6 ms·
src/cli/print.ts This is the single worst function in the codebase by every metric: - 3,167 lines long (the file itself is 5,594 lines) - 12 levels of nes
by mohsen1 7mo ago
src/cli/print.ts
This is the single worst function in the codebase by every metric:
- 3,167 lines long (the file itself is 5,594 lines)
- 12 levels of nesting at its deepest
- ~486 branch points of cyclomatic complexity
- 12 parameters + an options object with 16 sub-properties
- Defines 21 inner functions and closures
- Handles: agent run loop, SIGINT, rate-limits, AWS auth, MCP lifecycle, plugin install/refresh, worktree bridging, team-lead polling (while(true) inside), control message dispatch (dozens of types), model switching, turn interruption
recovery, and more
This should be at minimum 8–10 separate modules.
- phtrivier 7mo agoYes, if it was made for human comprehension or maintenance. If it's entirely generated / consumed / edited by an LLM, arguably the most important metric is... test coverage, and that's it ?
- konart 7mo agoCan't we have generated / llm generated code to be more human maintainable?
- grey-area 7mo agoLLMs are so so far away from being able to independently work on a large codebase, and why would they not benefit from modularity and clarity too?
- olmo23 7mo agoI agree the functions in a file should probably be reasonably-sized. It's also interesting to note that due to the way round-tripping tool-calls work, splitting code up into multiple files is counter-productive. You're better off with a single large file.
- AlexCoventry 7mo ago> due to the way round-tripping tool-calls work, splitting code up into multiple files is counter-productive. Can you expand on that?
- zer00eyz 7mo ago> independently work on a large codebase Im not sure that Humans are great at this either. Think about how we use frameworks and have complex supply chains... we sort of get "good enough" at what we need to do and pray a lot that everything else keeps working and that our tooling (things like artifactory) save us from supply chain attacks. Or we just run piles of old, outdated code because "it works". I cant tell you how many micro services I have seen that are "just fine" but no one in the current org has ever read a line of what's in them, and the people who wrote them left ages ago. > clarity too Yes, but define clarity! I recently had the pleasure of fixing a chunk of code that was part of a data pipeline. It was an If/elseif/elseif structure... where the final two states were fairly benign and would have been applicable in 99 percent of cases. Everything else was to deal with the edge cases! I had an idea of where the issue was, but I didn't understand how the code ended up in the state it was in... Blame -> find the commit message (references ticket) -> find the Jira ticket (references sales force) -> find the original customer issue in salesforce, read through the whole exchange there. A two line comment could have spared me all that work, to get to what amounted to a dead simple fix. The code was absolutely clear, but without the "why" portion of the context I likely would have created some sort of regression, that would have passed the good enough testing that was there. I re-wrote a portion of the code (expanding variable names) - that code is now less "scannable" and more "readable" (different types of clarity). Dropped in comments: a few sentences of explaining, and references to the tickets. Went and updated tests, with similar notes. Meanwhile, elsewhere (other code base, other company), that same chain is broken... the "bug tracking system" that is referenced in the commit messages there no longer exists. I have a friend who, every time he updates his dev env, he calls me to report that he "had to go update the wiki again!" Because someone made a change and told every one in a slack message. Here is yet another vast repository of degrading, unsearchable and unusable tribal knowledge embedded in so many organizations out there. Don't even get me started on the project descriptions/goals/tasks that amount to pantomime a post-it notes, absent of any sort of genuine description. Lack of clarity is very much also a lack of "context" in situ problem.
- grey-area 7mo agoI think humans are pretty good at it with small teams and the right structure. There are definitely dysfunctional orgs as you describe where humans produce garbage code yes. I blame the org for that, not the humans. As to what defines clarity, yes of course, like the word quality this is very hard to define, but we can certainly recognise when it was not considered. I think it is a goal worth striving for though, and abandoning code standards because we now have AI helpers is stupid and self-defeating, even if we think they are very capable and will improve. The end of history has not in fact arrived with generative AI, we still have to maintain software after.
- Bayko 7mo agoYe I honestly don't understand his comment. Is it bad code writing? Pre 2026? Sure. In 2026. Nope. Is it going to be a headache for some poor person on oncall? Yes. But then again are you "supposed" to go through every single line in 2026? Again no. I hate it. But the world is changing and till the bubble pops this is the new norm
- yoz-y 7mo agoThe jury on this one is still out.
- phtrivier 7mo agoSorry, I was not clear enough. My first word was litteraly "Yes", so I agree that a function like this is a maintenance nightmare for a human. And, sure, the code might not be "optimized" for the LLM, or token efficiency. However, to try and make my point clearer: it's been reported that anthropic has "some developpers won't don't write code" [1]. I have no inside knowledge, but it's possible, by extension, to assume that some parts of their own codebase are "maintained" mostly by LLMs themselves. If you push this extension, then, the code that is generated only has to be "readable" to: * the next LLM that'll have to touch it * the compiler / interpreter that is going to compile / run it. In a sense (and I know this is a stretch, and I don't want to overdo the analogy), are we, here, judging a program quality by reading something more akin to "the x86 asm outputed by the compiler", rather than the "source code" - which in this case, is "english prompts", hidden somewhere in the claude code session of a developper ? Just speculating, obviously. My org is still very much more cautious, and mandating people to have the same standard for code generated by LLM as for code generated by human ; and I agree with that. I would _not_ want to debug the function described by the commentor. So I'm still very much on the "claude as a very fast text editor" side, but is it unreasonnable to assume that anthropic might be further on the "claude as a compiler for english" side ? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1s7jjky/anthropic_ceo_i_have_engineers_within_anthropic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1s7j...
- heavyset_go 7mo agoIf that's the case then that's dumb
- mdavid626 7mo agoOh boy, you couldn't be more wrong. If something, LLM-s need MORE readable code, not less. Do you want to burn all your money in tokens?
- mrbungie 7mo agoCan't wait to have LLM generated physical objects that explode on you face and no engineer can fix.
- phtrivier 7mo agoOh, do we agree on that. I never said it was "smart" - I just had a theory that would explain why such code could exist (see my longer answer below).
- ulrikrasmussen 7mo agoUnit testing is much much harder when you have functions spanning thousands of lines and no abstractions. You have to white box test everything to ensure that you hit all code paths, and it is much more expensive to maintain such tests, both as a human and LLM. I don't think this can be ignored just because LLMs are writing the code.
- dntrkv 7mo agoMassive tests files are almost as bad a massive function. Scrolling through a 3k line test suite with multiple levels of nesting trying to figure out which cases are covered is a fucking pain in the ass.
- mohsen1 7mo agohere's another gem. src/ink/termio/osc.ts:192–210 void execFileNoThrow('wl-copy', [], opts).then(r => { if (r.code === 0) { linuxCopy = 'wl-copy'; return } void execFileNoThrow('xclip', ...).then(r2 => { if (r2.code === 0) { linuxCopy = 'xclip'; return } void execFileNoThrow('xsel', ...).then(r3 => { linuxCopy = r3.code === 0 ? 'xsel' : null }) }) }) are we doing async or not?
- sudo_man 7mo ago[flagged]
- almostdeadguy 7mo agoA defining work of the "just vibes" era.
- mrcwinn 7mo agoYou fail to mention the prior decades of really bad software engineers writing awful code -- off of which these models trained.
- almostdeadguy 7mo agoYes, anthropic is not the only company in the world with some shitty code, and yet I feel no pangs of guilt over laughing about it.
- visarga 7mo agoClaude Code says thank you for reporting, I bet they will scan this chat to see what bugs they need to fix asap.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo agowhat does that even do?
- clankerbad 7mo ago
- siruwastaken 7mo agoHow is it that a AI coding agent that is supposedly _so great at coding_ is running on this kind of slop behind the scenes. /s
- rirze 7mo agoBecause it’s based on human slop. It’s simply the student.
- WesolyKubeczek 7mo agoBut it is running, that's the mystery.
- Shocka1 7mo agoBecause in reality no one except for good engineers actually care about what the code looks like. The only thing most users care about with Claude Code is having it quickly vibe code the crappy idea they came up with that is going to 10x their lives, or whatever.
- novaleaf 7mo agoI'm sure this is no surprise to anyone who has used CC for a while. This is the source of so many bugs. I would say "open bugs" but Anthropic auto-closes bugs that don't have movement on them in like 60 days.
- lavezzi 7mo ago> This issue has been automatically locked since it was closed and has not had any activity for 7 days. If you're experiencing a similar issue, please file a new issue and reference this one if it's relevant. Close.
- mohsen1 7mo agoit's the `runHeadlessStreaming` function btw
- acedTrex 7mo agoWell, literally no one has ever accused anthropic of having even half way competent engineers. They are akin to monkeys whacking stuff with a stick.
- ykonstant 7mo ago"That's Larry; he does most of the work around here."
- DustinBrett 7mo ago"You can get Claude to split that up"
- keeganpoppen 7mo agothe claude code team ethos, as far as i’ve been lead to understand— which i agree with, mind you— is that there is no point in code-reviewing ai-generated code… simply update your spec(s) and regenerate. it is just a completely different way of interacting with the world. but it clearly works for them, so people throwing up their hands should at least take notice of the fact that they are absolutely not competing with traditional code along traditional lines. it may be sucky aesthetically, but they have proven from their velocity that it can be extremely effective. welcome to the New World Order, my friend.
- lanbin 7mo agoI see. They got unlimited tokens, right?
- knome 7mo ago>there is no point in code-reviewing ai-generated code the idea that you should just blindly trust code you are responsible for without bothering to review it is ludicrous.
- eclipxe 7mo agoWhy?
- fl4regun 7mo agoIs this a serious question? If you are handling sensitive information how do you confirm your application is secure and won't leak or expose information to people who shouldn't know it?
- lijok 7mo agoHow do you with classic code?
- hallway_monitor 7mo ago
- jollymonATX 7mo agoMaybe going slow is a feature for them? A kind of rate limit by bad code way to controlling overall throughput.
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago> This should be at minimum 8–10 separate modules. Can't really say that for sure. The way humans structure code isn't some ideal best possible state of computer code, it's the ideal organization of computer code for human coders. Nesting and cyclomatic complexity are indicators ("code smells"). They aren't guaranteed to lead to worse outcomes. If you have a function with 12 levels of nesting, but in each nest the first line is 'return true', you actually have 1 branch. If 2 of your 486 branch points are hit 99.999% of the time, the code is pretty dang efficient. You can't tell for sure if a design is actually good or bad until you run it a lot. One thing we know for sure is LLMs write code differently than we do. They'll catch incredibly hard bugs while making beginner mistakes. I think we need a whole new way of analyzing their code. Our human programming rules are qualitative because it's too hard to prove if an average program does what we want. I think we need a new way to judge LLM code. The worst outcome I can imagine would be forcing them to code exactly like we do. It just reinforces our own biases, and puts in the same bugs that we do. Vibe coding is a new paradigm, done by a new kind of intelligence. As we learn how to use it effectively, we should let the process of what works develop naturally. Evolution rather than intelligent design.
- FuckButtons 7mo agoI’ve heard this take before, but if you’ve spent any time with llm’s I don’t understand how your take can be: “I should just let this thing that makes mistakes all the time and seems oblivious to the complexity it’s creating because it only observes small snippets out of context make it’s own decisions about architecture, this is just how it does things and I shouldn’t question it.”
- meffmadd 7mo agoI think this view assumes no human will/should ever read the code. This is considered bad practice because someone else will not understand the code as well whether written by a human or agent. Unless 0% human oversight is needed anymore agents should still code like us.
- zarzavat 7mo agoI don't buy this. Claude doesn't usually have any issues understanding my code. It has tons of issues understanding its code. The difference between my code and Claude's code is that when my code is getting too complex to fit in my head, I stop and refactor it, since for me understanding the code is a prerequisite for writing code. Claude, on the other hand, will simply keep generating code well past the point when it has lost comprehension. I have to stop, revert, and tell it to do it again with a new prompt. If anything, Claude has a greater need for structure than me since the entire task has to fit in the relatively small context window.
- epolanski 7mo agoHmmm it's likely they have found that it works better for LLMs that need to operate on it.
- federicchauvat 6mo ago[dead]