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- Hacker News
- But web dev is extremely bloat and inefficient already.by feverzsj
- left-pad comes to mindby 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
by croes - 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).
by flossly - 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.
by andrewingram - A lot of this stuff is simply Veblen: 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.
by pjc50 - 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 - 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
by weego - It never matters.
Until it does.
And if you've been relying on quality not mattering, then when it starts mattering—when you get hit by a security bug, or unexpected data loss, or your software is inexplicably displaying goatse—then you have no way to proceed without learning how to do quality.
by danaris - 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?
- > 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.
- 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
- I love that they made the comparison to Hacker News in terms of request sizes lmao. Yea definitely a representative sampleby shlant
- That's because only frontend was reviewed, who knows what's on backend.by mateuszf
- 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.by rwmj
- "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 - >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!
by coldtea - It's worse than anything in MS really.by bluegatty
- > So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?
Begs the question of why the original "author" of the code hasn't just asked Claude to fix it? Or asked Claude to generate good code from the beginning. I suppose the answer is that nobody cares about good or efficient code anymore. But that's been the case since long before LLM coding though (as stated in your point 1).
Why write clever code when we can just write JS slop and ask customers "upgrade" their hardware every year...
- That was the strangest line for me as well. The article tries to play up this "Polish engineer with an MSc in computer science who has 13 years of industry experience" who ... used claude to review the code. My mom could have done this without an MSc or years of industry experience.by 63stack
- > I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software.
Except he's not building Office, a software with decades of legacy, used by hundreds of millions of users. He's coding a website, effectively writing bloat with a silver lining of useful features. AI automated and inflated the worst of practices too. Anyone outputting 37K LoC daily is creating bloat and inefficiencies at unprecedented rate.
And enterprise software was already the butt of all jokes in this regard. We found ways to make that worse at scale even for the basic things. It's not a good look when you need to use this "whatabout".
by close04 - I'd suggest looking at the review itself, there's an X-the-everything-app thread on it.
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.
by arcticbull - Yes but for that you need to focus on the quality. There are probably horrible issues on backend as well.by _visgean
- 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.
- 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 - IOW, you're doing an insane amount of micromanagement with a most inexperienced beginner developer.by zombot
- > 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.
by tasuki - > 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.
by mcv