5 ms·
There is a limit, after a few 10,000's of LOC ai projects start disintegrating and becoming unmanageable.
by visarga 1mo ago
There is a limit, after a few 10,000's of LOC ai projects start disintegrating and becoming unmanageable.
- BatFastard 1mo ago10,000 LOC, hell my LLM can do that in a day! Current project has over 60,000 LOC, I find using an antagonistic agent code and architecture reviews are really handy for keeping things grounded.
- ChoGGi 1mo agoHow do you know things are grounded?
- BatFastard 1mo agoMy tests work, multiple agents confirm the code base. Code reviews pass. I do very little actual reading of code anymore. Now I am more of a results merchant.
- glouwbug 1mo agoRight, but what are you doing? Placing UI elements on a page?
- Kinrany 1mo agoI believe tinygrad still caps the total LoC in their repository to 10k
- marcus_holmes 1mo agoDepends on the language, obviously. Some languages are more verbose than others, and relatedly, some languages force simple code structures that are less likely to become unmanageable.
- tharkun__ 1mo agoReally? I just did the LoC measure that isn't "official" but actually closer to how AI would read it: I.e. simply actual lines. Never mind "context window". Just in the actual source folder there are 1.9 million lines. That's not tokens. Lines. Not even LoC as per some official canonicalized definition. Various languages. ~15 year old code base. We work with Claude just fine. For variable measures of "fine" depending on how much devs just trust whatever Claude spits out ;)
- visarga 1mo agoYes, a 15 year old code base written by hand obviously, not by a coding agent from the start. At the same size I only heard of AI generated projects reimplementing compilers and browser engines which come with amazing tests written by hand, but even these projects generally don't become reliable enough to use.
- tharkun__ 1mo agoWell we also have an AI first code base, new product 160k "LoC" by the same measure. Not even a year old. That 1.9m code base, within the same time frame as the 160k was created? <10k by the same measure. 10k I can comfortably throw at a local agent on my system (see recent posts in my history). Whether I can keep it that small is another question I suppose lol!
- visarga 1mo agoI agree 10K LOC is too little, I was saying "a few 10,000's of LOC"