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Comment by lijok | Hacker News Reader

Speaks volumes to the maturity of our work that a 3000 LOC PR is seen not only as acceptable, but expected.

Raising a planning change equivalent to a 3000 LOC PR in a civil engineering firm would get your assignment swiftly handed over to someone more competent.

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LOC is a bad measure of literally anything. It's not related to productivity, efficiency, bug count, readability, etc. What it's most related to is the choice of language and libraries. For me, shunning big contributions just for being big just stifles my drive to contribute. If the solution does what it's supposed to, is valid, efficient and there's no obvious unnecessary duplication of codethen who cares if it's big. All valid contributions push the project forward.

It is actually directly related to the time and complexity of code review. Just because LOC is an imperfect metric for productivity etc., does not mean it's a poor metric for risk, complexity, poor sequencing of changes, or other attributes.

But the planning change to add a new wing to the building? That can’t be made smaller. What about if a new regulation is put in effect requiring every fire door to have a corresponding fire window next to it? That’s either 3000 little changes that need reviewing or one big change. One big change is often the correct choice. Knowing when it’s appropriate and when it’s not is the job of the engineer, the team, and the lead.

How are you supposed to write new code without hitting a 3k loc pr?

Merge before you’ve written 3000 lines of code?

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