Comment by simonw
1 month ago
Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it.
That particular reference isn't fair though. You need to view that comment in context: https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2098217573276131577
I'm entirely in agreement with that. The interesting challenge is how we achieve that new high bar.
I don't actually buy that tweet from Boris Cherny. When the Claude Code source leaked some months ago, there were many posts on Mastodon about how the revealed code was a shit show, a big pile of hacks. I wish now that I had bookmarked some of those posts.
Here's the one I saw most widely cited: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930
I wasn't very impressed by that pile-on, personally.
Has there ever been a rapidly evolving 1,000,000+ line codebase that suitably motivated critics couldn't pick a thousand holes in and conclude that the code was garbage?
Claude Code is used by millions of people on a daily basis, has generated billions of dollars in revenue, and spits out new features on a weekly basis.
Many of the complaints I saw - things like the absurdity of asking for JSON and then looping against a schema until it matches - are common patterns for building software against language models, which are weird components to need to tame.
I'm still inclined to question whether the agent harness needs to be a million lines, or even a hundred thousand lines, in the first place. I mean, isn't one supposed to just hook up tool calling and let the LLM's intelligence do the rest? At least, that's the way it appears from things like tptacek's post about writing an agent. https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/
Then again, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that the anti-AI backlash has also provoked an unreasonable backlash against development speed and scale themselves.
3 replies →