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.
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.
> "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.
That'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.
If it is Windows, then you and I are going to test it :)
Maybe you will; i won't
No 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
Porting legacy code is definitely one of its strengths. It can even... do wilder things if you're creative enough.
It 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.
Microsoft never got that memo. They still measure LoC because it’s all MBAs.
Fuck is there a way to have that degree and not be clueless and toxic to your colleagues and users.
It 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.
Yes, 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.
There’s this really awful MBA tool called a “9-box”…
All evidence continues to point towards NO.
They seem better at working in finance and managing money.
Most models of productivity look like factories with inputs, outputs, and processes. This is just not how engineering or craftsmanship happen.
It's because the purpose of engineering is to engineer a solution. Their purpose is to create profit, engineering gets in the way.
How do you create profit?
No man, it's in the title, master bullshit artist
If so, it hasn't always been that way. Steve Ballmer on IBM and KLoC's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0
(I think it is from "Triumph of the Nerds" (1996), but I can't find the time code)
Ballmer hasn’t been around for a long long time. Not since the Red Ring of Death days. Ever since Satya took the reins, MBAs have filled upper and middle management to try to take over open source so that Sales guys had something to combat RedHat. Great for open source. Bad for Microsoft. However, Satya comes from the Cloud division so he knows how to Cloud and do it well. Azure is a hit with the enterprise. Then along comes AI…
Microsoft lost its way with Windows Phone, Zune, Xbox360 RRoD, and Kinect. They haven’t had relevance outside of Windows (Desktop) in the home for years. With the sole exception being Xbox.
They have pockets of excellence. Where great engineers are doing great work. But outside those little pockets, no one knows.
I believe the "look at all the lines of code" argument for LLMs is not a way to showcase intelligence, but more-so a way to showcase time saved. Under the guise that the output is the/a correct solution, it's a way to say "look at all the code I would have had to write, it saved so much time".
The line of code that saves the most time is the one you don't write.
It's all contextual. Sometimes, particularly when it comes to modern frontends, you have inescapable boilerplate and lines of code to write. Thats where it saves time. Another example is scaffolding out unit tests for series of services. There are many such cases where it just objectively saves time.
Reason went out of fashion like 50 years ago, and it was never really in vogue.
> measuring someone or something by the number of lines of code produced is still incredibly stupid, in my opinion.
Totally agree. I see LOC as a liability metric. It amazes me that so many other people see it as an asset metric.
I wonder if we can use the compression ratio that an LLM-driven compressor could generate to figure out how much entropy is actually in the system and how much is just boilerplate.
Of course then someone is just going to pregenerate a random number lookup table and get a few gigs of 'value' from pure garbage...
it's still a bad metric and OP is also just being loose by repeating some marketing / LinkedIn post by a person who uses bad metrics about an overhyped subject
Yeah. I honestly feel 1m LOC is enough to recreate a fully featured complete modern computing environment if one goes about it sensibly.
I think the charitable way to read the quote is that 1M LOC are to be converted, not written.
Ironically, AI may help get past that. In order to measure "value chunks" or some other metric where LoC is flexibly multiplied by some factor of feature accomplishment, quality, and/or architectural importance, an opinion of the section in question is needed, and an overseer AI could maybe do that.
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.
With those kinds of numbers you don’t need logic anymore, just a lookup table with all possible states of the system.
Absurd. The Linux kernel is 30 million, Postgres is 2, windows is assumed to be about 50.
No, no. 100 trillion lines of code per day is great! The only thing better would be 200 trillion ;)
CEO: I want big numbers of things. Big numbers = success.
Maybe it means "LOCs changed"?
Mutate things so fast cancer looks like stable.
Copilot add a space to every line of code in this repository and commit please.
One of the many reasons why it's such a bad practice (overly verbose solutions id another one of course)
More likely those 100k engineers would shrink to 10k.
Thats still 10 billion lines of code per month if that insane metric were a real goal (it’s not).
That’s 200 Windows’ worth of code every month.
Totally agreed. The numbers are silly. My only point is that you don't need 100k engineers if you're letting Claude dump all that code into production.
That’s definitely true. But I don’t think you need 100k engineers for literally anything.
Guess Windows 12 is gonna be a bit on the bloated side, Huh?
I think the point is that they are fantasizing about cutting their engineering workforce by 90% while maintaining the same level of "productivity".
Claude doesn't require paying payroll tax, health insurance, unemployment, or take family leave.
Maybe they can use 5 - 10 loc to move the classic window shell button so it's not on top of the widgets button
So the recent surge in demand for storage is to because we have to store that code somewhere?
Surely 1 line of code = $1, so Microsoft can get $100b revenue per month. Genius plan.
I 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:
I miss those days.Original French: "Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher".
"Il semble" sure gives the quote a different tone to me.
Cf. -2000 Lines Of Code:
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
Cool - 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. ;-)
Looks like the guy who posted that updated his post to say he was just talking about a research project he is working on.
Which 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".
The 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.
One 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).
You 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?
Sure, 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.
Microsoft funded Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell) and Don Syme (F#) and SP-J worked on Excel, but it would be inaccurate to say that their goal was to rewrite Excel, Windows, C#, .NET into functional programming. Yes, to an extent researchers "play around on a whim doing hobby projects for fun", or more formally as SP-J said in an interview "the mission statement that Microsoft Research had at that time which was to push forward the boundaries of knowledge; put Microsoft in a position to be agile when new stuff heaves over the horizon; provide a reservoir of expertise for the rest of the company to draw on".
- https://archivesit.org.uk/interviews/simon-peyton-jones/
Otherwise your position is that "blue-sky research" doesn't exist (it does) or that big companies don't fund it (they do). In particular, the LinkedIn in question said nothing about "Windows", that is something internet has hallucinated to maximise ragebait.
The 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"
I 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.
Wow 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...
Because as we all know, lines of code == quality of code.
I 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 ...
What if the % declines proportionally (or worse) to the growth in code.
it might, but not if you isolate/repurpose that % (over time), which is the promise
Microsoft 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.
Is 1 million bugs stated implicitly or explicitly?
No-one can read tens of thousands of lines of code every day, so the code would only be superficially reviewed; spot checked.
We’re back to measuring productivity by lines of code are we? Because that always goes well.
Do you have a source for that?
I'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.
I'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 ...
They took the stupidest metric ever and made a moronic target out of it.
That’s what MBAs do
Wasn’t this one single researcher?
What 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.
It just seems odd to use one example of one person to generalize about a group that one person isn’t even a member of.
This 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.
Yay another stupid metric to game!
This will lead to so much enshitification.
[dead]
Eliminate 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?
Well, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUprpjCWjM
If remember correctly, Rust.
Yeah. It's using AI agents to rewrite C/C++ to Rust. https://x.com/gounares/status/2003543050698809544
Why are rust people always insane?
why 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
That is what the AI said:
1. Classic Coding (Traditional Development) In the classic model, developers are the primary authors of every line.
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. I think realistic 5x to 10x is possible. 50.000 - 200.000 LOC per YEAR !!!! Would it be good code? We will see.