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

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

#51

Post by bluegatty »

It's 100% fine for Gary to write software in a way that works for him - and for us to push boundaries, and not 'gatekeep'.

BUT - it's still a pile of steaming garbage.

It's not just a 'bit odd' - it's just massive slop.

The total lack of self awareness is comical and disturbing.

GStack + Gary's Tweets about 30K LOC a day is 'Trumpian' in self delusion - it looks like basically he and YC are frauds that don't know what technology is.

This is like Elon and his 'salute' or his 'I'm a top 10 Diablo player - hey watch me play and expose myself unwittingly' type situations.

A bit of AI hype is fine.

Someone needs to take Gary and have a side-discussion.

He can do GStack - he just needs to characterize it properl for what it is.

Talking about that amount of code with the assumption 'it's sensible' code, is basically a lie - it's fraudulent' levels of hype.

Just describe it as an unwieldy but productive experiment, not for mainline consumption etc. then it's fine.

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

#52

Post by jrflowers »

logicchains wrote: post #43
operation_moose wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I like that you start by saying that you don’t know how someone could draw that conclusion about AI and end by saying they probably got there by using AI

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

#54

Post by mcv »

zerof1l wrote: post #35

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 periodicall…

> 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.

My wife does exactly that. For the exercise. She makes large detours to go anywhere. The end result is a healthier body.

How this translates to software, I don't know. I don't think AI benefits from this exercise.

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

#55

Post by DiskoHexyl »

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…

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

An interesting choice of a metaphor here. If I needed a shelter for a day, I would have bought (or rented) a nice tent. Or booked a room in a proper hotel

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

#57

Post by msdz »

jrflowers wrote: post #52
logicchains wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

I like that you start by saying that you don’t know how someone could draw that conclusion about AI and end by saying they probably got there by using AI

While that's true and pretty funny, it does make for a meaningful distinction IMO: Just like you wouldn't look at the "all Ds" student, but not the "straight A" student in order to get an impression of students' capabilities, you wouldn't ignore a newer, potentially SOTA-pushing model to then come out and say something along the lines of "all models suck"… right?

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

#58

Post by andrewingram »

Whilst I don't _really_ consider 37k LoC a day to be a particularly extreme number, my issue with all the high profile high output usage of AI, is that it doesn't really prove much of value.

I use AI in a pretty single-threaded way and my primary challenge is figuring out how to keep the LoC as minimal as possible, as well as minimise my spend. I am, unintentionally, one of the highest spenders at work; this is possible because I do more fiddly UI enhancements where the desired behaviour is often subjective and invariably hard to articulate. When I work on big backend features, my spend tends to be much lower.

What I really want from the people who have effectively unlimited tokens to spend, is to use that finding ways for the rest of us to produce higher quality output at lower costs, rather than focusing on output alone.

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

#59

Post by lambdaone »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #16
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).…

Absolutely. For him the bloat is not a problem; it's a negative externality.

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

#60

Post by pjc50 »

mcv wrote: post #54
zerof1l wrote: post #35

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 periodicall…

> 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. My wife does exactly that. For the exercise. She makes large detours to go anywhere. The end result is a healthier body. How this translates to software, I don't know. I don't think AI benefits from this exercise.

People like using the "AI is like bringing a forklift to the gym" metaphor. I suppose for the shopping one it's using a SUV to make the 500m trip.
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