Comment by e1g

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.