[gyomu]

Yeah, it’s pretty wild. Even pg is tweeting stuff like

“An experienced programmer told me he's now using AI to generate a thousand lines of code an hour.“

https://x.com/paulg/status/2026739899936944495

Like if you had told pg to his face in (pre AI) office hours “I’m producing a thousand lines of code an hour”, I’m pretty sure he’d have laughed and pointed out how pointless that metric was?

[ruszki]

I don't understand how some people decide here, who the good programmers are. A lot of people reminded me a guy from West Palm Beach, who votes on elections solely on the principle of who has more "fame". Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all. So I always interpreted his words with a hefty amount of grain of salt. And sometimes some comments have a list of "good" coders, then half of them is like these famous, but not good ones.

[TacticalCoder]

> Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all.

pg wrote a Lisp dialect, Arc, with Morris. The Morris from "the Morris worm". These people are at the very least hackers and they definitely know how to code.

I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect. At least of all the "not good" programmers I met in my life, 0% of them could have written a Lisp dialect.

It's not because Arc didn't reach the level of fame of Linux or Quake or Kubernetes or whatever that pg is not a good programmer.

[ruszki]

I met a coder, who has several self made programming languages, and I would never allow him anywhere near any codebases for which I'm responsible. So writing a Lisp dialect, is not something which makes you a good coder for sure. Even as a junior you can do that. Making it good, and be able to really reason for choices is a different story. I've never seen any good new reasoning from Graham like for example how Dan Abramov do all the time. They are not even close, and definitely not in favor of Graham.

[steveklabnik]

> I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect.

You can write a lisp in 145 lines of Python: https://norvig.com/lispy.html

[tasuki]

That doesn't disprove anything. Peter Norvig is about as far from "not good programmer" as one can get.

[steveklabnik]

It's not about Peter. Of course, he's a great programmer. The point is that you can follow nicely written tutorials and have your own in a very short period of time. It's not particularly difficult to build a Lisp.

[eichin]

Presumably he got better in the intervening decades, but part of how we stopped the Morris Worm was that it was badly written (see the various version of With Microscope and Tweezers for detail, particularly about the "am I already running" check that ended up being why it got noticed, "because exponential growth".) Even for "bored 1st year grad student skipping lectures" it should have been better code :-)

(Also, writing a Scheme dialect was a first-semester CS problem set - if you're in a 1980s academic CS environment it was more effort to not accidentally write a lisp interpreter into something, something in the water supply...)

[_zagj]

> pg wrote a Lisp dialect, Arc

Wasn't Arc just a collection of Scheme macros?

[aerhardt]

I take him to be a good programmer on top of a pioneer venture capitalist and entrepreneur but Hackers and Painters contains some pretty bad predictions and takes on programming, and if he didn't have that good foresight then, it has probably become worse with the years.

[KerrAvon]

obligatory Dabblers and Blowhards https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

[medi8r]

He is a Lisper too, making it more ironic. Lisp the power to heavily reduce cruft by heavy customization with macros.

[saltcured]

Thousand left-parens per hour...?

[ball_of_lint]

I mean, I didn't close them all but still, ... Look at the code! That's gotta be valuable

[amelius]

Technical debt is increasing by 1,000 lines an hour.

[manoDev]

They need to keep the musical chairs going.

[lukan]

Hm, I do not read the statement as a hyped "this is how everyone should write code now" rather as a statement of fact. "A experienced programmer he knows uses LLMs to generate thounds LOC/h". That does not say whether those lines will actually be shipped anywhere or just exist for testing purposes/prototyping.

[steve1977]

We all know that a thousand parentheses would be better metric.

[ElProlactin]

Enshittification comes for us all

[wiseowise]

It’s all virtual virtue signaling. If you were to say this shit in the office, you’d be walked out pretty fast.

[Zak]

Who is signaling what virtues to whom in this context?

When I see PG write something like that, it signals to me that he has embraced AI hype to the point that he is displaying poor taste and embracing a risky technical practice.

[wiseowise]

PG is signaling his AI bros, idk.

[Zak]

I imagine PG is rich enough and influential enough in the tech/VC space that he doesn't have to signal anything he doesn't honestly believe.

It's unsurprising he would believe LLM coding tools are a productivity boon, but using code quantity as a measure of software development progress is one of the most famously wrong ideas in the software world. Either he wrote carelessly, or he believes that LLM tools have changed that reality.

I'm inclined to think LLM tools haven't substantially changed that reality. LLMs perform better when more of the problem fits in context, so succinctness remains valuable.

[andrei_says_]

Maybe it depends on whose office? C-suite management who salivate after reducing software engineer headcount?