Comment by onion2k

2 days 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.

84 comments

onion2k

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jodrellblank  2 days ago

> "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.

  • rkozik1989  2 days ago

    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.

    • ethin  2 days ago

      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

  • giancarlostoro  2 days ago

    Porting legacy code is definitely one of its strengths. It can even... do wilder things if you're creative enough.

smoe  2 days ago

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.

  • austinthetaco  2 days ago

    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".

  • randusername  2 days ago

    > 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.

  • snovv_crash  2 days ago

    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...

  • torginus  2 days ago

    Yeah. I honestly feel 1m LOC is enough to recreate a fully featured complete modern computing environment if one goes about it sensibly.

  • jayd16  2 days ago

    I think the charitable way to read the quote is that 1M LOC are to be converted, not written.

  • make3  2 days ago

    it's still a bad metric and OP is also just being loose by repeating some marketing / LinkedIn post by a person who uses bad metrics about an overhyped subject

  • martinflack  2 days ago

    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.

bondarchuk  2 days ago

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.

  • clickety_clack  2 days ago

    With those kinds of numbers you don’t need logic anymore, just a lookup table with all possible states of the system.

  • petcat  2 days ago

    I think the point is that they are fantasizing about cutting their engineering workforce by 90% while maintaining the same level of "productivity".

    Claude doesn't require paying payroll tax, health insurance, unemployment, or take family leave.

  • torginus  2 days ago

    So the recent surge in demand for storage is to because we have to store that code somewhere?

  • falloutx  2 days ago

    Surely 1 line of code = $1, so Microsoft can get $100b revenue per month. Genius plan.

  • FergusArgyll  2 days ago

    Maybe they can use 5 - 10 loc to move the classic window shell button so it's not on top of the widgets button

javawizard  2 days ago

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.

I miss those days.

  • bookofjoe  2 days ago

    Original French: "Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher".

m4rtink  2 days ago

Cool - I was thinking it would be good for them to implode as a company due all the extra harmfull stuff they are doing with Windows recently.

Generating bilions of lines of code that is unmaintainable and buggy should easily achieve that. ;-)

sarchertech  2 days ago

Looks like the guy who posted that updated his post to say he was just talking about a research project he is working on.

  • anonymous908213  2 days ago

    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".

    • jodrellblank  2 days ago

      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.

      3 replies →

    • coldtea  2 days ago

      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"

    • sarchertech  2 days ago

      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.

wolvoleo  2 days ago

Wow such bad practice, using lines of code as a performance metric has been shown to be really bad practice decades ago. For a software company to do this now...

esafak  2 days ago

No-one can read tens of thousands of lines of code every day, so the code would only be superficially reviewed; spot checked.

copilot_king_2  2 days ago

> “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

nrawe  2 days ago

I've not heard that goal before. If true, it makes me sad to hear that once again, people confuse "More LOC == More Customer Value == More Profit". Sigh.

  • spwa4  2 days ago

    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 ...

badgersnake  2 days ago

We’re back to measuring productivity by lines of code are we? Because that always goes well.

WD-42  2 days ago

This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard from microslop this morning. It’s like they are forgetting to be a real software company.

heliumtera  2 days ago

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.

progx  2 days ago

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.

2. AI-Supported Coding (The Modern Workflow) AI tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor act as a "pair programmer," shifting the human role to a reviewer and architect.

    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.

I think realistic 5x to 10x is possible. 50.000 - 200.000 LOC per YEAR !!!! Would it be good code? We will see.