"startup" and "legacy codebase" are diametrically opposed concepts.
And if you're saying (based on your other comments) that a 6 month window is enough to create a legacy codebase...that indicates a serious lack of experience or understanding as to what a legacy codebase is, or why they exist.
Man, so many people in this thread just arguing pointless semantics, making weirdo absolutist (and incorrect) statements.
Accept that other people may ascribe different meanings/interpretations to words than you, and that if your reading of their statement doesn't make sense to you, perhaps you are simply reading it wrong.
Trying to hold someone else to your definition of words suits what purpose exactly? Are you just trying to "win" ?
Yes lol. Of all things people are getting on me for it's the number of LoC x Years In Business of this startup. I don't fucking know, I didn't start the company and I wasn't here for several of those industrious years. Looking now it looks like we have slightly fewer LoC than that, I was counting some of the generated stuff.
But who cares? The point is any codebase over a few years old with lots of customers and a big surface area has lots of code, much of it "legacy" from the standpoint of a guy in 2026.
You are wrong and they are wrong but that is ok.
I agree with your larger point. Though I think it's pretty natural to wonder how the poster ended up with a multi million line codebase.
2M lines of code is 15 people committing ~26k lines of code per year (~100 lines per working day) for 5 years.
15 people is a pretty small startup, what if this is a 50-person startup?
Doesn't seem like that much to me, depending on what you're building and the size of your team.
This is an ultra cop out. There are standards in language that are not all “left means right for me so you cannot assume when i say right it is right and not left”
This whole thread around loc is depressing. It speaks volumes of some peoples inexperience working on actual legacy code. Legacy code is not just age or size but that the technical foundation is dated in a fundamental way. A giant monolith running on a now defunk framework using a database only one guy in canada knows about.
Case and point in my day job. The org that owns XMM development does not know how to recover a physical bench that is bricked because everyone who knew how has left. So now they just use simulators…
Interestingly, AI figured out some of this pretty easily for me. But the org has the exact same AI as i do. At the same time another org is close to a year into a greenfield rewrite that has been developed via agentic swarms. Absolute trainwreck.
AI doesnt make bad engineers good. Anyone who says they are doing 4 eng work likely would be without ai too. Those that claim otherwise, are the bad engineers.
exactly. Usually legacy code forms when people lose context and confidence in parts of the codebase due to staff turnover etc and ppl avoid touching or enhancing those parts for long periods. Six months is a short time to accrue that much tech debt, its enough time where most of the people who created that "legacy" are probably still around. As you said indicates bigger problems.
So basically any LLM codebase of sufficient size is immediately legacy.