[bbeonx]

This isn't really a metric. It's a description to help the reader understand the magnitude of effort that went into this project. SLoC is a bad metric for plenty of things, but I think it's fine for quickly conveying the scope of a project to a blog reader.

[odyssey7]

Lines of code is also a poor indicator for “magnitude of effort.”

Tangent: generally I’m more inclined to believe quality is improved when someone claims 1000s of lines reduced rather than 1000s of lines written.

[tgv]

Do you remember writing the proof for quicksort, which is say 0.1k lines? 15k lines of verified code is a pretty good indication of effort.

But the problem may come from the headline, which is somewhat clickbaity. HN forbids changing it, and then part of the discussion focuses on the literal content of the headline, which is, as you rightly hint, not the best summary of what's interesting here.

[chaitimes]

From my experience, pre LLMs, it was a valid proxy metric for effort

[xeromal]

See: AI generating 1000s of lines

[lionkor]

It's a metric of complexity