Comment by lelanthran
23 days ago
> Maybe that's why LLMs work well for writing things read by computers, but not so much for things read by people.
They don't really work well for that, though.
The reason you hardly ever hear about it is because the people delivering code via LLMs aren't critically evaluating the code it generates. This is why Claude Code, a text app that is little more than glue between various text-suppliers, is what, 500k SLoC in a high level language?
> people delivering code via LLMs aren't critically evaluating the code it generates
I guess this is the flip side of "you're prompting it wrong": "you only think it works because you can't tell how much it sucks."
Core vim is around 300k lines of C89 code and it's just a text editor.
It's over a million lines if you include all the scripting, language features and tests.
Vim has been around for decades, supports a billion architectures and an entire modal editing system plus a scripting language. And it’s in C, not a high level language so verbosity is higher. It’s really not comparable to a glorified frontend to an API.
It turns out things are more complex than they may initially appear.