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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

#41

Post by andrewingram »

arcticbull wrote: post #13
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 o…

> Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs

This doesn't seem right. Yes, the "build a blog in 15 minutes" demo was pretty memorable, but I don't think it's ever really been pitched as a sweet spot for Rails. IIRC Rails was essentially extracted out of the 37Signals codebases for Basecamp et al.

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

#42

Post by vrganj »

shapefrog wrote: post #21

Garry is buying horses for all the defenders in this thread. No he wont fund your startup.

Still better than when he was making death threats against public officials.

Letting this guy run the show is a public declaration of the moral bankruptcy of the tech sphere.

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

#43

Post by logicchains »

operation_moose wrote: post #24
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…

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 a…

>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:

I don't know how you can say that with a straight face when AI's capable of matching the best human students on the hardest exams we have, like the IMO, the Putnam and the bar exam. I can only assume you've only ever used the free tier of any AI service.

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

#44

Post by mateuszf »

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.

That's because only frontend was reviewed, who knows what's on backend.

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

#45

Post by mindwok »

> 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

This conclusion is unsupported from the observations. The code makes lots of requests, has too much CSS, and 6 different logo formats. So what? Lots of real, production codebases have just as many warts.

Folks need to stop dealing in absolutes with AI coding. Code quality always mattered, and still does, in certain circumstances. In others, it's less important and speed of iteration has more value. That's still true even with AI code.

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

#46

Post by c7b »

rwmj wrote: post #39
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.

I think we're on the same team, I find the general attitude towards security in the current AI scene scary. I was just hoping for a bit more ammunition than what that article gave us.

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

#47

Post by croes »

Do you remember when you had to write essays in school and the word count mattered? That’s when you’d write "it is" instead of "it's" and "will not" instead of "won't."

This is worse.

Not the first time that I read quantity over quality related to YC

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

#48

Post by arcticbull »

andrewingram wrote: post #41
arcticbull wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs This doesn't seem right. Yes, the "build a blog in 15 minutes" demo was pretty memorable, but I don't think it's ever really been pitched as a sweet spot for Rails. IIRC Rails was essentially extracted out of the 37Signals codebases for Basecamp et al.

Ah yeah that is indeed what I was thinking of. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

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

#50

Post by croes »

63stack wrote: post #26
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?

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.

Your mom couldn’t distinguish Claude‘s BS analysis and hallucinations from real bloat and errors.

You need experience to check Claude‘s findings

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