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"I met a founder who writes 10k lines of code a day thanks to AI"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- akmarinov 1y agoHe’s an indie developer then, not a founder?
- brettkromkamp 1y agoHe says that this is not 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap… but, unless you are explicitly verifying and testing the code, how would you know? And, what kind of solution needs 10,000 lines of code added to it daily? Then again, these could be separate solutions. but, still… this 10,000-lines-of-code-a-day thing seems strange.
- itake 1y agoMaybe they create 10k lines per day, but only 10% actually make it into production?
- cm2187 1y agoHTML/CSS? Anything UI is unnecessary verbose, and full of boilerplate code. [edit] also any interaction with storage / database isn't fun either, unless you use some ORM frameworks, and then you have some even bigger problems.
- smartmic 1y agoExactly. And I wonder why Paul Graham is jumping on such a statement. Of everything I've read by him so far, this has the least substance.
- rich_sasha 1y agoI suppose VC love it. They want to lower the bar to building products, and make them cheaper. They want a steady line of investable companies with cheap hiring down the line. More generally, it's weird. 10 years ago, the technical aspects would legitimately be seen as a major, perhaps main obstacle to building a product. It's questionable whether that is really gone (can you really, really build a software product now with just LLMs? With deployment, security etc). But for sure the technological bar is now much lower, it might disappear altogether, and what remains is actually finding a useful product, marketing, finding clients etc. Which I'd argue were actually always the biggest step to overcome.
- jamil7 1y ago> 10 years ago, the technical aspects would legitimately be seen as a major, perhaps main obstacle to building a product. Yeah I think that this was really more the advancement of frameworks, tooling and SaaS software. I see it all the time with non-technical people at work who demo something they built with LLMs and its always Next.js, Supabase and Tailwaind that are actually doing the heavy lifting, with the LLM invoking some commands for them. This all gets attributed to LLMs though since this is often the first exposure to those tools for non-technical people. Most engineers also knew how to scaffold a SaaS with Rails, Django or Next.js, Stripe etc. without writing much code.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago> Most engineers also knew how to scaffold a SaaS with Rails, Django or Next.js, Stripe etc. without writing much code. Most web engineers do, certainly. But I work in data, so I didn't. And for me, LLM based tools have made it much, much easier to build relatively simple frontends for my data stuff that make my life a lot easier. I'm partial to the notion that LLMs don't really raise the ceiling, rather they raise the floor by making web n00bs like me more effective at shipping stuff that can be used by others. To be fair though, I'm much handier at Django now than I used to be, and am slowly learning JS/browser stuff as a result of these projects.
- anothernewdude 1y agoI would say, if you're fully embracing AI altering code frequently, and want to do it safely... Then a lot of things about the way code should be structured can change. If you're not editing by hand, and want to limit the scope of changes, and have AI tools to make future edits faster... THEN you can have a lot of redundancy in your code. You can just not have complex code that shares responsibility and instead have redundant repeated code that solves one problem differently. It's not what I would advocate for every single part of every program, but many things now make sense to be structured in this way. Separate out concerns way more, and not try to have complex solutions that solve many problems at once, and favour repetitive code slightly more. Much as you would structure a project if you had some junior programmers, you might have sections that only seniors should be touching - complex cores and difficult parts where you have way more oversight. And use more AI in the areas where you'd let juniors do scut work.
- Someone 1y ago> unless you are explicitly verifying and testing the code, how would you know? Ask your AI to write tests and to review the code, of course /s > And, what kind of solution needs 10,000 lines of code added to it daily? In the first days, adding 10,000 useful lines a day can be very helpful. It means you get your MVP out earlier and/or makes it way easier to experiment with different ways to solve a problem.
- flashgordon 1y agoTo be fair. After having done this for the last 6 months (sabbaticals are fantastic things). About 5k lines of code corresponds to 1-2 "decent" features. And though an ai skeptic originally I've turned around - so 10k is not hard if: A. you are doing this "full time" B. Know what to build C. More importantly you know "how" you want it built and you push the llm to refactoring regularly in your style. I don't buy into the "let the agent code for 6 hours straight" agentic nonsense. I review every (big) change and just saving me stackoverflow/Google visits has been a huge productivity booster. Heck I wrote css, proto plugins, dsl parsers, simple games and more because now I needed much less "onboarding" times.
- rchaud 1y agoPaul Graham became thoroughly Thomas Friedman-ized about 15 years ago. He's a 30,000-foot cheerleader for "innovation" and "free markets" these days.
- ZiiS 1y agoSo do I
- liquidise 1y agoAs*
- 1GZ0 1y agoWhy would anyone care who Paul Graham hangs out with?
- DANmode 1y agoIs that a joke?
- DANmode 1y agoI bet he'd be pumped to know he created a community that's so counterculture it either doesn't know who he is, or disdains him. Actual lol.
- eddythompson80 1y agoMark Zuckerberg created much bigger and more useful communities. Must be the better man. Actual lol.
- DANmode 1y agoHuh?
- uamgeoalsk 1y agoCounterculture? Do you think you have to be counterculture not to know who Paul Graham is? What the fuck lol. Ask anyone outside of your little bubble and they won't have a fucking clue. Edit: The above was needlessly confrontational. I don't know you and it was uncalled for. I just fucking despise Silicon Valley.
- justsayinstuff 1y agoYou know where you're posting, right? Not know who he is funny, not counterculture. Having disdain for him is getting there.
- muskyFelon 1y agoIt's really sad to see what big tech has become these days. At least some folks are ready to stop drinking the kool-aid.
- rwmj 1y agoI met a company that has a huge technical debt.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoUnpaid technical debt who will eventually want others to pay it.
- ZYZ64738 1y agoGreat but I don't want meet myself letting AI write 10k lines of "code" for me
- CafeRacer 1y ago"I met your wife, she was happy I did not say a word about AI". AI is a too and can be useful at times. But amount of hype is unjustified in my opinion. Ergo, I am getting a feeling that there is some kind of elite conspiracy going on.
- countfeng 1y agoWill artificial intelligence steal my ideas?
- balamatom 1y agoNo, but it might alter the world in ways which make it futile to accomplish some goals. Your goals in particular if you do not account for basilisk-compliance.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoOnly if you get the BCI implants or talk in your sleep.
- throwmeaway222 1y agoshow me their github stats then pg
- onion2k 1y ago"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." Bill Gates
- a2128 1y agoThis comes to mind: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
- gherkinnn 1y ago10k lines added daily or generating 10k lines, of which only a fraction makes it? Either way, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and from that one visible tweet without an account I remain unconvinced.
- cess11 1y agoBetter link, at least for me: https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236 https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236 I've done that, occasionally, though through deterministic means, i.e. code generation tools. If you know what you're getting it's no big deal. If you don't, it probably is, but not in a good way. If it's actually true and the result reasonable, I expect ~7-8 KLOC out of those 10 to be adequate and necessary tests, and roughly 4 out of those 12 h a day to be waiting for tests to finish. I also expect static analysis tooling, linters, ast-grep and so on get a lot of use.
- philipp-gayret 1y ago> I also expect static analysis tooling, linters, ast-grep and so on get a lot of use. Better yet, feedback from these kind of tools is exactly what AI is great at in iteratively resolving so you don't have to review code below your standard of quality.
- nivertech 1y ago"I met a guy who takes on $10,000 debt a day thanks to an unlimited line of credit." What could go wrong?
- rsynnott 1y agoIf it was _truly_ unlimited, that might not be an unreasonable thing to do. Of course, nothing ever is.
- firefoxd 1y agoBut is he a true Scotsman? https://idiallo.com/byte-size/ai-scotsman https://idiallo.com/byte-size/ai-scotsman
- koliber 1y ago"I met a founder today who said he ..." I meet people all the time who say the most incredible things. Sometimes, rarely, these things turn out to be true.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoEspecially in Silicon Valley where there is an increased density of counterproductive/self-defeating crazy people and smooth, Cheshire-cat-like liars who charm almost everyone like cult leaders.
- AndyMcConachie 1y agoPG has become a parody of himself.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoMaybe it's an inside baseball joke taken out of context that I don't understand.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoHe was some 20..10 years ago a proponent of succint code and even authored the Arc language which is used to run HN.
- rchaud 1y agoIs HN any more sophisticated than a PHPbb forum? The value is in the community and moderation, not the back end.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoGiven that is has soldiered on almost two decades as a single-server system, I'd give a bit more credit to the back end.
- mvdtnz 1y agoVERY important to note that Paul Graham is a dumb guy.
- allanmacgregor 1y agoThat statement definetively shows him out of touch. Is such a bad take.
- admissionsguy 1y agoEvery time something like this is said, the author turns out (in this case, obviously is given the yc’s recent investment profile) to be a peddler of AI coding tools.
- dejv 1y agoEven if I wrote 10k lines of code a day I will be out of things to implement in day two. Maybe I am working on wrong codebases, but I never felt like I am behind because of not enough lines got writen. It was always finding and forming correct perspective. Just for fun I checked the codebase stats for platform I am working on and it is 70k lines of code. We are talking about enterprise saas processing payments in billions per year.
- jackdoe 1y agoI can see that. Last week I have been working on remote controlling Borunte welding robots, I wrote 10k lines of code per day, creating all kinds of interfaces, weird ik strategies, camera calibrations, weird joypad controls, cad mouse controls, simulations etc. None of it was prod ready, I was just experimenting, but tbh I would've made 1/10th of the progress if it wasn't for gemini and claude. Now I know what to write. PS: the default ik engine on those robots have a bug that can easily kill you when it gets singular, so if you are working on them, keep your distance :)
- wiseowise 1y ago> But he's not naive. This is not 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap. > As it turns out I met another startup today that's using AI to do ongoing testing of changing codebases. (He's not using them yet though.) This is a satire, right?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoWhen someone becomes sufficiently and necessarily old and grizzled, our existence collapses into schadenfreudian enjoyment of confusing the uninitiated. Or: too much weed tweeting. Twitter is such a superficial format that obliterates all context, reason, and sense of humanity. I'm still 100% unsure what the intent of that conveyance was. Brain fart? That's why I don't tweet. Also, I'm too old.
- brainless 1y agoI stopped looking at my code about 2 months back. I am launching "Lets Order", a micro SaaS, entirely generated by Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Google Jules, etc. I follow a structured approach, using issues on GitHub, Git branches, etc. - as I have done as an engineer for more than a decade. Rust (backend) and TypeScript - Admin app (for managers), Menu app (for guests) and marketing site. SQLite database with LiteStream for backups. Basic tests, CI/CD. All this - solo, in 10 days. Plus I market a lot more than I have ever had time. - Source code and GitHub issues: https://github.com/brainless/letsorder https://github.com/brainless/letsorder - Site: https://letsorder.app https://letsorder.app I am sure there are parts that will break, but what I am getting out of a Claude Pro $20/month in value is a dream. I am generating a couple other products in parallel too, all sources available.
- oxfordmale 1y agoThanks for sharing this, very brave. Looking at the code, there is a good chance this codebase is vulnerable to SQL injection.
- brainless 1y agoI will not be surprised if there is but that is not a problem that cannot be fixed with some effort. The point is if we can produce deploy-able, full-stack apps, which are manageable, this changes what it means for software and for startups. I live in a remote village in Himalayas, WB, India that I am sure no one on HN has heard of. I got 5G based broadband that is flaky just a few weeks back. By the end of this year, I am sure I will be able to attempt 4-5 products and market them more than I have ever done in my 16 years of professional life. Software development has changed, forever.
- oxfordmale 1y agoThe design is fundamentally flawed, with queries in close to hundred .js files. Perhaps you marker and sell a few, but it looks insecure and would be hard to refactor.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- guelo 1y agopg somewhat backs off with the claim in a subsequent tweet "The fact that you can write x number of LOC in 12 hours doesn't imply that you work 12 hour days every day." The first tweet says "lines of code a day". https://x.com/paulg/status/1953321877746901060 https://x.com/paulg/status/1953321877746901060
- uamgeoalsk 1y agoThis is like praising an "author" who self-publishes hundreds of AI-ghostwritten novels a day and then preemptively defending against criticism by going "He's not naive. These aren't books of typo-filled, grammatically incorrect crap".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jgb1984 1y agoWhat a load of crap.
- rwmj 1y agoLiterally, for anyone thinking about investing in this company.
- 28304283409234 1y agoCode is an answer. What is the question?
- bananapub 1y agohow are you even meant to review 10k lines of code a day?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoOne key process advantage Meta has is that all commits (diffs) require review by someone other than you, preferably supported by added tests and tests passing (whether locally or by automated test infrastructure). It gets more complicated when testing and reducing risk of deploying infrastructure and client platform code rather than pure service-oriented software running as part of an app.
- bananapub 1y agoyes, everyone who cares about code quality should do that, that was what I'm talking about - even after automated tests, and automated linting, 10k is a huge amount of code for one person to coherently review each day.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThat's absolutely true. Not arguing with that. It's absolutely absurd. The point of requiring others to review code is it essentially eliminates cowboy coding and incomprehensible crap because another person/people puts their credibility on the line when they sign-off. It doesn't devolve into "trust me, bro, just rubber stamp it" because of the seriousness, professionalism tech culture.
- benterix 1y agoWell, Paul, show us the code and let us judge ourselves instead of using the old "trust me, bro" rhetoric that doesn't work any more.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoSigh. (Take away pg's weed for today.) That's 100-200 defects/day and unknown vulnerabilities. Building one's own coffin by voluminous tech debt to be repaid later with interest. It's wiser to reuse what already exists and reduce kLoC for maximum delivered utility. And it's also an absolutely dubious claim to assert because there's absolutely no evidence... it's purely a vague, testimonial vibe. (Sorry, pg.)
- jaredcwhite 1y agoIt is literally impossible for someone to understand what they're "coding" in a day if 10,000 lines (!!) just got farted out of some codegen tools. I cannot believe anyone would say this responsibly with a straight face.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoThey're not coding, they're not vibe coding, they're asking for the code to an LLM. When people say "I did this" showing something they did with AI, the reality is "I asked an AI for this". Okay, not every time, but something on this scale would, they don't even know what those 10K lines of code do, they asked and received.