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Comment by lukeify | Hacker News Reader

> Something is a small-change if it meets all of these criteria it is less than 1,000 lines of code

Only my personal view but even 1000 LoC is not a "small change".

Yep a small changes is one computer screen of diff (36 to 48 lines) excluding generated changes (lock files, formatted files,…)

A thousand characters, perhaps, and we can gently exclude whitespace in languages insensitive to it.

It can be even more lines as long as the hunks are continuous. Once you lose the context of change and have to “zoom out” to see where it fits in, the review time grows significantly.

This struck me too, but I think it is intentionally a high limit to prevent problems like relatively low impact/high LoC tests from tipping a small change into a large one. That would encourage gamification like skipping useful scenarios to keep a change "small".

The other criteria are more important.

> Only my personal view but even 1000 LoC is not a "small change".

To make matters worse, they effectively implemented a YOLO allowlist to allow a specific developer to batch 1k loc changes to the set of services they are working on without requiring any scrutiny.

Crazy stuff.

They could achieve this in a much simpler way by just removing PR requirements from those users in those projects.

But this has "agents".

AND, not OR.

How the rule is composed with other rules is irrelevant to my statement that a small change is not "1000 lines".

I disagree with their criteria that they couple with it, but I could come up with some of my own that I'd like better.

"This has 900 lines but 850 of them are in codegen boilerplate that changed", for instance.

"This has 900 lines but they're mostly updating a bunch of test fixtures along common patterns."

"This is 800 lines because we bumped ten version dependencies and that bumped a lot of other things + they changed the package naming for some so we had to rewrite a bunch of imports."

"I added two panels to a Grafana dashboard." (ok slight exaggeration)

Of course it's relevant: your statement is a strawman ... they didn't claim that 1000 lines is a small change, that was part of a conjunction. Basic logic here.

I won't respond further.

The criteria is unfit for purpose because as it stands it doesn't align with the ideals of what a "small change" is. And it's HN, not a COMP101 class.

> I won't respond further.

That's okay, I don't care.

> AND, not OR.

If you bother to read the blog post, the other conditions in the "AND" are who posted the developer and which project the PR is updating.

This does not make it better. It's a YOLO bro allowlist.

I did bother to read it (and that ad hominem charge is an explicit violation of the HN guidelines) and you're mischaracterizing it. In any case they did not say that 1000 lines is a small change.

I won't respond further.

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