Comment by nine_k
2 days ago
Impressive!
35 kLOC is quite a bit. I wonder how straightforward and maintainable this app ended up to be. This would require taking a look at the sources. While good Rails code tends to be very terse, frontend may be quite voluminous.
> I believe within a couple of months, when things like log tailing and automated testing and native version control get implemented
This sounds a bit too optimistic, especially around automated testing, but yes, eventually this all will be there.
> an extremely powerful tool for even non-technical people to write production-quality apps
But why would non-technical people would even think in terms of log tailing and version control, any more than they think about the gauge of wiring in their walls, or the kind of modulation their Wi-Fi device use? For really non-technical audience to make a good use of such tools, it won't just take the AI to be a competent coder. The AI should become a competent architect and a competent senior SWE to translate from the product management language to the software development language, without even surfacing it when not explicitly asked. It's going to be quite a bit of a challenge to make it work, and work about as reliably as with a human team.
Since I wrote the blog post, I actually added automated tests which Windsurf / Claude Code runs before committing any change. It saved me a lot of headaches when the LLM decided to make random logic changes for no reason.
The LLM swaps out business logic without you knowing it? As someone who worries about determinism and doesn’t do much vibe coding, I am curious what’s going on here, thanks!
Absolutely, very often. It typically happens because it's trying to do more than you asked for.
Example scenario: you have a codebase that you iterated on with LLM, and it contains let's say 15 features with various implementation details. You continue tomorrow and want to make a small change to handle an edge-case. While making changes to one of the 3 required files, suddenly it will decide to also rewrite / "improve" other parts of the code that have nothing to do with your request, where pieces of previous logic will no longer exist - since it made 18 changes to the file, and there are 3 such files, good luck spotting it without thorough and detailed change review.
Also, if you made manual changes to generated code and than you ask it to add something to the code (within the same "conversation" / context, it will often replace your changes with how it originally wanted code to look like.
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"Let's take a different approach. Instead of trying to fix the existing file incrementally, let's rewrite it completely with a simpler approach that uses the --print-config flag to test the configuration:"
Would you mind describing the process for this in a bit more detail?
Yeah, without trying to be dismissive I'm a bit unsure where the 35kLOC are going?
The vibes? It was vibecoded.
probably includes npm packages. Actual loc is probably 2-3k.
with npm packages it's probably 35k - Files -
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The 35k lines of code is what made me think this was either a joke or the state of vibe coding, but no it turns out they're serious
I have entire codebases of embedded software in C without the shortcuts of modern programming languages in way fewer than 35k lines
I cannot find a link to the source code. Is there any?
https://www.recipeninja.ai/assets/index-B7TAGfYd.js
Not 35k lines, but there's one line that's about 48,000 characters long. So either they've intentionally obfuscated it, or chatgpt just churned out one long line
Edit: Running it through a prettifier the code comes about 33k lines
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> 35 kLOC is quite a bit. I wonder how straightforward and maintainable this app ended up to be. This would require taking a look at the sources. While good Rails code tends to be very terse, frontend may be quite voluminous.
I think people will have to recalibrate on this. The LOCs do things that you otherwise would not do. Features and details that simply would not happen — because they are too code/time intensive for most projects. It just won't matter anymore.
> But why would non-technical people would even think in terms of log tailing and version control
They won't! They won't have to. The obvious good stuff that everyone thinks the AI tool should be able do, will just work, because the people building the tools, will mostly obviously focus on making them work.
That or we're completely ignoring principles like DRY and producing a head spinning amount of tech debt.
I can't really imagine producing that much code in that short amount of time and holding any amount of it in my head. I'd bet money there's code in there that does the same thing but different, leading to all kinds of little inconsistencies that make this code worthless in any serious context.
I’m an old school coder. I haven’t vibed. I’m guessing the “who is going to maintain this” could only be another tool similar to what built it. I can’t imagine trying to get my head around that much code in a timeframe acceptable to someone demanding product. So are we headed to a place where everything is written and maintained this way or a lucrative future of having to get these things to work properly.
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Yeah 35k of code is a red flag. There's no reason for this to be that large.