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

khazhoux 3mo ago
How can anyone in their right mind think that growing a codebase by 200K LOC every week could possibly be a good thing?
Alien1Being 3mo ago
"Tan/AI built the website so that when a user visits, their browser makes 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. For comparison, the minimalist Hacker News homepage (also run by Y Combinator) makes seven requests for data totaling just 12 kilobytes. The website ships 28 actual test files (code developers use to reality-check their work) straight to every visitor’s browser. That’s 300 kilobytes of pure developer scaffolding that users never asked for. It loads 78 different JavaScript controllers for features like AI image generation, voice extraction, video tools, etc., none of which appear on the homepage. The browser still has to download all of them “just in case.” The site’s logo is an illustration of a bear. The site downloads the logo in eight different formats, including a completely empty 0-byte file that somehow made it to production, Gregorein found. The website uses huge, uncompressed old-school PNGs (some nearly 2 megabytes each), even though the browser literally asks for modern tiny formats. Two images alone waste about 4 MB; with newer formats they could have been just 300KB. Gregorein also found duplicate page content, an empty CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file, a huge rich-text editor loaded on a read-only page, missing image descriptions, and analytics code that deliberately routes through a proxy to dodge people’s ad blockers (with a comment in the code admitting it), Gregorein reports," Brave new world indeed... It might be elliptically relevant that in the original novel by Aldous Huxley, the protagonist John the Savage hangs himself at the end when his search for truth fails.
- philipp-gayret 3mo ago
  Impressive. Now, let's see the link in this post to fastcompany.com; It opens a website that also pulls in 6MB using more "server requests" than 169, in fact the number keeps going up, and all it does is display a paywall. So, let's not pretend this is something unique.
  - Semaphor 3mo ago
    I’m not a huge AI fan, and was ready for some Schadenfreude. But with every paragraph I thought "so, just like modern human-created websites?"
    - matwood 3mo ago
      Exactly, it's like that old anti-drug commercial from the 90s where the dad asks the son where he learned to smoke pot or whatever and son retorts, "I learned it from watching you!"
  - coldtea 3mo ago
    The difference is that nobody brags about churning out pages like the fastcompany.com link landing page. If anything, they're ashamed of it - and they only do it because managers and shady SEO types push for that shit. Nor are such bloated pages regarded (or were regarded pre-AI) as anything else than as a symptom of the sickness of modern web practices.
blubber 3mo ago
"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?
- coldtea 3mo ago
  >2. So anyone with a claude subscription could arrive at the same conclusions? It's symmetrical: just like anyone with a claude subscription could arrive at the same vibe slop!
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  Personally, I've used my newfound productivity to build higher quality software at the same rate as I produced mediocre quality software before. Some people, like Gary Tan for example, seem to instead produce software at the same quality or worse than before, but just produce a ton more software regardless of quality. I guess the article in reality is just these two perspectives pitted against each other for some cheap views.
- arcticbull 3mo ago
  I'd suggest looking at the review itself, there's an X-the-everything-app thread on it. https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316 https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316 Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs, I'm having trouble understanding what 78,000 lines of ruby in the context of a Rails blog could ... do. I'm sure there's some powerful ugly stuff in Office but in a good code that's calcified kind of way. It got that way over like 30 years of releasing to the public across platforms, not over a weekend. I'd be surprised if microsoft.com is shipping their entire test suite unminified and their back-end posting rich text editor with index.html (with two title tags in the head) and rendering the entire DOM for desktop and mobile regardless of your platform. I'm not critiquing Garry or the site. I think it's great people are using AI to build things that bring them joy, or that they find useful. I certainly do. I am opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code. It has always been the worst metric on earth as a proxy for productivity. Every line is a liability, and it always was. AI has not changed that, if anything it's amplifying it. The best PRs remove code, not add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC are OpenAI and Anthropic. Everyone else seems to be rummaging around for an ROI.
stratocumulus0 3mo ago
The cult of 10x got their magical tool that lets them feel 100x. Don't take their toy away from an excited kid.
embedding-shape 3mo ago
Seems to be a frequently occurring issue, most (good) software engineers know that LOC basically means nothing, if anything, less LOC is a better goal over more LOC, if you absolutely have to have a goal. As soon as people/companies starts bragging about how many LOC they can ship, you need to start being very suspicious, mostly because they just admitted to not actually understand software engineering at all. Cursor did something similar months ago, bragging about producing millions of LOC while what they actually made barely worked and could have been built with an order of magnitude less LOC: https://emsh.cat/en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ https://emsh.cat/en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522 | 324 points | 5 months ago | 156 comments) What I don't understand, isn't there a single engineer working with these people who ask them what the fuck they're doing, before they hit that publish button? Or is there just such a constant pressure to publish anything that quality just simply doesn't matter at all to these people?
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
  > 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. Ahh … remember the good ol’ days, when we were forced to cap our Web pages at 32K? I have found similar issues with LLM-generated code. Lots of code … lots of issues. Just yesterday, I went through a whole bunch of LLM-generated code, and switched the threading model. It sped up my code significantly, and the jetsam crashes stopped immediately. Until I used LLM code, my apps had never jetsam-crashed before. First time for everything, I guess.
- cindyllm 3mo ago
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- filmax777 3mo ago
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apimade 3mo ago
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 be confident that it won’t. And even if it didn’t fall on my head under normal conditions, I also would not know when I needed to design for earthquakes. Or floods. Or fire. Or wind. Or grandmother-cosplaying wolves with very strong lungs. But if all I need is shelter for a day, would I necessarily care whether it lasts more than a week? That is effectively what a website like this is. It is not really a product. People don’t depend on it. Tan’s visitors are probably using MacBooks and iPhones on fast networks, and most of them will never notice how bad it is under the surface. That does not mean it is good. It means it is good enough for the context. Most people also tolerated the hilarious gigabyte JSON parsing bug in Grand Theft Auto for years, until a hacker patched it and cut GTA Online loading times by around 70%: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... It was good enough, even if people noticed how bad it was. Business applications, and typical software really doesn’t have to be super tuned or perform fast. It just needs to work. At least until your product category has been commoditized, and _then_ you’re competing on experience.
- meetingthrower 3mo ago
  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...
  - officialchicken 3mo ago
    ... and engineers don't have to consider this a good look coming from the head of YC. These are rookie mistakes - generated by both the human and AI model in a collaborative process. It's also the kind of mistake most of us aren't willing to make b/c we don't have the capital to sweep it under the rug if it goes pear-shaped.
darig 3mo ago
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amirofy 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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shapefrog 3mo ago
Garry is buying horses for all the defenders in this thread. No he wont fund your startup.
- vrganj 3mo ago
  Still better than when he was making death threats against public officials. Letting this guy run the show is a public declaration of the moral bankruptcy of the tech sphere.
feverzsj 3mo ago
But web dev is extremely bloat and inefficient already.
- croes 3mo ago
  left-pad comes to mind
rwmj 3mo ago
https://archive.ph/KHM9E https://archive.ph/KHM9E
Arnt 3mo ago
Focus on a single metric instead of outcome and you win on that metric instead of the outcome. I remember that for, uh, Key Quarterly Objectives, was that the name? Aeons ago. Same shit new decade. (I love working with AI though. It has many of the benefits of good pair programming.)
amarcheschi 3mo ago
my cpu fan spinning a lot when visiting that website
titanomachy 3mo ago
> 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. Quantity, in other words, doesn’t necessarily equal quality. They didn't provide any evidence for this point. They showed that the code is bad quality, but not that it matters that it's bad.
- weego 3mo ago
  My hot take is that the entire history of the personal internet was inefficient, badly built and chaotic and it was much more fun to exist in. I really don't see a problem if it breathes life into the internet for non-technical people to be creative and interesting again. Wordpress etc gave people a cheap voice, but at the cost of immovable guard-rails. And even at a small business level, most stuff people build get's torn down by the next person or next agency 6, 12, 18 months later anyway so why care about engineering rigour (this point does not extend to security concerns) in the front end when you can spin up and tear down something in a day or two for incredibly cheap. I'm honestly tired at the pearl-clutching when we ourselves have helped shape an industry that constantly raises the bar to entry with unnecessary techincal complexity and bloat. Ever built a brochureware site in react or similar? you've done exactly what the this guy did, you just did it with pure intent rather than an AI doing it
  - titanomachy 3mo ago
    Yeah almost all code is just good enough to get the job done. Exceptions include (some) open-source codebases, a few key projects at leading tech companies, and probably the work of obscure geniuses at random companies that nobody else will ever see.
  - MrSkelter 3mo ago
    You are completely right. I have decades of experience building products working with everyone from remote teams I have never met to FAANG employees in Silicon Valley. Pretty much every product and site is a combination of good work, hacks and hope. When people attack LLMs on the basis of quality I don’t know what they think the standard is? Outside 8-bit games which shipped in cassette and the Apollo flight computer most modern code only works because it’s been consistently updated and fixed in flight. It’s sad but true. LLMs write code the way they write English. It’s not pretty but is of much higher general quality than the human average.
zerof1l 3mo ago
Measuring success in LoC is so wrong… 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. The end result is the same. AI has a tendency to generate more code than necessary. It keeps re-inventing things, and every time you ask it to add a new feature or fix something, it just keeps on piling the code. I now periodically ask AI to refactor the code by simplifying, removing unused things, factoring out, and reusing.
- mcv 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - pjc50 3mo ago
    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.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Using an SUV to make a 500m trip and then bragging about how you now drive 37 kilometers per day.
- zombot 3mo ago
  IOW, you're doing an insane amount of micromanagement with a most inexperienced beginner developer.
- tasuki 3mo ago
  > 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. The end result is the same. The case is different with LoC though: the more the worse. I'd much maintain the thing written in 500 lines than the one written in 10,000 lines.
c7b 3mo ago
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.
- rwmj 3mo ago
  It's good that no leaked keys were found in the front end code but the developer wasn't able to look at the backend where, if the quality of the front end is any indication, there are likely to be many security issues. Hopefully it's not all running on the same servers/network as anything important.
  - c7b 3mo ago
    I think we're on the same team, I find the general attitude towards security in the current AI scene scary. I was just hoping for a bit more ammunition than what that article gave us.
- mateuszf 3mo ago
  That's because only frontend was reviewed, who knows what's on backend.
- shlant 3mo ago
  I love that they made the comparison to Hacker News in terms of request sizes lmao. Yea definitely a representative sample
flossly 3mo ago
Nice article... Bloat is not "since generative AI coding" new. We always had it. As the author says: > “It does sound like Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things,’ which didn’t age well either.” Which indeed did not age well, but it did help the company to grow to a certain point at which it is now a staple in our lives (and can do super expensive BS experiments like "Metaverse" and still show profits). This may be what Tan does as well: first profitable, then correct. This is an approach, which may work for some, it may also allow some companies to become irrelevant (like: once the bloat-app is profitable, a clone-app emerges that is bloat-free and overtakes the bloat-app in every dimension, while the bloat-app is figuring out how to scale up with a shitty db schema).
mindwok 3mo ago
> 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 always mattered, and still does, in certain circumstances. In others, it's less important and speed of iteration has more value. That's still true even with AI code.
- dingaling 3mo ago
  > 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".
  - mindwok 3mo ago
    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"
croes 3mo ago
Do you remember when you had to write essays in school and the word count mattered? That’s when you’d write "it is" instead of "it's" and "will not" instead of "won't." This is worse. Not the first time that I read quantity over quality related to YC
rgmerk 3mo ago
You can make decent code with AI assistance. You can churn out 37kLOC per day. However, I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that you can do both.
bluegatty 3mo ago
It's 100% fine for Gary to write software in a way that works for him - and for us to push boundaries, and not 'gatekeep'. BUT - it's still a pile of steaming garbage. It's not just a 'bit odd' - it's just massive slop. The total lack of self awareness is comical and disturbing. GStack + Gary's Tweets about 30K LOC a day is 'Trumpian' in self delusion - it looks like basically he and YC are frauds that don't know what technology is. This is like Elon and his 'salute' or his 'I'm a top 10 Diablo player - hey watch me play and expose myself unwittingly' type situations. A bit of AI hype is fine. Someone needs to take Gary and have a side-discussion. He can do GStack - he just needs to characterize it properl for what it is. Talking about that amount of code with the assumption 'it's sensible' code, is basically a lie - it's fraudulent' levels of hype. Just describe it as an unwieldy but productive experiment, not for mainline consumption etc. then it's fine.
hereme888 3mo ago
An opinionated agent harness is all it takes to correct the mentioned issues.
andrewingram 3mo ago
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 possible because I do more fiddly UI enhancements where the desired behaviour is often subjective and invariably hard to articulate. When I work on big backend features, my spend tends to be much lower. What I really want from the people who have effectively unlimited tokens to spend, is to use that finding ways for the rest of us to produce higher quality output at lower costs, rather than focusing on output alone.
- pjc50 3mo ago
  A lot of this stuff is simply Veblen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption 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.
astonex 3mo ago
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.
inigyou 3mo ago
Does anyone know which CDN this site is using? I got an unusual type of CAPTCHA asking me to slide right.
- lrae 3mo ago
  https://www.fastly.com/ https://www.fastly.com/
tauridev 3mo ago
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mewpmewp2 3mo ago
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.
aubanel 3mo ago
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.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  His point is about the volume, and that to us (software engineers) it sounds like he actively just adding bloat, not putting out useful software.
- Sammi 3mo ago
  Has Garry produced any software that is actually useful to anybody? Cause that kinda needs to be be lowest we can set the bar, right?
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Article from April OP; Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633506
zombot 3mo ago
That's just sick. If I had to review 37k LoC per day, my brain would vaporize. But the point probably is that nobody ever looks at that code.
tavavex 3mo ago
Are there ANY institutions remaining that haven't completely succumbed to the Church of Quantity? It was already bad before AI, on the web especially, and now that it's widely used it feels like no one cares about anything anymore. Ask any developer and they would gladly offer you 100x the code shipped 10x faster, but recoil at the idea of making it even 1.5x better or more performant. Everyone has accepted that quality doesn't matter because... you can remake the same flawed thing ten times in an hour? Code is discarded just as quickly as it was spawned into existence, never having been worth anything to anyone. But at least some very influential people get to take the speed they firehosed this code at and brag about it. Not what they made, not its quality, but about a metric that only builds street cred among a million people doing the same thing and not really going anywhere. I knew that the elite of the tech world never really cared, they were just forced to. They don't care about what they make as long as some numbers and statements look good so they get more money at any cost. What's shocking is that everyone else agrees with them - that in all contexts, quality is dead and less than worthless. Just stop caring bro.
PunchyHamster 3mo ago
> Tan/AI built the website so that when a user visits, their browser makes 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. No, no, that's just average day of frontend development
chrisandchris 3mo ago
> Once Garry’s agent observed the usage data of his site, it would have corrected all these mistakes without Gregorein writing the thread. That struck me most and that's why we (software developers) are never going to be engineer. Consider a doctor just trying ang going along if the patient survives. A brige constructor doing something and after each car that passes fixing problems. A car manufacturer trying new brakes in production without testing. A builder starting to build a house and fix it while people already live there. The list could go on. It's sad to see a profession on such a decline. I use AI myself, but please please keep doing something _professionally_ or stop doing it as your profession.
ryss20 3mo ago
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How can anyone in their right mind think that growing a codebase by 200K LOC every week could possibly be a good thing?

"Tan/AI built the website so that when a user visits, their browser makes 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. For comparison, the minimalist Hacker News homepage (also run by Y Combinator) makes seven requests for data totaling just 12 kilobytes. The website ships 28 actual test files (code developers use to reality-check their work) straight to every visitor’s browser. That’s 300 kilobytes of pure developer scaffolding that users never asked for. It loads 78 different JavaScript controllers for features like AI image generation, voice extraction, video tools, etc., none of which appear on the homepage. The browser still has to download all of them “just in case.” The site’s logo is an illustration of a bear. The site downloads the logo in eight different formats, including a completely empty 0-byte file that somehow made it to production, Gregorein found. The website uses huge, uncompressed old-school PNGs (some nearly 2 megabytes each), even though the browser literally asks for modern tiny formats. Two images alone waste about 4 MB; with newer formats they could have been just 300KB. Gregorein also found duplicate page content, an empty CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file, a huge rich-text editor loaded on a read-only page, missing image descriptions, and analytics code that deliberately routes through a proxy to dodge people’s ad blockers (with a comment in the code admitting it), Gregorein reports," Brave new world indeed... It might be elliptically relevant that in the original novel by Aldous Huxley, the protagonist John the Savage hangs himself at the end when his search for truth fails.

philipp-gayret 3mo ago
Impressive. Now, let's see the link in this post to fastcompany.com; It opens a website that also pulls in 6MB using more "server requests" than 169, in fact the number keeps going up, and all it does is display a paywall. So, let's not pretend this is something unique.
- Semaphor 3mo ago
  I’m not a huge AI fan, and was ready for some Schadenfreude. But with every paragraph I thought "so, just like modern human-created websites?"
  - matwood 3mo ago
    Exactly, it's like that old anti-drug commercial from the 90s where the dad asks the son where he learned to smoke pot or whatever and son retorts, "I learned it from watching you!"
- coldtea 3mo ago
  The difference is that nobody brags about churning out pages like the fastcompany.com link landing page. If anything, they're ashamed of it - and they only do it because managers and shady SEO types push for that shit. Nor are such bloated pages regarded (or were regarded pre-AI) as anything else than as a symptom of the sickness of modern web practices.

blubber 3mo ago

"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?

coldtea 3mo ago
>2. So anyone with a claude subscription could arrive at the same conclusions? It's symmetrical: just like anyone with a claude subscription could arrive at the same vibe slop!
embedding-shape 3mo ago
Personally, I've used my newfound productivity to build higher quality software at the same rate as I produced mediocre quality software before. Some people, like Gary Tan for example, seem to instead produce software at the same quality or worse than before, but just produce a ton more software regardless of quality. I guess the article in reality is just these two perspectives pitted against each other for some cheap views.
arcticbull 3mo ago
I'd suggest looking at the review itself, there's an X-the-everything-app thread on it. https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316 https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316 Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs, I'm having trouble understanding what 78,000 lines of ruby in the context of a Rails blog could ... do. I'm sure there's some powerful ugly stuff in Office but in a good code that's calcified kind of way. It got that way over like 30 years of releasing to the public across platforms, not over a weekend. I'd be surprised if microsoft.com is shipping their entire test suite unminified and their back-end posting rich text editor with index.html (with two title tags in the head) and rendering the entire DOM for desktop and mobile regardless of your platform. I'm not critiquing Garry or the site. I think it's great people are using AI to build things that bring them joy, or that they find useful. I certainly do. I am opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code. It has always been the worst metric on earth as a proxy for productivity. Every line is a liability, and it always was. AI has not changed that, if anything it's amplifying it. The best PRs remove code, not add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC are OpenAI and Anthropic. Everyone else seems to be rummaging around for an ROI.

stratocumulus0 3mo ago

The cult of 10x got their magical tool that lets them feel 100x. Don't take their toy away from an excited kid.

embedding-shape 3mo ago

Seems to be a frequently occurring issue, most (good) software engineers know that LOC basically means nothing, if anything, less LOC is a better goal over more LOC, if you absolutely have to have a goal. As soon as people/companies starts bragging about how many LOC they can ship, you need to start being very suspicious, mostly because they just admitted to not actually understand software engineering at all. Cursor did something similar months ago, bragging about producing millions of LOC while what they actually made barely worked and could have been built with an order of magnitude less LOC: https://emsh.cat/en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ https://emsh.cat/en/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522 | 324 points | 5 months ago | 156 comments) What I don't understand, isn't there a single engineer working with these people who ask them what the fuck they're doing, before they hit that publish button? Or is there just such a constant pressure to publish anything that quality just simply doesn't matter at all to these people?

ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
> 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. Ahh … remember the good ol’ days, when we were forced to cap our Web pages at 32K? I have found similar issues with LLM-generated code. Lots of code … lots of issues. Just yesterday, I went through a whole bunch of LLM-generated code, and switched the threading model. It sped up my code significantly, and the jetsam crashes stopped immediately. Until I used LLM code, my apps had never jetsam-crashed before. First time for everything, I guess.
cindyllm 3mo ago
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filmax777 3mo ago
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apimade 3mo ago

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 be confident that it won’t. And even if it didn’t fall on my head under normal conditions, I also would not know when I needed to design for earthquakes. Or floods. Or fire. Or wind. Or grandmother-cosplaying wolves with very strong lungs. But if all I need is shelter for a day, would I necessarily care whether it lasts more than a week? That is effectively what a website like this is. It is not really a product. People don’t depend on it. Tan’s visitors are probably using MacBooks and iPhones on fast networks, and most of them will never notice how bad it is under the surface. That does not mean it is good. It means it is good enough for the context. Most people also tolerated the hilarious gigabyte JSON parsing bug in Grand Theft Auto for years, until a hacker patched it and cut GTA Online loading times by around 70%: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... It was good enough, even if people noticed how bad it was. Business applications, and typical software really doesn’t have to be super tuned or perform fast. It just needs to work. At least until your product category has been commoditized, and _then_ you’re competing on experience.

meetingthrower 3mo ago
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...
- officialchicken 3mo ago
  ... and engineers don't have to consider this a good look coming from the head of YC. These are rookie mistakes - generated by both the human and AI model in a collaborative process. It's also the kind of mistake most of us aren't willing to make b/c we don't have the capital to sweep it under the rug if it goes pear-shaped.

darig 3mo ago

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amirofy 3mo ago

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deleted 3mo ago

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shapefrog 3mo ago

Garry is buying horses for all the defenders in this thread. No he wont fund your startup.

vrganj 3mo ago
Still better than when he was making death threats against public officials. Letting this guy run the show is a public declaration of the moral bankruptcy of the tech sphere.

feverzsj 3mo ago

But web dev is extremely bloat and inefficient already.

croes 3mo ago
left-pad comes to mind

rwmj 3mo ago

https://archive.ph/KHM9E https://archive.ph/KHM9E

Arnt 3mo ago

Focus on a single metric instead of outcome and you win on that metric instead of the outcome. I remember that for, uh, Key Quarterly Objectives, was that the name? Aeons ago. Same shit new decade. (I love working with AI though. It has many of the benefits of good pair programming.)

amarcheschi 3mo ago

my cpu fan spinning a lot when visiting that website

titanomachy 3mo ago

> 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. Quantity, in other words, doesn’t necessarily equal quality. They didn't provide any evidence for this point. They showed that the code is bad quality, but not that it matters that it's bad.

weego 3mo ago
My hot take is that the entire history of the personal internet was inefficient, badly built and chaotic and it was much more fun to exist in. I really don't see a problem if it breathes life into the internet for non-technical people to be creative and interesting again. Wordpress etc gave people a cheap voice, but at the cost of immovable guard-rails. And even at a small business level, most stuff people build get's torn down by the next person or next agency 6, 12, 18 months later anyway so why care about engineering rigour (this point does not extend to security concerns) in the front end when you can spin up and tear down something in a day or two for incredibly cheap. I'm honestly tired at the pearl-clutching when we ourselves have helped shape an industry that constantly raises the bar to entry with unnecessary techincal complexity and bloat. Ever built a brochureware site in react or similar? you've done exactly what the this guy did, you just did it with pure intent rather than an AI doing it
- titanomachy 3mo ago
  Yeah almost all code is just good enough to get the job done. Exceptions include (some) open-source codebases, a few key projects at leading tech companies, and probably the work of obscure geniuses at random companies that nobody else will ever see.
- MrSkelter 3mo ago
  You are completely right. I have decades of experience building products working with everyone from remote teams I have never met to FAANG employees in Silicon Valley. Pretty much every product and site is a combination of good work, hacks and hope. When people attack LLMs on the basis of quality I don’t know what they think the standard is? Outside 8-bit games which shipped in cassette and the Apollo flight computer most modern code only works because it’s been consistently updated and fixed in flight. It’s sad but true. LLMs write code the way they write English. It’s not pretty but is of much higher general quality than the human average.

zerof1l 3mo ago

Measuring success in LoC is so wrong… 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. The end result is the same. AI has a tendency to generate more code than necessary. It keeps re-inventing things, and every time you ask it to add a new feature or fix something, it just keeps on piling the code. I now periodically ask AI to refactor the code by simplifying, removing unused things, factoring out, and reusing.

mcv 3mo ago
> 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.
- pjc50 3mo ago
  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.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Using an SUV to make a 500m trip and then bragging about how you now drive 37 kilometers per day.
zombot 3mo ago
IOW, you're doing an insane amount of micromanagement with a most inexperienced beginner developer.
tasuki 3mo ago
> 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. The end result is the same. The case is different with LoC though: the more the worse. I'd much maintain the thing written in 500 lines than the one written in 10,000 lines.

c7b 3mo ago

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.

rwmj 3mo ago
It's good that no leaked keys were found in the front end code but the developer wasn't able to look at the backend where, if the quality of the front end is any indication, there are likely to be many security issues. Hopefully it's not all running on the same servers/network as anything important.
- c7b 3mo ago
  I think we're on the same team, I find the general attitude towards security in the current AI scene scary. I was just hoping for a bit more ammunition than what that article gave us.
mateuszf 3mo ago
That's because only frontend was reviewed, who knows what's on backend.
shlant 3mo ago
I love that they made the comparison to Hacker News in terms of request sizes lmao. Yea definitely a representative sample

flossly 3mo ago

Nice article... Bloat is not "since generative AI coding" new. We always had it. As the author says: > “It does sound like Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things,’ which didn’t age well either.” Which indeed did not age well, but it did help the company to grow to a certain point at which it is now a staple in our lives (and can do super expensive BS experiments like "Metaverse" and still show profits). This may be what Tan does as well: first profitable, then correct. This is an approach, which may work for some, it may also allow some companies to become irrelevant (like: once the bloat-app is profitable, a clone-app emerges that is bloat-free and overtakes the bloat-app in every dimension, while the bloat-app is figuring out how to scale up with a shitty db schema).

mindwok 3mo ago

> 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 always mattered, and still does, in certain circumstances. In others, it's less important and speed of iteration has more value. That's still true even with AI code.

dingaling 3mo ago
> 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".
- mindwok 3mo ago
  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"

croes 3mo ago

Do you remember when you had to write essays in school and the word count mattered? That’s when you’d write "it is" instead of "it's" and "will not" instead of "won't." This is worse. Not the first time that I read quantity over quality related to YC

rgmerk 3mo ago

You can make decent code with AI assistance. You can churn out 37kLOC per day. However, I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that you can do both.

bluegatty 3mo ago

It's 100% fine for Gary to write software in a way that works for him - and for us to push boundaries, and not 'gatekeep'. BUT - it's still a pile of steaming garbage. It's not just a 'bit odd' - it's just massive slop. The total lack of self awareness is comical and disturbing. GStack + Gary's Tweets about 30K LOC a day is 'Trumpian' in self delusion - it looks like basically he and YC are frauds that don't know what technology is. This is like Elon and his 'salute' or his 'I'm a top 10 Diablo player - hey watch me play and expose myself unwittingly' type situations. A bit of AI hype is fine. Someone needs to take Gary and have a side-discussion. He can do GStack - he just needs to characterize it properl for what it is. Talking about that amount of code with the assumption 'it's sensible' code, is basically a lie - it's fraudulent' levels of hype. Just describe it as an unwieldy but productive experiment, not for mainline consumption etc. then it's fine.

hereme888 3mo ago

An opinionated agent harness is all it takes to correct the mentioned issues.

andrewingram 3mo ago

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 possible because I do more fiddly UI enhancements where the desired behaviour is often subjective and invariably hard to articulate. When I work on big backend features, my spend tends to be much lower. What I really want from the people who have effectively unlimited tokens to spend, is to use that finding ways for the rest of us to produce higher quality output at lower costs, rather than focusing on output alone.

pjc50 3mo ago
A lot of this stuff is simply Veblen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption 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.

astonex 3mo ago

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.

inigyou 3mo ago

Does anyone know which CDN this site is using? I got an unusual type of CAPTCHA asking me to slide right.

lrae 3mo ago
https://www.fastly.com/ https://www.fastly.com/

tauridev 3mo ago

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mewpmewp2 3mo ago

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.

aubanel 3mo ago

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.

embedding-shape 3mo ago
His point is about the volume, and that to us (software engineers) it sounds like he actively just adding bloat, not putting out useful software.
Sammi 3mo ago
Has Garry produced any software that is actually useful to anybody? Cause that kinda needs to be be lowest we can set the bar, right?

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

Article from April OP; Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633506

zombot 3mo ago

That's just sick. If I had to review 37k LoC per day, my brain would vaporize. But the point probably is that nobody ever looks at that code.

tavavex 3mo ago

Are there ANY institutions remaining that haven't completely succumbed to the Church of Quantity? It was already bad before AI, on the web especially, and now that it's widely used it feels like no one cares about anything anymore. Ask any developer and they would gladly offer you 100x the code shipped 10x faster, but recoil at the idea of making it even 1.5x better or more performant. Everyone has accepted that quality doesn't matter because... you can remake the same flawed thing ten times in an hour? Code is discarded just as quickly as it was spawned into existence, never having been worth anything to anyone. But at least some very influential people get to take the speed they firehosed this code at and brag about it. Not what they made, not its quality, but about a metric that only builds street cred among a million people doing the same thing and not really going anywhere. I knew that the elite of the tech world never really cared, they were just forced to. They don't care about what they make as long as some numbers and statements look good so they get more money at any cost. What's shocking is that everyone else agrees with them - that in all contexts, quality is dead and less than worthless. Just stop caring bro.

PunchyHamster 3mo ago

> Tan/AI built the website so that when a user visits, their browser makes 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. No, no, that's just average day of frontend development

chrisandchris 3mo ago

> Once Garry’s agent observed the usage data of his site, it would have corrected all these mistakes without Gregorein writing the thread. That struck me most and that's why we (software developers) are never going to be engineer. Consider a doctor just trying ang going along if the patient survives. A brige constructor doing something and after each car that passes fixing problems. A car manufacturer trying new brakes in production without testing. A builder starting to build a house and fix it while people already live there. The list could go on. It's sad to see a profession on such a decline. I use AI myself, but please please keep doing something _professionally_ or stop doing it as your profession.

ryss20 3mo ago

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