This equates roughly to 1k developers writing net 1000 lines per day, every day for 5 years. While it's unlikely, the numbers aren't actually as far off as I e

This equates roughly to 1k developers writing net 1000 lines per day, every day for 5 years. While it's unlikely, the numbers aren't actually as far off as I expected. Maybe they have 10k developers. Maybe the systems have been worked on for 20 years, maybe devs are only doing 100 lines a day. Lots of combinations come to the right order of magnitude here. However, most engineers in teams of 1k-10k aren't this productive (not necessarily their fault), and much development is rewrites, so I suspect that the actual amount is about an order of magnitude lower. What might make up the numbers in order for this to be the "headline" summary number, could be that only net lines were counted, or that they use some sort of monorepo where they have e.g. all of Python committed in, all of GCC/LLVM or other toolchains, etc. Add a few toolchains like that and you'll quickly make up the numbers I'm sure.