I'm pretty sure that I could consistently spew 1000 lines a day/per commit if it was mostly cut-n-pasting of existing code, that I had complete access to, with some minor variations.
The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#22Does anyone know what “agent tea” is in the second graph? There is a paper about a protocol but it seems a bit obscure to be featured in this context and the other two points on the graph are models.
I think the graph is getting cut off for you - for me it reads "Agent Teams"
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Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#23> Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning. How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future. Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.
We should fund them, sure, but that’s not enough.
The problem is the cost is so wildly asymmetric. When everyone with a computer and a subscription can vibe code low quality features, when everyone can submit dubious security bug reports, no amount of funding will even that out. Producing submissions is essentially free while triaging and reviewing remains very expensive.
3 years ago the cost was asymmetric in the other direction. The cost of writing code was high. The cost of finding security bugs was extremely high. The cost of triaging and reviewing was basically the same as it is today.
Large corporations that are well funded are facing the exact same issues internally right now. With agent output so cheap, how do you deal with the deluge? It’s not practical or desirable to have your best engineers doing nothing but reviewing generated code, some of which is likely very low value.
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#24The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.
It wasnt one thing, gnu is a case of cathedrals. Corps are usually more cathedrally than bazaary because of their hierarchical top down structure, but ymmv, an elon musk or steve jobs company will be more cathedral than a conglomerate like unilever or a google or microsoft
Google is famously a slime mold.
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#25Does anyone have numbers for churn vs. cumulative code?
Most of my commits (hand written and AI) have delete counts that are 75-110% the added line count.
The point that many developers will probably forget to tell the LLM to run cleanup/refactoring paths is probably true though. (I’ve definitely found ghost-chasing bugfixes in all sorts of corners of LLM generated code).
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#26So, I’ve explored AI coding, but my conclusion up to this point has been that it’s interesting, but the code is sometimes a mess, and sometimes it will completely crater the project to the point where you just have to throw it all away and start over. After reading this article, I keep wondering if we’re really being productive or just creating lots of crappy code at machine speeds now. It’s one thing to say that we are using a “security agent,” for example, to ensure the security of the code, but quite another to actually know (or at least strongly believe) that our code is really secure. With all the froth of generating thousands of lines of code, how are we sure? In some sense, my question is whether we’re building a Winchester Mystery House or a house of cards.
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#27> Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning. How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future. Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.
LLMs can drown a fleet of paid maintainers. Machines can generate code (even good code, not just slop) far faster than humans can evaluate it.
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#28>Gary Tan’s personal AI committee gstack is a Winchester Mystery House constructed mostly from Markdown. Winchester Mystery Potemkin Village.
Yea, I was curious about that, too. It’s one thing to vibe code a one-off personal project. It’s another to create something that can run the distance.
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#29So, I’ve explored AI coding, but my conclusion up to this point has been that it’s interesting, but the code is sometimes a mess, and sometimes it will completely crater the project to the point where you just have to throw it all away and start over. After reading this article, I keep wondering if we’re really being productive or just creating lots of crappy code at machine speeds now. It’s one thing to say that we…
Software developers working on their own have built monstrosities before (not as quickly) but it seems likely that this is a skill issue and we will learn how to use these tools better. You can tell coding agents to work on cleaning up code, improving the architecture, and so on.
Maybe adopting some hard constraints on code complexity that agents have to work within would help?
Re: The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
#30The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.
The essay also didn't kick anything off; it was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.