Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me know when you meet a person that can handle 1.5M lines, because most people I've worked with can't. Certainly I've never worked on something that required even reading that much... Especially when targeted search options exist to find just specific function/class implementations as needed.
I have a large team that works in a 1.5M line codebase. Not everyone is familiar with every line, but we regularly make changes that would blow through the usable context window of LLMs (which is, in fact, much smaller than advertised). Is a messy 1.5M lines of tightly coupled code best practice? Of course not. But it evolved over about 20 years and processes tens of billions of dollars of financial transactions. In…
I work regularly with AOSP code (~3mn). While LLMs (Copilot w/ Claude Sonnet 3.7, in my case) cannot gobble all of it up, they have no trouble answering my queries, for the most part, from submodules. If nothing else, using LLMs has dramatically reduced the time it takes to understand a new code file / submodule / a range of commits.