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Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

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Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#161

Post by sarchertech »

criley2 wrote: post #146
troupo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a TUI API wrapper with a few commands bolted on. I doubt it needs to be more than 20-50kloc. You can create a full 3D game with a custom 3D engine in 500k lines. What the hell is Claude Code doing?

Honest question: Why does it matter? They got the product shipped and got millions of paying customers and totally revolutionized their business and our industry. Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.

The reason it’s not useful as a measure of productivity is because it’s measure of complexity (not directly, but it’s correlated). But it tells you nothing about whether that complexity was necessary for the functionality it provides.

But given that we know the functionality of Claude Code, we can guess how much complexity should be required. We could also be wrong.

>Why does it matter?

If there’s massively more code than there needs to be that does matter to the end user because it’s harder to maintain and has more surface area for bugs and security problems. Even with agents.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#162

Post by [deleted] »

troupo wrote: post #158
criley2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why does it matter? They got the product shipped and got millions of paying customers and totally revolutionized their business and our industry. Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.

> Honest question: Why does it matter? Because it's unmaintainable slop that they themselves don't know how to fix when something happens? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#163

Post by sarchertech »

criley2 wrote: post #160
dandellion wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More code means more entropy, more room for bugs, harder to find issues, more time to fix, more attack surface, more memory used, more duplication, more inconsistencies... I bet you at some point we'll get someone reporting how AI performance deteriorates as the code base grows, and some blog post about how their team improved the success of their AI by trimming the code base down to less than 100k LOC or something l…

The history of programming is also each generation writing far less performant code than the one before it. The history of programming is each generation bemoaning the abstractions, waste and lack of performance of the code of the next generation. It turns out that there is a tradeoff in code between velocity and quality that smart businesses consider relative to hardware cost/quality. The businesses that are outcomp…

> far less performant code than the one before it.

That worked because of rapid advancements in CPU performance. We’ve left that era.

It’s about more than performance. Code is and always has been a liability. Even with agents, you start seeing massive slowdowns with code base size.

It’s why I can nearly one shot a simple game for my kid in 20 minutes with Claude, but using it at work on our massive legacy codebase is only marginally faster than doing it by hand.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#164

Post by blantonl »

criley2 wrote: post #146
troupo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a TUI API wrapper with a few commands bolted on. I doubt it needs to be more than 20-50kloc. You can create a full 3D game with a custom 3D engine in 500k lines. What the hell is Claude Code doing?

Honest question: Why does it matter? They got the product shipped and got millions of paying customers and totally revolutionized their business and our industry. Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.

Exactly. Imagine if Claude Code was a PHP script. Some folks would lose their damn minds

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#165

Post by bsenftner »

techpression wrote: post #107
supersparrow wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who don’t know how to use an LLM to make them more productive, or are scared it’s going to take their job, are louder than the people who are making good use of them to make them more productive. That just seems to be human nature unfortunately - the complainers are always louder.

What? We must have different internets, I agree in general, but the "AI is the second coming" crowd is louder than standing next to a jet on takeoff. I'm in the "AI is making me more productive but a worse developer" crowd, don't know what I count as.

You got shuttled into one bubble and the previous commenter into another advertising / news bubble. It's incredible how different the media experience is for people in different media bubbles.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#168

Post by ulbu »

raincole wrote: post #153
criley2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why does it matter? They got the product shipped and got millions of paying customers and totally revolutionized their business and our industry. Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.

It doesn't. LoC is only meaningful when you use it to belittle others' code.

hehe, belittle (to make smaller)

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#169

Post by neurostimulant »

troupo wrote: post #135
fragmede wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many LoC should it be, for that kind of program?

It's a TUI API wrapper with a few commands bolted on. I doubt it needs to be more than 20-50kloc. You can create a full 3D game with a custom 3D engine in 500k lines. What the hell is Claude Code doing?

Just check the leaked code yourself. Two biggest areas seem to be the `utils` module, which is a kitchen sink that covers a lot of functionality from sandboxing, git support, sessions, etc, and `components` module, which contains the react ui. You could certainly build a cli agent with much smaller codebase, with leaner ui code without react, but probably not with this truckload of functionality.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#170

Post by throwatdem12311 »

I know it seems counter-intuitive but are there any agent harnesses that aren’t written with AI? All these half a million LoC codebases seem insane to me when I run my business on a full-stack web application that’s like 50k lines of code and my MvP was like 10k. These are just TUIs that call a model endpoint with some shell-out commands. These things have only been around in time measured in months, half a million LoC is crazy to me.
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