild is currently at ~150k LOCs, and GitHub says his contributions were +600k,-400k.
5. LOCs are not the same. 10k lines of algorithms can take a month, but 10K of React widgets is like a week of work (on a greenfield project where you know exactly what you're building). These days, when a frontend developer says their most extensive UI codebase was 100k LOCs in an interview, I assume they haven't built a big UI thing.
So yes, if the reference point is "how many sprint tickets is that", it seems impossible. If the reference point is "a creative outlet that aligns with startup-level rewards", I think my statement of "millions of lines" is conservative.
Granted, not all of it was revenue-generating - much was experimental, exploratory, or just for fun. My overarching point was that I build software products for (great) living, as opposed to a marketer who stumbled into Claude Code and now evangelizes it as some huge unlock.
100-200 lines per day, written, debugged, tested and deployed, is normal performance, isn't it? I think I could do it if worked for 8 hours.
No, it’s not. At all. At the overwhelming majority of companies I’ve worked for or heard of, even 400-500 lines fully shipped in a week, slightly less than your figure here, would be top quartile of output - but further, it isn’t necessarily the point. Writing lines of code is a pretty small part of the job at companies with more than about 5-6 engineers on staff, past that it’s a lot more design and architecture and LEGO-brick-fitting - or just politicking and policying. Heck, I know folks who wish they could ship 400 lines of code a month, but are held back by the bureaucracies of their companies.
Uh... Totaling +1000 at the end of a work week is an easy thing to do, especially if working on a new/evolving product.
Now extrapolate. That’s maybe 50k a year assuming some PTO.
10 years would make 500k and you just cross a million at 20.
So that would have to be 20 years straight of that style of working and you’re still not into plural millions until 40 years.
If someone actually produced multiple millions of lines in 25 years, it would have to be a side effect of some extremely verbose language where trivial changes take up many lines (maybe Java).
Maybe there's some copying and pasting involved. ;-)