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.
AI feels to me like having access to someone who got a D in literally every single course offered at a university. If you don't know anything about the subject they are smarter than you. If you do know the subject, its unsettling how bad they are. Basically the Gell-Mann effect:
> The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
They've improved from someone who failed every single university course a couple years ago. Maybe they'll get to a C or even a B in the future; maybe not.
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...
... 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.
> 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
This could be fine if all you're looking is to get the quick and dirty result at any cost, or private use, etc. When anything is better than nothing.
The problem starts when this extremely low bar becomes the baseline for anything. When you're willing to attach your name to a stream of absolute slop and you're even proud of it.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am entirely opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code and PRs. 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 amplified it.
The best PRs remove more than they add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC count are OpenAI and Anthropic, and I'm not sure it's related.
> 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".
> 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...
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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!"
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.
AI feels to me like having access to someone who got a D in literally every single course offered at a university. If you don't know anything about the subject they are smarter than you. If you do know the subject, its unsettling how bad they are. Basically the Gell-Mann effect:
> The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
They've improved from someone who failed every single university course a couple years ago. Maybe they'll get to a C or even a B in the future; maybe not.
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...
... 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.
> 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
This could be fine if all you're looking is to get the quick and dirty result at any cost, or private use, etc. When anything is better than nothing.
The problem starts when this extremely low bar becomes the baseline for anything. When you're willing to attach your name to a stream of absolute slop and you're even proud of it.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am entirely opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code and PRs. 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 amplified it.
The best PRs remove more than they add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC count are OpenAI and Anthropic, and I'm not sure it's related.
Yes but for that you need to focus on the quality. There are probably horrible issues on backend as well.
>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!
> 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".
> 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...
https://archive.ph/KHM9E
But web dev is extremely bloat and inefficient already.
How can anyone in their right mind think that growing a codebase by 200K LOC every week could possibly be a good thing?
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.
"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.
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.
The difference is that nobody brags about churning out pages like the fastcompany.com link landing page.
If anything, they're ashamed of it.
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.
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?"
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!"
Garry is buying horses for all the defenders in this thread.
No he wont fund your startup.
The cult of 10x got their magical tool that lets them feel 100x. Don't take their toy away from an excited kid.
The classes of errors found is what you'd expect in any enterprise products.
This is more a testement to the quality of agentic work.
It seems like the pessimists are rewriting the history of software development to be much more rosy than it ever was.