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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

#31

Post by aljgz »

meetingthrower wrote: post #17
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...

That is, until you have silent corruption of data because the admin tool is not aware of the new field you added to the website, and it's not written with forward compatibility in mind. (Have seen this lots of times)

Or a downstream service is overwhelmed and suddenly all the retired you added to different places DDOS your own service. (Also have seen this lots of times)

Some quality problems you can fix later. With others, once they happen, there's no "later"

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

#33

Post by titanomachy »

> The larger point is that while AI coding tools make it easy to pump out lots of code, it’s really (still) the quality of the code that matters. Quantity, in other words, doesn’t necessarily equal quality.

They didn't provide any evidence for this point. They showed that the code is bad quality, but not that it matters that it's bad.

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

#34

Post by pjc50 »

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…

I think this is where aggregate effects have to be considered. One person building an idiosyncratic house out of found materials: neat little project. One million people doing so: shanty town that can be seen from orbit and is a disaster waiting to happen.

The Web already had a problem with externalizing costs onto users. Both the simple cost of poorly executing websites (power, mobile data, time), and more subtle ones (social media). AI is a huge accelerant for that.

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

#35

Post by zerof1l »

Measuring success in LoC is so wrong… It's like bragging that you took 10,000 steps to reach the store by walking in circles when you could have taken 500 steps if you just walked straight. The end result is the same.

AI has a tendency to generate more code than necessary. It keeps re-inventing things, and every time you ask it to add a new feature or fix something, it just keeps on piling the code. I now periodically ask AI to refactor the code by simplifying, removing unused things, factoring out, and reusing.

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

#36

Post by c7b »

Hmm the list is a bit underwhelming. Basically, it's unnecessary requests, bloated JS, unoptimized images and generally poorly structured code. I would hate if that was where the average website is headed, but realistically, we were already headed there before LLMs. From the headline I was expecting CVEs, broken UX flows / business logic, leaked secrets.

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

#37

Post by flossly »

Nice article...

Bloat is not "since generative AI coding" new. We always had it. As the author says:

> “It does sound like Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things,’ which didn’t age well either.”

Which indeed did not age well, but it did help the company to grow to a certain point at which it is now a staple in our lives (and can do super expensive BS experiments like "Metaverse" and still show profits).

This may be what Tan does as well: first profitable, then correct.

This is an approach, which may work for some, it may also allow some companies to become irrelevant (like: once the bloat-app is profitable, a clone-app emerges that is bloat-free and overtakes the bloat-app in every dimension, while the bloat-app is figuring out how to scale up with a shitty db schema).

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

#38

Post by rwmj »

meetingthrower wrote: post #17
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...

In the thread the developer is only able to look at the front-end code. The real problem is more likely in the back-end code where there'll be hilariously bad security issues. Hopefully Tan isn't running this on the same server or network as anything important.

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

#39

Post by rwmj »

c7b wrote: post #36

Hmm the list is a bit underwhelming. Basically, it's unnecessary requests, bloated JS, unoptimized images and generally poorly structured code. I would hate if that was where the average website is headed, but realistically, we were already headed there before LLMs. From the headline I was expecting CVEs, broken UX flows / business logic, leaked secrets.

It's good that no leaked keys were found in the front end code but the developer wasn't able to look at the backend where, if the quality of the front end is any indication, there are likely to be many security issues. Hopefully it's not all running on the same servers/network as anything important.

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

#40

Post by weego »

titanomachy wrote: post #33

> The larger point is that while AI coding tools make it easy to pump out lots of code, it’s really (still) the quality of the code that matters. Quantity, in other words, doesn’t necessarily equal quality. They didn't provide any evidence for this point. They showed that the code is bad quality, but not that it matters that it's bad.

My hot take is that the entire history of the personal internet was inefficient, badly built and chaotic and it was much more fun to exist in.

I really don't see a problem if it breathes life into the internet for non-technical people to be creative and interesting again. Wordpress etc gave people a cheap voice, but at the cost of immovable guard-rails.

And even at a small business level, most stuff people build get's torn down by the next person or next agency 6, 12, 18 months later anyway so why care about engineering rigour (this point does not extend to security concerns) in the front end when you can spin up and tear down something in a day or two for incredibly cheap.

I'm honestly tired at the pearl-clutching when we ourselves have helped shape an industry that constantly raises the bar to entry with unnecessary techincal complexity and bloat. Ever built a brochureware site in react or similar? you've done exactly what the this guy did, you just did it with pure intent rather than an AI doing it

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