Comment by frays
3 days ago
Claude Code creator said Claude wrote 100% of his code last month: https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2004897269674639461
3 days ago
Claude Code creator said Claude wrote 100% of his code last month: https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2004897269674639461
I read your comment as a joke, but in case if was a defense, or is taken as a defense by others, let me help you punch up your writing for you:
"[Person who is financially incentivized to make unverifiable claims about the utility of the tool they helped build] said [tool] [did an unverified and unverifiable thing] last month"
"Claude Code creator relied so heavily on Claude Code that he broke Claude Code"
>In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed.
Is anyone with or without AI approaching anywhere near that speed of delivery?
I don’t think my whole company matches that amount. It sounds super unreasonable, just doing a sanity check.
40K - 38K means 2K lines of actual code.
Which could mean that code was refactored and then built on top of. Or it could just mean that Claude had to correct itself multiple times over those 459 commits.
Does correcting your mistakes from yesterday’s ChatGPT binge episode count as progress…maybe?
If it doesn't revert the corrections, maybe it is progress?
I can easily imagine constant churn in the code because it switches between five different implementations when run five times, foing back to the first one on the sixth time and repeating the process.
I gotta ask, though, why exactly is that much code needed for what CC does?
It's a specialised wrapper.
2 replies →
AI approaches can churn code more than a human would.
Lines of code has always been a questionable metric of velocity, and AI makes that more true than ever.
Even discounting lines of code:
- get a feature request/bug
- understand the problem
- think on a solution
- deliver the solution
- test
- submit to code review, including sufficient explanation, and merge when ready
260 PRs a month means the cycle above is happening once per hour, at constant speed, for 60 hours work weeks.
2 replies →
I'd love to see Claude Code remove more lines than it added TBH.
There's a ton of cruft in code that humans are less inclined to remove because it just works, but imagine having LLM doing the clean up work instead of the generation work.
Is it possible for humans to review that amount of code?
My understanding of the current state of AI in software engineering is that humans are allowed (and encouraged) to use LLMs to write code. BUT the person opening a PR must read and understand that code. And the code must be read and reviewed by other humans before being approved.
I could easily generate that amount of code and make it write and pass tests. But I don't think I could have it reviewed by the rest of my team - while I am also taking part in reviewing code written by other people on my team at that pace.
Perhaps they just aren't human reviewing the code? Then it is feasible to me. But it would go against all of the rules that I have personally encountered at my companies and that peers have told me they have at their companies.
>BUT the person opening a PR must read and understand that code.
The AI evangelists at my work who say this the loudest are also the ones shipping the most "did anyone actually look at this code?" bugs.
1 reply →
I'm appalled this isn't talked about more. Understanding code let alone code written by others is where the real complexity lies. I fail to see how more written code by some dumbass AI that gets things wrong half the time is going to make the job less draining to me. I can only conclude that half the devs of the world, or more, don't really do code reviews, or just rubber stamp crap.
I can make a bot that touches each line of code and commits it, if you would like.
Recently came across a project on HN front page that was developed on Github with a public repo. https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/graphs/contributors 2000 commits over 20 days +497K/-360K lines
I'm not affiliated with Claude or the project linked.
Anthropic must be loving this.
> Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
The author has written an evangelical book about vibe coding.
https://www.amazon.com/Vibe-Coding-Building-Production-Grade...
He also has some other agent-coordination software. https://github.com/steveyegge/vc
Don't know whether it's helpful, or what the difference is.
Read that as "speed of lines of code", which is very VERY very different from "speed of delivery."
Lines of code never correlated with quality or even progress. Now they do even less.
I've been working a lot more with coding agents, but my convictions around the core principles of software development have not changed. Just the iteration speed of certain parts of the process.
[dead]
If the code is like React, 40k it's just the addition of a few CRUD views
Check out Steve Yegge’s pace with beads and gas town - well in excess of that.
Yeah, but at that pace it is, for all practical purposes, unreviewable.
Humans writing is slow, no doubt, but humans reading code ain't that much faster.
...but is it good?
3 replies →
You're counting wheel revolutions, not miles travelled. Not an accurate proxy measurement unless you can verify the wheels are on the road for the entire duration.
Back-peddling this tweet to 99% in 3, 2, 1.
No chance, IPO is coming up, the only play is to double down hard now.
Back in my day, honest to God humans wrote all code, and certainly never introduced any bugs.
[deleted]