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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 mea
by onion2k 9mo 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.
- sarchertech 9mo agoLooks like the guy who posted that updated his post to say he was just talking about a research project he is working on.
- anonymous908213 9mo agoWhich 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".
- sarchertech 9mo agoI 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.
- coldtea 9mo agoThe 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"
- jodrellblank 9mo agoThe 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.
- anonymous908213 9mo agoOne supposes, when a highly senior employee publicly talks about project goals in recruitment material, that they are not fancifully daydreaming about something that can never happen but are in fact actually talking about the work they're doing that justifies their ~$1,000,000/yr compensation in the eyes of their employer. Talking about rewriting Windows at a rate of 1 million lines of code per engineer per month with LLMs is absolutely going to garner negative publicity, no matter how much you spin it with words like "ambitious" (do you work in PR? it sounds like it's your calling).
- jodrellblank 9mo agoYou suppose that there are no highly-paid researchers on the planet working on AGI? Because there are, and that's less proven than "porting one codebase to another language" is. What about Quantum Computers, what about power-producing nuclear fusion? Both less proven than porting code. What about all other blue-sky research labs? Why would you continue supposing such a thing when both the employee, and the employer, have said that your suppositions are wrong?
- anonymous908213 9mo agoSure, there are plenty of researchers working on fanciful daydreams. They pursue those goals at behest of their employer. You attempted to make a distinction between the employer and the employee's goals, as though a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft was just playing around on a whim doing hobby projects for fun. If Microsoft is paying him $1m annually to work on this, plus giving him a team to pursue the goal of rewriting Windows, it is not inaccurate to state that Microsoft's goal is to completely rewrite Windows with LLMs, and they will earn negative publicity for making that fact public. The project will likely fail given how ridiculous it is, but it is still a goal they are funding.
- nrawe 9mo agoI'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 9mo agoI'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 ...
- bondarchuk 9mo agohttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/welcome-to-the-engineering-at-microsoft-blog/ 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 9mo agoWith those kinds of numbers you don’t need logic anymore, just a lookup table with all possible states of the system.
- torben-friis 9mo agoAbsurd. The Linux kernel is 30 million, Postgres is 2, windows is assumed to be about 50.
- conartist6 9mo agoNo, no. 100 trillion lines of code per day is great! The only thing better would be 200 trillion ;)
- Eddy_Viscosity2 9mo agoCEO: I want big numbers of things. Big numbers = success.
- oleganza 9mo agoMaybe it means "LOCs changed"?
- copilot_king_2 9mo ago[dead]
- skandinaff 9mo agoEliminate C/C++ in favor of what? Perhaps the plan is to use AI to write plain assembler? Why stop there, maybe let's do prompt in - machine-code out?
- pjmlp 9mo agoWell, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUprpjCWjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUprpjCWjM
- Zardoz84 9mo agoIf remember correctly, Rust.
- davey48016 9mo agoYeah. It's using AI agents to rewrite C/C++ to Rust. https://x.com/gounares/status/2003543050698809544 https://x.com/gounares/status/2003543050698809544
- gafferongames 9mo agoWhy are rust people always insane?
- derjames 9mo agowhy stopping at rust? Let's have a windows version written in python another in crystal and another in java. At least the generated code will be readable and maintainable!!!/s
- mrbungie 9mo agoThey took the stupidest metric ever and made a moronic target out of it.
- reactordev 9mo agoThat’s what MBAs do
- brookst 9mo agoWasn’t this one single researcher?
- reactordev 9mo agoWhat does that have to do with it? I said MBAs do that. As in, do that too… Take some arbitrary scaler and turn it into a mediocre metric, for some moronic target.
- brookst 9mo agoIt just seems odd to use one example of one person to generalize about a group that one person isn’t even a member of.
- smoe 9mo agoIt 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.
- reactordev 9mo agoMicrosoft never got that memo. They still measure LoC because it’s all MBAs.
- walt_grata 9mo agoFuck is there a way to have that degree and not be clueless and toxic to your colleagues and users.
- chillfox 9mo agoAll evidence continues to point towards NO.
- bluGill 9mo agoIt all comes from "if you can't measure it you can't improve it". The job of management is to improve things, and that means they need to measure it and in turn look for measures. When working on an assembly line there are lots of things to measure and improve, and improving many of those things have shown great value. They want to expand that value into engineering and so are looking for something they can measure. I haven't seen anyone answer what can be measured to make a useful improvement though. I have a good "feeling" that some people I work with are better than others, but most are not so bad that we should fire them - but I don't know how to put that into something objective.
- mwigdahl 9mo agoYes, the problem of accurately measuring software "productivity" has stymied the entire industry for decades, but people keep trying. It's conceivable that you might be able to get some sort of more-usable metric out of some systematized AI analysis of code changes, which would be pretty ironic.
- badgersnake 9mo agoWe’re back to measuring productivity by lines of code are we? Because that always goes well.
- m4rtink 9mo agoCool - 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. ;-)
- javawizard 9mo agoI 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.
- the_duke 9mo agoDo you have a source for that?
- HumblyTossed 9mo agoYay another stupid metric to game! This will lead to so much enshitification.
- ReptileMan 9mo agoIs 1 million bugs stated implicitly or explicitly?
- jodrellblank 9mo 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.
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoPorting legacy code is definitely one of its strengths. It can even... do wilder things if you're creative enough.
- rkozik1989 9mo agoThat'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.
- kavalg 9mo agoIf it is Windows, then you and I are going to test it :)
- bigfishrunning 9mo agoMaybe you will; i won't
- ethin 9mo agoNo 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
- richsouth 9mo agoBecause as we all know, lines of code == quality of code.
- funkyfiddler369 9mo agoI mean, if 1% out of 8 billion is "top" and that applies to Lines of Code, too, than ... more code contains more quality, ... by their logic, I guess ...
- philipwhiuk 9mo agoWhat if the % declines proportionally (or worse) to the growth in code.
- funkyfiddler369 9mo agoit might, but not if you isolate/repurpose that % (over time), which is the promise
- wolvoleo 9mo agoWow 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...
- scrlk 9mo agoCf. -2000 Lines Of Code: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
- heliumtera 9mo agoMicrosoft 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.
- WD-42 9mo agoThis 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.
- esafak 9mo agoNo-one can read tens of thousands of lines of code every day, so the code would only be superficially reviewed; spot checked.
- progx 9mo agoThat 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.