Comment by troupo
15 days ago
It's a TUI API wrapper with a few commands bolted on.
I doubt it needs to be more than 20-50kloc.
You can create a full 3D game with a custom 3D engine in 500k lines. What the hell is Claude Code doing?
15 days ago
It's a TUI API wrapper with a few commands bolted on.
I doubt it needs to be more than 20-50kloc.
You can create a full 3D game with a custom 3D engine in 500k lines. What the hell is Claude Code doing?
Just check the leaked code yourself. Two biggest areas seem to be the `utils` module, which is a kitchen sink that covers a lot of functionality from sandboxing, git support, sessions, etc, and `components` module, which contains the react ui. You could certainly build a cli agent with much smaller codebase, with leaner ui code without react, but probably not with this truckload of functionality.
They are doing some strange "reinvent the wheel" stuff.
For example, I found an implementation of a PRNG, mulberry32 [1], in one of the files. That's pretty strange considering TS and Javascript have decent PRNGs built into the language and this thing is being used as literally just a shuffle.
[1] https://github.com/AprilNEA/claude-code-source/blob/main/src...
mulberry32 is one of the smallest seedable prngs. Math.random() is not seedable.
If you search mulberry32 in the code, you'll see they use it for a deterministic random. They use your user ID to always pick the same random buddy. Just like you might use someone's user ID to always generate the same random avatar.
So that's 10 lines of code accounted for. Any other examples?
Well, at least that confirms they weren't lying when they said all recent updates to claude code were made by claude. You certainly won't do this stuff if you were writing the code yourself.
Software doesn’t end at the 20k loc proof of concept though.
What every developer learns during their “psh i could build that” weekendware attempt is that there is infinite polish to be had, and that their 20k loc PoC was <1% of the work.
That said, doesn't TFA show you what they use their loc for?
Check out `print.ts` to see how "more LOC" doesn't mean "more polished"
Okay, I'm looking at it. Now what?
This file is exactly what I'm talking about.
Take the loadInitialMessage function: It's encumbered with real world incremental requirements. You can see exactly the bolted-on conditionals where they added features like --teleport, --fork-session, etc.
The runHeadlessStreaming function is a more extreme version of that where a bunch of incremental, lateral subsystems are wired together, not an example of superfluous loc.
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I think that’s why the author was comparing to to a finished 3D game.
I guess because you see 3D stuff in a 3D game instead of text, people assume that it must be the most complex thing in software? Or because you solve hard math problems in 3D, those functions are gonna be the most loc?
It's a completely different domain, e.g. very different integration surface area and abstractions.
Claude Code's source is dumped online so there's probably a more concrete analysis to be had than "that sounds like too many loc".
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Comments like these remind me of the football spectators that shout "Even I could have scored that one" when they see a failed attempt.
Sure. You could have. But you're not the one playing football in the Champions League.
There were many roads that could have gotten you to the Champions League. But now you're in no position to judge the people who got there in the end and how they did it.
Or you can, but whatever.
I don't think this is warranted given that the comment you're criticising is simply expressing an opinion explicitly solicited by the comment it's responding to.
It’s more like “Player A is better than Player B” coming from a professional player in a smaller league who is certainly qualified to have that opinion.
> Sure. You could have. But you're not the one playing football in the Champions League.
The only reason people are using Claude Code is because it's the only way to use their (heavily subsidized) subscription plans. People who are okay with using and paying for their APIs often opt out for other, better, tools.
Also, analogies don't work. As we know for a fact that Claude Code is a bloated mess that these "champions league-level engineers" can't fix. They literally talk about it themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488 (they had to bring in actual Champions League engineers from bun to fix some of their mess).
"Even I would have scored that goal" == "I would never ever have created a bloated mess like Anthropic"
You just repeat the same statement.
That bloated mess is what got them to the Champions League. They did what was necessary to get them here. And they succeeded so far.
But hey, according to some it can be replicated in 50k lines of wrapper code around a terminal command, so for Anthropic it's just one afternoon of vibe coding to get rid of this mess. So what's the problem? /s
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Yes, exactly. I like this analogy. I am surprised the level of pearl clutching in these discussions on Hacker News. Everybody wants to be an attention sharecropper, lol.
Honest question: Why does it matter? They got the product shipped and got millions of paying customers and totally revolutionized their business and our industry.
Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.
More code means more entropy, more room for bugs, harder to find issues, more time to fix, more attack surface, more memory used, more duplication, more inconsistencies... I bet you at some point we'll get someone reporting how AI performance deteriorates as the code base grows, and some blog post about how their team improved the success of their AI by trimming the code base down to less than 100k LOC or something like that.
The principles of good software don't suddenly vanish just because now it's a machine writing the code instead of a human, they still have to deal with the issues humans have for more than half a century. The history of programming is new developers coming up with a new paradigm, then rediscovering all the issues that the previous generation had figured out before them.
The history of programming is also each generation writing far less performant code than the one before it. The history of programming is each generation bemoaning the abstractions, waste and lack of performance of the code of the next generation.
It turns out that there is a tradeoff in code between velocity and quality that smart businesses consider relative to hardware cost/quality. The businesses that are outcompeting others are rarely those who have the highest quality code, but rather those that are shipping quickly at a quality level that is satisfactory for current hardware.
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It doesn't. LoC is only meaningful when you use it to belittle others' code.
hehe, belittle (to make smaller)
The reason it’s not useful as a measure of productivity is because it’s measure of complexity (not directly, but it’s correlated). But it tells you nothing about whether that complexity was necessary for the functionality it provides.
But given that we know the functionality of Claude Code, we can guess how much complexity should be required. We could also be wrong.
>Why does it matter?
If there’s massively more code than there needs to be that does matter to the end user because it’s harder to maintain and has more surface area for bugs and security problems. Even with agents.
Among the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that Anthropic produced was one that leaked the source code. It is likely to be a config file, not part of the Claude Code software itself, but it still something to track.
The more lines of code you have the more likely there is for one of them to be wrong and go unnoticed. It results in bugs, vulnerabilities,... and leaks.
More bugs. More costly maintenance.
Exactly. Imagine if Claude Code was a PHP script. Some folks would lose their damn minds
> Honest question: Why does it matter?
Because it's unmaintainable slop that they themselves don't know how to fix when something happens? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488
It will be exactly that. But that is a 'them' problem. I can look at it a go 'that looks like a bad idea' but they are the ones who have to live with it.
At some point someone will probably take their LLM code and repoint it at the LLM and say 'hey lets refactor this so it uses less code is easier to read but does the same thing' and let it chrun.
One project I worked on I saw one engineer delete 20k lines of code one day. He replaced it with a few lines of stored procedure. That 20k lines of code was in production for years. No one wanted to do anything with it but it was a crucial part of the way the thing worked. It just takes someone going 'hey this isnt right' and sit down and fix it.
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