Garry is buying horses for all the defenders in this thread.
No he wont fund your startup.
YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
21–30 of 108 posts
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#22"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?
Yes but for that you need to focus on the quality. There are probably horrible issues on backend as well.
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#23This 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…
> 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
This could be fine if all you're looking is to get the quick and dirty result at any cost, or private use, etc. When anything is better than nothing.
The problem starts when this extremely low bar becomes the baseline for anything. When you're willing to attach your name to a stream of absolute slop and you're even proud of it.
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#24This 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…
AI feels to me like having access to someone who got a D in literally every single course offered at a university. If you don't know anything about the subject they are smarter than you. If you do know the subject its unsettling how bad they are. Basically the Gell-Mann effect:
> The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
They've improved from someone who failed every single university course a couple years ago. Maybe they'll get to a C or even a B in the future; maybe not.
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#25But web dev is extremely bloat and inefficient already.
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#26"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?
That was the strangest line for me as well. The article tries to play up this "Polish engineer with an MSc in computer science who has 13 years of industry experience" who ... used claude to review the code. My mom could have done this without an MSc or years of industry experience.
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#27Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#28This 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...
... and engineers don't have to consider this a good look coming from the head of YC. These are rookie mistakes - generated by both the human and AI model in a collaborative process. It's also the kind of mistake most of us aren't willing to make b/c we don't have the capital to sweep it under the rug if it goes pear-shaped.
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#29How can anyone in their right mind think that growing a codebase by 200K LOC every week could possibly be a good thing?
Re: YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
#30Focus on a single metric instead of outcome and you win on that metric instead of the outcome.
I remember that for, uh, Key Quarterly Objectives, was that the name? Aeons ago.
Same shit new decade.
(I love working with AI though. It has many of the benefits of good pair programming.)