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

Alien1Being

"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.

blubber

"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?

stratocumulus0

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

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://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?

apimade

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... 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.

shapefrog

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

feverzsj

But web dev is extremely bloat and inefficient already.

rwmj

https://archive.ph/KHM9E

khazhoux

How can anyone in their right mind think that growing a codebase by 200K LOC every week could possibly be a good thing?

Arnt

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

my cpu fan spinning a lot when visiting that website

titanomachy

> 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.

zerof1l

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.

c7b

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.

flossly

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

> 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.

croes

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

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

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

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