Comment by echelon

2 days ago

[flagged]

A classic hype merchant sales pitch: believe me, I was a doubter just like you, but I saw the light thanks to [insert latest model]!

(Which for anyone familiar with your long comment history as a regular HN poster, is comically absurd to imply. You've been reliably adamant that AI will demolish this or that entire industry overnight for years at this point).

  • GP commenter got my attention during the last few days. Judging by their claims of productivity, they should have been a billionaire already. I'm curious to know their motivation behind making such outrageous claims.

    • I’ve seen their outrageous comments so often I wonder if it’s Sam Altman’s alt account. Probably the biggest AI snake oil merchant on the forum these days, with a sadistic pleasure at seeing people losing their job to AI.

  • > You've been reliably adamant that AI will demolish this or that entire industry overnight for years at this point

    We'll see who's right. I never said "overnight". Let's check in at the decade's end.

    Y'all dunked on me in 2019 when I said AI was coming for Hollywood. Have you seen Seedance 2.0?

    It's coming for us too. I've written five nines, active-active systems that handle billions of dollars of money movement daily. These systems can work in those contexts. I didn't think we'd be here this soon, and I actually thought LLMs were a dead end. I was wrong.

    I'm not trying to sell Claude Code. I hate the concept of hyperscaler companies. I want there to be viable open source coding models - there just aren't. I'm merely reporting on my findings.

    I sit at my machine for hours now in a prompt, review, test cycle. It's addictive. I'm getting more done at a faster rate than any time in my professional career. I'm excited, and I'm also worried. I don't know what happens after this.

    If you've seen how much I praise AI, then you've also seen how much I rail against monopolies. I am worried these giant companies are going to take the means of production from us. I don't think enough people are freaking out about this. It's a very real possibility.

    I'm just going to keep building. But you should pay close attention to what's happening.

    • You're not wrong in principle, but you've made some specific extraordinary claims. If you're really that productive, generating useful work product at a rate of 20 kloc/day by yourself, people would pay just to learn how you're doing it!

      Y'all dunked on me in 2019 when I said AI was coming for Hollywood. Have you seen Seedance 2.0?

      Being right at the wrong time is often worse than just being outright wrong, I've found.

> write 20kloc of Rust code every day (and I review all of it)

Only one of this can be true. It's not a shame to say you don't bother reviewing it, in the future that may well be the norm.

  • This isn't agentic coding. I haven't even tried that yet.

    I'm prompting every change set, reviewing the outputs, then reviewing the total changes.

    I'm sitting at my PC all day doing this - I used to be productive in short bursts, now I'm productive all the time. It's addictive.

    • You are reviewing 20kLOC per day, which is about 0.7 LOC per second in an 8 hour working day, assuming literally doing nothing else but reviewing? Pardon me but I don't find that very believable.

    • I don't completely disagree with what you are saying -- but there's no way you produce and review 20k lines a day. That part is clearly false. Even if Claude generated it in 10 seconds and it needed no changes you probably still couldn't review that much sensibly.

      I used Claude a lot on a recent project where it probably wrote 15-20k lines in a month, and it was overall excellent.

So you now have 400Kloc of Rust code? Doing what? How much of that is "new"?

I can't get Augment / Opus 4.5 to edit a few C++ files from within VSCode without going off on a wild goose chase or getting stuck in an infinite loop after I tell that it should be doing this: "oh, you're right, I need to do X", "To do X, I must understand how to do Y", "I see now that to do Y, I should look at at Z". "Let me look at Z", followed by: "oh, you're right, I need to do X"..

  • To be fair, humans editing C++ also go on wild goose chases. Have you seen the insanity the C++ committee has ratified?

> 20kloc of Rust code every day (and I review all of it).

Reviewing 1k lines of code an hour is a breakneck pace, are you spending 20 hours a day reviewing code?

  • It’s clearly code so flawless you can tell at a glance that it’s correct.

To do what, exactly, and are people paying you for your output or are you just making things for yourself?

Building things at a mature company with a market is a lot different than hacking together your own tools. There are a lot more people you can let down at scale.

> In the last month, I've been using Claude Code to write 20kloc of Rust code every day (and I review all of it).

If you're generating 20kLoC per day, you definitely aren't reviewing it!

There's no way you're reviewing 20kloc a day unless all you're doing is the Sandi Metz squint test.

> They just need to put all of the engineers on HN out of work.

I think you've crossed the line from being an AI maxi to just rage baiting. This comment is a pointless anecdote at best, please take your ridiculous FOMO takes elsewhere.

That’s the same definition of reviewing code as saying watching the movie is the same as reading the book it’s based on. No human has ever reviewed 600k lines of code in a month, ever. It’s hard to find someone who can even read and understand that amount in that time.

I’m convinced these “guys you gotta believe me I’m a seasoned veteran and this shit is the real deal” posts that show up in every AI thread are either coming from Sam Altman or a bot.