openai/build-hours
Build hours code to share.
GitHub 
100K
lines of main code
682 files
4.6K
lines of test code
44 files
111K
lines of other code
256 files
2y
age
801 days
77%
main code touched
1 year (78K LOC)
ABCDE
ease of change
for people*
ABCDE
ease of change
for AI*
28K
tsx
24K
ts
15K
ipynb
12K
py
12K
css
3.2K
html
3K
js
1.8K
yaml
0.4K
scss
MJS
0.2K
mjs
0.1K
cjs
MAKO
0.02K
mako
JSONL
0.01K
jsonl
30 days 2026 2025 2024
+0
-0
+86K
-411
+154K
-144
+2.4K
-79
0

322

1.1K

19

0

17

28

6

0

4

10

3

2026 2025 2024
Rule-of-thumb estimates

Rebuild value

to rebuild
rebuild value

Maintenance effort

per year to maintain
maintenance cost per year
Rules of thumb, not measurements: one man-year rebuilds about 10,000 lines of main code (design, testing and coordination included), and keeping a code base alive takes about 15% of its rebuild value per year (20 man-years of rebuild value need about 3 man-years of maintenance every year). Your changes are remembered in this browser for every report.