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

    by titanomachy
  • 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?

    by embedding-shape
  • 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.

    by astonex
  • 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.
    by c7b
  • "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?

    by blubber
  • 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.

    by zerof1l
  • Article from April OP;

    Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633506

    by ChrisArchitect

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