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getnormality | on: Lines of code got a better publicist
This weird trend reached an apex in a Feb 2026 OpenAI blog post [1], recently on the front page [2], which describes the process for building... something... written 100% by agents.

There is no description of what the thing is, no indication of what value it provides its users. The closest it gets is "the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users".

But the fact that the thing has a million lines of code is repeated twice in the first few hundred words.

[1] https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416264

DrewADesign | parent | next
> "the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users".

My guess is it’s an email filter.

> million lines of code

> written 100% by agents

Yeah, probably an email filter. Or maybe a JS menu for a departmental wiki that basically recreates jquery using MS JScript and transpiles it into JS 5.

pyrale | root | parent | next
> My guess is it’s an email filter.

It may also be an email generator.

The email filter team is trying to match the pace of innovation of the email generation team. At stakes is the ability for the employees to process the billions of mission-critical generated emails each of them receives each day.

DrewADesign | root | parent
It’s true. They’re all go-getters destined for big things. Look at those token burn rates!
getnormality | root | parent
Your hilariously specific hypotheses remind me of how little I know about technology.
DrewADesign | root | parent
> how little I know about technology.

Probably because you smoked too much weed in school.

Remember, this is the tech industry! An abject lack of knowledge is no impediment for people with boundless confidence in their assumptions!

QuercusMax | root | parent
Ya gotta start smoking weed after you're done with school, that's the way to success
JCTheDenthog | parent | next
The entire Linux kernel is about 40 million LoC, and only something like 16 million LoC after you remove drivers. I have a hard time imagining whatever OpenAI was talking about there having anywhere close to 6% as much utility as the Linux kernel, despite having 6% as many lines of code. And I have a hard time imagining it's anywhere close to maintainable, regardless of how powerful their LLMs might be.
esperent | root | parent | next
To be fair, few things of any number of LOC have as much utility as the Linux kernel, and it's also a particularly dense example of code. There's plenty of other examples that have higher LOC / utility ratio without being vibe coded. For example, Google's monorepo famously has 2 billion LOC, which is a statistic I've heard long before LLM coding took over.
jeffbee | root | parent
Clarification: Google claimed to have 2 billion lines of code in their repo ten years ago, and a commit rate of 50,000 changelists per day, both on exponential growth trends.
zaphar | root | parent
That's a monorepo with hundreds if not thousands of different applications. It's not even close to an apples to apples comparison.
jeffbee | root | parent
That's certainly a way to look at it. And that repo contains a "third party" directory which itself contains Linux, LLVM, and much of the rest of the open source world. But I would suggest that the largest of those thousands of applications probably has a transitive closure of hundreds of millions of lines of code.
zaphar | root | parent
I'm aware. I worked on that specific project (assuming we are talking about the same one) back in the day. :-)

There are certainly very large applications in that repo in the hundreds of millions of lines of code. But comparing the entire repo to single applications is not an apt comparison.

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strulovich | root | parent | next
The Linux kernel is not in any way at top of big projects. A kernel, as the name suggests, deals with specific issues and tries to remain small.

The world’s biggest software is usually built over endless adapters of different data and a need to reconcile endless edge cases with laws, regulations and real world complexities.

dist-epoch | root | parent
Chrome has 50 mil LoC

https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summa...

skydhash | root | parent
Chrome is basically reinventing each OS API and libraries. One day they’ll have their own tcp stack and packet filter.
getnormality | root | parent | next
It kinda makes sense given that one of their major products is a computer that runs an operating system literally called ChromeOS.
robotresearcher | root | parent | next
Chrome still has a way to go until Zawinski's Law is satisfied natively.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

jeffbee | root | parent
Arguably with QUIC it already does.
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