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Comment by qustio

16 days ago

I don't think the bottleneck was that it took six years to Ctrl-F strncpy and type in new code for each file.

21 comments

qustio

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qarl2  15 days ago

I looked at the git history. The first three years were wasted waiting for a human to pick it up. He then very slowly submitted patches over 2 years.

Claude Code doesn't need to be interested to work.

qarl  16 days ago

It's a shame you're misrepresenting what is actually going on.

In another comment here I explained that I have run a test: asking Claude Code to add a substantial feature to 270 different C programs.

Despite your beliefs - it went extremely well.

  • qustio  16 days ago

    Huh, are you confusing me with someone else? I don't doubt Claude Code did that, I do the same for refactors all the time.

    But xscreensaver theme tweaks for personal use have a much lower standard for quality control, regression testing, side effects, etc than a kernel used by billions of devices with thousands of interconnected drivers and subsystems.

    Not to mention the coordination problem to get every maintainer on board and patches approved for each specific area when working on a project of that scale, even for a relatively narrow change.

    Claude Code doesn't really help with that so don't see why the expectation would be a significant speed up (and doing it all in a single patch would definitely be rejected).

    • qarl  16 days ago

      Yes, I understand the difference in rigor.

      I refuse to believe the six year delay here was getting people to test a patch.

      Which, actually, Claude Code will also do quite well.

      8 replies →

  • lelanthran  16 days ago

    > In another comment here I explained that I have run a test: asking Claude Code to add a substantial feature to 270 different C programs.

    That's a different scenario, though.

    Would Claude have performed adequately if it had to add a specific feature to 270 programs buried in a set of 270m program, each of which may or may not have a dependency on one or more of the others, with virtually unbounded results to test?

    In terms of tokens alone, that would have been cost-prohibitive. But lets assume that you had the money to do this: it still might not even be possible.

    You're confusing "I have these 270 independent programs and want to make this change to all of them" with "I have these 270m lines of code, of which only 270 needs to be changed".