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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

#61

Post by bluegatty »

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...

It's not really a question about if GStack is 'good enough' - it's the claims about 37K LOC being legitimate.

Because it's producing 'functional slop' that has little bearing on how anything else would be made the 37K LOC is totally out of context and therefore a misrepresentation.

He has bragging rights over GStack - not 37K LOC, that's bad.

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

#62

Post by astonex »

And with that 37k a day, or 185k per 5-day work-week, what exactly has he achieved?

I don't see any actual output coming from these AI tools, despite how many are saying it's greatly increased their productivity. Where are all the new businesses and tools? I only see more shovels being sold.

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

#63

Post by bluegatty »

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?

It's worse than anything in MS really.

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

#66

Post by inigyou »

pjc50 wrote: post #60
mcv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Using an SUV to make a 500m trip and then bragging about how you now drive 37 kilometers per day.

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

#67

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Ironically the fastcompany page hosting the article that should only be read only paragraphs of text and a simple navigation seems to do 300+ requests, with 29.4mb of resources.

I mean honestly the numbers and issues talked about there seem to be on most modern web apps. It just doesn't seem to affect business results enough for people to care about fixing them.

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

#68

Post by shlant »

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.

I love that they made the comparison to Hacker News in terms of request sizes lmao. Yea definitely a representative sample

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

#69

Post by dingaling »

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…

There are no studies to suggest that "Gell-Mann" is a real phenomenon. It was invented by an author, Michael Crichton, on a whim.

Any rational reader will adjust their faith in a publication based on the identified errors it makes. Too many and they'll reject it as a source for anything beyond "a thing may have happened".

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

#70

Post by MrToadMan »

msdz wrote: post #57
jrflowers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The competence threshold can vary according to the model's complexity and cost to run, but the broader point remains that having a human operator of greater competence that can evaluate the output and understand potential harms that might result seems to be a valid one. Depending on domain, it can be irresponsible to deploy systems you don't fully understand that could harm others. Responsibly overseeing 37k lines of code a day sounds exhausting.
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