What do you define as a large project? Like TLOC?

In my case the maximum was ~3k LOC.

That's not a "large" project, it's either a toy or a single-purpose tool.

A single-purpose tool, and libraries, yes.

What is the LOC of cgit? Because I made a lot of changes to it, too, albeit privately. I uploaded most files as project files.

That's not just small, it's utterly miniscule. It's most certainly not large.

Depends. 3k is pretty much enough for a fully-featured XY.

So no context, and differences of the definition of "large".

Perhaps if you come from Java, then yeah.

shrugs

I'd still call 3kLOC quite small in all mainstream languages.

I worked on a Python project which I'd consider as medium sized, ie not small but not large, and it was around 25kLOC.

My $dayjob is a Delphi codebase with roughly 500kLOC, which I'd say is large but not huge.

Though if you wrote it in something like K[1], then yeah ok, I'd agree 3kLOC probably counts as large.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

I have spent my career working on software that measures its size in MLOC (millions of lines of code). Not because it's Java, but because it's big.

Nah this is miniscule: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c

You can fit a hell of a lot of functionality in 3k statements. Really whether it's considered large or small necessarily must rely on the functionality it's intended to provide.

You're thinking on "lean" vs "bloated". "Large" and "small" have meanings of their own, and a 3k LOC project wouldn't be accepted as "large" by anyone. "Small", maybe.

I certainly never described 3k as large, so I'll assume you replied to the wrong comment. If not, let's just agree to use the terms differently.

This is 11,682 lines of C (and not including some Lua and Python scripts) according to cloc:

https://github.com/williamcotton/webdsl

It's a pipeline-based DSL for building web apps with SQL, Lua, jq and mustache templates.

I'd say it's like 90% Cursor Composer in Agent mode.

This is probably more like a mid-sized project, right?

Quite nice that.

I've done >100k LoC with Claude; by far most of that is frontend in react/ts which is incredibly verbose and wasteful, so very easy to pack up many many lines quickly without a lot (mostly none) of ROI per line. Which is probably why claude is great at it.

How do you deal with large files? After about a thousand lines in a file, it starts to cough for me. Forgets that some functions exist and makes up inferior duplicate ones.

If possible you need to refactor before getting to that point.

Claude has done a good job refactoring, though I’ve had to tell it to give me a refactor plan upfront in case the conversation limit gets hit. Then in a new chat I tell it which parts of the plan it has already done.

But a larger context/conversation limit is definitely needed because it’s super easy to fill up.

I did not experience hallucinations (very rarely if at al) when I use it for programming. It happened more with niche languages (so I provide examples and documentation), and with GPT.

Let us say there is 3k lines of RFCs, API, documentation of niche languages, examples), 2k lines of code generated by Claude (iteratively, starting small), then I do exceed the limit after a while. In that case I ask it to summarize everything in detail, start a new chat, use those 3k lines and the recent code, and continue ad infinitum.

I ask it to cut files up when they get too large, that seems t work pretty well. It is also good at that, but you have to sternly tell it NOT to make any functional changes, otherwise it will and breakage will happen.