Well thankfully my day job is actually ML research. :) Lines of code is not strictly speaking a bottleneck for the next generation of models, but it ties with

Well thankfully my day job is actually ML research. :) Lines of code is not strictly speaking a bottleneck for the next generation of models, but it ties with other objectives that are: researcher productivity, hardware efficiency, and model verifiability. GPT-5 might be another case of simply scaling up the existing transformer models, but the next step-function change of model quality are going to involve a lot more R&D about the right architectural primitives to take before scaling it up. And in that case lines of code do matter - because they allow simple concepts to be robustly tested, optimized, and iterated against. Doing that against a 50k monolith is a much harder task.