Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 108 posts

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

#71

Post by pjc50 »

andrewingram wrote: post #58

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 possi…

A lot of this stuff is simply Veblen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

They're not trying to consume less, they're trying to consume more (and I would count lines of code as "spend", a liability rather than an asset).

Tokenmaxxing is not dissimilar to NFTs. A means of laundering electricity into stock prices and social status, which works for a while.

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

#72

Post by aubanel »

Garry Tan's point still stands: he never pretended to be building nice software. But his point was that he can now build AT ALL! Shipping a webpage at all is the firs step ; making it load under 7 Mo is just a refinement, an important one of course (who tf wants bloated webpages) but still only a refinement. Tan is right to be amazed and to be shipping.

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

#73

Post by dingaling »

mindwok wrote: post #45

> 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 al…

> In others, it's less important and speed of iteration has more value.

Maybe in some sort of topsy-turvy techbro world.

I've never, in three decades of developing, had a user say "what I want are new features updated frequently and I'm happy to accept sluggish, buggy code".

What they do say is "I want more features, sooner, without bugs".

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

#74

Post by meetingthrower »

bluegatty wrote: post #61
meetingthrower wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a great way to put it: functional slop. That's what I mean tho - as long as it is minimally functional it does its job.

I totally get the shade thrown at ycombinator. But I guess my perception is that it has never been about the tech for them and more about getting quick hacks to get to market quickly. So it feels on brand?

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

#75

Post by klik99 »

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 recently did a feasibility test for porting complex c++ project to a stripped down DSP processor with no c or c++ stdlib without making changes to the actual project - sonnet was able to do it in half a day and stumbled for another half a day on a minor error until I pointed out its mistake, but the code was absolutely bad. Just the same, I would’ve taken two weeks to just know it was feasible and I have a reference to know how it avoided certain pitfalls. It’s taken about a month for two of us to do it right, but honestly I don’t think we would’ve attempted it without proof it was possible. I still wouldn’t put any AI code in production for actual end users (beyond the “shed built for a day” use you mention), but that doesn’t mean as a tool it’s not magical. It’s a false binary between the “it’s always amazing” viewpoint of Garry Tan and many others and the “it’s all slop” of the original author, it’s a tool that has specific uses and high costs right now. Its irresponsible to blindly assume it’ll continue to get better, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t valid use cases today

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

#76

Post by mindwok »

dingaling wrote: post #73
mindwok wrote: post #45

> 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 al…

> In others, it's less important and speed of iteration has more value. Maybe in some sort of topsy-turvy techbro world. I've never, in three decades of developing, had a user say "what I want are new features updated frequently and I'm happy to accept sluggish, buggy code". What they do say is "I want more features, sooner, without bugs".

I'd guess you're maybe working on more established codebases then? I see this regularly with my clients. I work in sprints and they pay for my time, so they will often deprioritise engineering/robustness work if it's taking up time that could be used some shiny new feature they want.

Also it's rarely "I want new features and I'm happy for them to be buggy or sluggish", it's more "We want to solve this problem and we're not exactly sure what the solution will look like, so lets try stuff and accept it's not going to be perfect"

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

#77

Post by shapefrog »

dingaling wrote: post #69
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…

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".

I thought you generally knew what you were talking about till i read this. Now I am wondering if you know anything at all.

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

#78

Post by klik99 »

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,…

Exams are usually discussed and part of the corpus though right? Performance on novel problems are really the only good metric and those decay really quickly across models once they’re known, like the pelican on a bicycle test

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

#79

Post by bluegatty »

meetingthrower wrote: post #74
bluegatty wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a great way to put it: functional slop. That's what I mean tho - as long as it is minimally functional it does its job. I totally get the shade thrown at ycombinator. But I guess my perception is that it has never been about the tech for them and more about getting quick hacks to get to market quickly. So it feels on brand?

You're right it's a fine line, but I think there was always a kind of underlying 'tech legitimacy'. PG is a big Lisp nerd. HN is ultra minimal and well designed.

It's one thing to say 'just make it work' - it's another to create hype on top of nonsense.

I don't want to diss vibecoding - because it has it's place, but GStack is being presented in the context of something new and amazing in terms of engineering productivity - not just 'a thing that works good enough'.

But there's an on-brand element to it.

It's a bridge to far though.

There is already backlash, whereas, I'm not sure there is backlash to AirBnB's initial attempts - literally nobody is going to care what their stack is.

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

#80

Post by wayland_jeremy »

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…

We're trying to up the GPA on the code quality exam by giving them access to structural metrics calculated on graph representations of the programs they write. Hoping this is the study guide template they need to start getting an A in minimizing slop, even if they're actually a D student. They're good at optimizing against scores...

https://github.com/Krv-Labs/topos

Post reply on HN