← Back to context

Comment by 3form

8 hours ago

I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days.

I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.

Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.

Tech debt and maintainability were important because time was of the essence in another era. If the cycles get compressed by say 95%, to hell with it, just trash the old and write everything from scratch, start from a clean slate each time?

  • That may be good enough for consumer facing systems. Rewrites seldom go well for enterprise systems of record because the code embodies a lot of undocumented but critical requirements. If you start vibe coding from a clean slate then all of that knowledge is lost and you've created an even bigger problem.

Claude Code is similar. It's fairly clean for AI coding standards but it's also most likely much, much bigger than what it should be for what it does.