> A GUI/client can be arbitrarily more or less complex than the things it's GUI'ing.

If it's an interface to ffmpeg, then sure, the GUI could be extremely complicated code.

But that's not what we are talking about, is it? We are talking about an interface to a chatbot that can accept and return chats, accept and return files, and run a selection of internal commands (which include invoking itself recursively).

The interface to this chatbot that has a settings entry for "personality" is still only going to map that to one of a small number of chatbot inputs. Same with basically anything else (read the skills file, etc).

I dunno... maybe 500kSloC for a fancy IRC client is the going rate, but the last time I wrote an interface to a chat client, it was barely 10k lines, not counting the lib*.so that the the program called to interact with the chatbot, with said chatbot supporting file uploads and '/' commands.