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

fastcompany.com

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

#11

Post by apimade »

This is what happens when you give people tools that let them achieve an outcome, without necessarily giving them the judgement or expertise to know whether the outcome is any good.

If you asked me to build a house, I could probably assemble something that would stand for a few months. Hopefully. It might even keep the rain out. But it might also fall on my head, because I do not know enough about building houses to be confident that it won’t.

And even if it didn’t fall on my head under normal conditions, I also would not know when I needed to design for earthquakes. Or floods. Or fire. Or wind. Or grandmother-cosplaying wolves with very strong lungs.

But if all I need is shelter for a day, would I necessarily care whether it lasts more than a week?

That is effectively what a website like this is. It is not really a product. People don’t depend on it. Tan’s visitors are probably using MacBooks and iPhones on fast networks, and most of them will never notice how bad it is under the surface.

That does not mean it is good. It means it is good enough for the context.

Most people also tolerated the hilarious gigabyte JSON parsing bug in Grand Theft Auto for years, until a hacker patched it and cut GTA Online loading times by around 70%: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

It was good enough, even if people noticed how bad it was.

Business applications, and typical software really doesn’t have to be super tuned or perform fast. It just needs to work.

At least until your product category has been commoditized, and _then_ you’re competing on experience.

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

#12

Post by embedding-shape »

blubber wrote: post #5

"found numerous examples of bloat and inefficiencies in Tan’s site code, and used a single (Anthropic) Claude session to review the files he downloaded from the website to confirm his observations" 1. I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software. 2. So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?

Personally, I've used my newfound productivity to build higher quality software at the same rate as I produced mediocre quality software before. Some people, like Gary Tan for example, seem to instead produce software at the same quality or worse than before, but just produce a ton more software regardless of quality.

I guess the article in reality is just these two perspectives pitted against each other for some cheap views.

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

#13

Post by arcticbull »

blubber wrote: post #5

"found numerous examples of bloat and inefficiencies in Tan’s site code, and used a single (Anthropic) Claude session to review the files he downloaded from the website to confirm his observations" 1. I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software. 2. So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?

I'd suggest looking at the review itself, there's an X-the-everything-app thread on it.

https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316

Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs, I'm having trouble understanding what 78,000 lines of ruby in the context of a Rails blog could ... do.

I'm sure there's some powerful ugly stuff in Office but in a good code that's calcified kind of way. It got that way over like 30 years of releasing to the public across platforms, not over a weekend.

I'd be surprised if microsoft.com is shipping their entire test suite unminified and their back-end posting rich text editor with index.html (with two title tags in the head) and rendering the entire DOM for desktop and mobile regardless of your platform.

I'm not critiquing Garry or the site. I think it's great people are using AI to build things that bring them joy, or that they find useful. I certainly do.

I am opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code. It has always been the worst metric on earth as a proxy for productivity. Every line is a liability, and it always was. AI has not changed that, if anything it's amplifying it.

The best PRs remove code, not add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC are OpenAI and Anthropic. Everyone else seems to be rummaging around for an ROI.

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

#14

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

embedding-shape wrote: post #8

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…

> 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size.

Ahh … remember the good ol’ days, when we were forced to cap our Web pages at 32K?

I have found similar issues with LLM-generated code. Lots of code … lots of issues.

Just yesterday, I went through a whole bunch of LLM-generated code, and switched the threading model. It sped up my code significantly, and the jetsam crashes stopped immediately. Until I used LLM code, my apps had never jetsam-crashed before.

First time for everything, I guess.

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

#16

Post by streetfighter64 »

blubber wrote: post #5

"found numerous examples of bloat and inefficiencies in Tan’s site code, and used a single (Anthropic) Claude session to review the files he downloaded from the website to confirm his observations" 1. I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software. 2. So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?

> So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?

Begs the question of why the original "author" of the code hasn't just asked Claude to fix it? Or asked Claude to generate good code from the beginning. I suppose the answer is that nobody cares about good or efficient code anymore. But that's been the case since long before LLM coding though (as stated in your point 1).

Why write clever code when we can just write JS slop and ask customers "upgrade" their hardware every year...

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

#17

Post by meetingthrower »

apimade wrote: post #11

This is what happens when you give people tools that let them achieve an outcome, without necessarily giving them the judgement or expertise to know whether the outcome is any good. If you asked me to build a house, I could probably assemble something that would stand for a few months. Hopefully. It might even keep the rain out. But it might also fall on my head, because I do not know enough about building houses to…

Correct. It's "good enough" for now and if it needs to be industrialized you can do that later. If it is brand new and has no traffic and is not exposing user data or opening up your keys to someone.... who cares how perfect the code is if it mostly works? Users don't have to use it...

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

#18

Post by close04 »

blubber wrote: post #5

"found numerous examples of bloat and inefficiencies in Tan’s site code, and used a single (Anthropic) Claude session to review the files he downloaded from the website to confirm his observations" 1. I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software. 2. So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?

> I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software.

Except he's not building Office, a software with decades of legacy, used by hundreds of millions of users. He's coding a website, effectively writing bloat with a silver lining of useful features. AI automated and inflated the worst of practices too. Anyone outputting 37K LoC daily is creating bloat and inefficiencies at unprecedented rate.

And enterprise software was already the butt of all jokes in this regard. We found ways to make that worse at scale even for the basic things. It's not a good look when you need to use this "whatabout".

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