YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood

"Tan/AI built the website so that when a user visits, their browser makes 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. For comparison, the minimalist Hacker News homepage (also run by Y Combinator) makes seven requests for data totaling just 12 kilobytes.

The website ships 28 actual test files (code developers use to reality-check their work) straight to every visitor’s browser. That’s 300 kilobytes of pure developer scaffolding that users never asked for.

It loads 78 different JavaScript controllers for features like AI image generation, voice extraction, video tools, etc., none of which appear on the homepage. The browser still has to download all of them “just in case.”

The site’s logo is an illustration of a bear. The site downloads the logo in eight different formats, including a completely empty 0-byte file that somehow made it to production, Gregorein found.

The website uses huge, uncompressed old-school PNGs (some nearly 2 megabytes each), even though the browser literally asks for modern tiny formats. Two images alone waste about 4 MB; with newer formats they could have been just 300KB.

Gregorein also found duplicate page content, an empty CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file, a huge rich-text editor loaded on a read-only page, missing image descriptions, and analytics code that deliberately routes through a proxy to dodge people’s ad blockers (with a comment in the code admitting it), Gregorein reports,"

Brave new world indeed... It might be elliptically relevant that in the original novel by Aldous Huxley, the protagonist John the Savage hangs himself at the end when his search for truth fails.

I’m not a huge AI fan, and was ready for some Schadenfreude. But with every paragraph I thought "so, just like modern human-created websites?"

The cult of 10x got their magical tool that lets them feel 100x. Don't take their toy away from an excited kid.

Seems to be a frequently occurring issue, most (good) software engineers know that LOC basically means nothing, if anything, less LOC is a better goal over more LOC, if you absolutely have to have a goal. As soon as people/companies starts bragging about how many LOC they can ship, you need to start being very suspicious, mostly because they just admitted to not actually understand software engineering at all.

Cursor did something similar months ago, bragging about producing millions of LOC while what they actually made barely worked and could have been built with an order of magnitude less LOC: https://emsh.cat/en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522 | 324 points | 5 months ago | 156 comments)

What I don't understand, isn't there a single engineer working with these people who ask them what the fuck they're doing, before they hit that publish button? Or is there just such a constant pressure to publish anything that quality just simply doesn't matter at all to these people?

The difference is that nobody brags about churning out pages like the fastcompany.com link landing page.

If anything, they're ashamed of it - and they only do it because managers and shady SEO types push for that shit.

Nor are such bloated pages regarded (or were regarded pre-AI) as anything else than as a symptom of the sickness of modern web practices.