Isn't it a simple REPL with some tools and integrations, written in a very high level language? How the hell is it so big? Is it because it's vibecoded and LLMs strive for bloat, or is it meaningful complexity?
> Claude Code's 500k LOC doesn't seem out of the ordinary.
Aren't all the other products also vibe-coded? "All vibe-coded products look like this" doesn't really seem to answer the question "Why is it so damn large?"
It's a repl, that calls out to a blackbox/endpoint for data, and does basic parsing and matching of state with specific actions.
I feel the bulk of those lines should be actions that are performed. Either this is correct or this is not:
1. If the bulk of those lines implement specific and simple actions, why is it so large compared to other software that implements single actions (coreutils, etc)
2. If the actions constitute only a small part of the codebase, wtf is the rest of it doing?
>> I feel the bulk of those lines should be actions that are performed. Either this is correct or this is not:
> You're complaining about vibe coding while also complaining about how you "feel" about the code. Do you see the irony in that?
Where did I complain about how I feel about the actual code? I have feelings, negative ones, about the size of the code given the simple functionality it has, but I have no feelings on the code because I did not look at the code.
Bad by whose definition? They work really well in my experience. They aren't perfect but the amount of hand holding has gone down dramatically and you can fix any glaring problems with a code review at the end. I work on a multimillion line code base which does not use any popular frameworks and it does a great job. I may be benefiting from the fact that the codebase is open source and all models have obviously been trained on it.
Most of their issues have been solved a long time ago, with 1000x less code. It is depressing at this point. I really had no clue IT was in the shitters this much. I knew it was theatrical but I had no idea that it was by this much.
All these AI tools teams have most valid excuse "We are just a bunch of people who only know Javascript/typescript/NodeJS. Please bear with us while we resolve 10,000 open issues."
I haven't seen the scrolling glitch in months, where previously it was happening multiple times a day. Also haven't seen anyone complain about it in quite some time. Pretty sure they have resolved that.
I don't know if you're mindlessly repeating the HN trope that JS/typescript/Electron is bad and that all bloat can easily prevented, but if you're truly interested in answers to your questions: RTFA.
yeah its honestly full of vibe fixes to vibe hacks with no overarching desig. . some great little empirical observations though!i think the only clever bit relative to my own designs is just tracking time since last cache ht to check ttl. idk why i hadnt thought of that, but makes perfect sense
Other notable agents' LOC: Codex (Rust) ~519K, Gemini (TS) ~445K, OpenCode (TS) ~254K, Pi (TS) ~113K LOC. Pi's modular structure makes it simple to see where most of code is. Respectively core, unified API, coding agent CLI, TUI have ~3K, ~35K, ~60K, ~15K LOC. Interestingly, the just uploaded claw-code's Rust version is currently at only 28K.
edit: Claude is actually (TS) 395K. So Gemini is more bloat. Codex is arguable since is written in lower-level language.
Just check the leaked code yourself. Two biggest areas seem to be the `utils` module, which is a kitchen sink that covers a lot of functionality from sandboxing, git support, sessions, etc, and `components` module, which contains the react ui. You could certainly build a cli agent with much smaller codebase, with leaner ui code without react, but probably not with this truckload of functionality.
They are doing some strange "reinvent the wheel" stuff.
For example, I found an implementation of a PRNG, mulberry32 [1], in one of the files. That's pretty strange considering TS and Javascript have decent PRNGs built into the language and this thing is being used as literally just a shuffle.
mulberry32 is one of the smallest seedable prngs. Math.random() is not seedable.
If you search mulberry32 in the code, you'll see they use it for a deterministic random. They use your user ID to always pick the same random buddy. Just like you might use someone's user ID to always generate the same random avatar.
So that's 10 lines of code accounted for. Any other examples?
Well, at least that confirms they weren't lying when they said all recent updates to claude code were made by claude. You certainly won't do this stuff if you were writing the code yourself.
Software doesn’t end at the 20k loc proof of concept though.
What every developer learns during their “psh i could build that” weekendware attempt is that there is infinite polish to be had, and that their 20k loc PoC was <1% of the work.
That said, doesn't TFA show you what they use their loc for?
Take the loadInitialMessage function: It's encumbered with real world incremental requirements. You can see exactly the bolted-on conditionals where they added features like --teleport, --fork-session, etc.
The runHeadlessStreaming function is a more extreme version of that where a bunch of incremental, lateral subsystems are wired together, not an example of superfluous loc.
The file is more than 5000 lines of code. The main function is 3000. Code comments make reference to (and depend on guarantees in connection with) the specific behavior of code in other files. Do I need to explain why that's bad?
I guess because you see 3D stuff in a 3D game instead of text, people assume that it must be the most complex thing in software? Or because you solve hard math problems in 3D, those functions are gonna be the most loc?
It's a completely different domain, e.g. very different integration surface area and abstractions.
Claude Code's source is dumped online so there's probably a more concrete analysis to be had than "that sounds like too many loc".
It is a different domain but that wasn’t your argument. Your argument was that someone was comparing it to a POC when in fact they were comparing to a finished product.
Also a AAA game (with the engine) with physics, networking, and rendering code is up there in terms of the most complex pieces of software.
Comments like these remind me of the football spectators that shout "Even I could have scored that one" when they see a failed attempt.
Sure. You could have. But you're not the one playing football in the Champions League.
There were many roads that could have gotten you to the Champions League. But now you're in no position to judge the people who got there in the end and how they did it.
I don't think this is warranted given that the comment you're criticising is simply expressing an opinion explicitly solicited by the comment it's responding to.
It’s more like “Player A is better than Player B” coming from a professional player in a smaller league who is certainly qualified to have that opinion.
> Sure. You could have. But you're not the one playing football in the Champions League.
The only reason people are using Claude Code is because it's the only way to use their (heavily subsidized) subscription plans. People who are okay with using and paying for their APIs often opt out for other, better, tools.
Also, analogies don't work. As we know for a fact that Claude Code is a bloated mess that these "champions league-level engineers" can't fix. They literally talk about it themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488 (they had to bring in actual Champions League engineers from bun to fix some of their mess).
"Even I would have scored that goal"
==
"I would never ever have created a bloated mess like Anthropic"
You just repeat the same statement.
That bloated mess is what got them to the Champions League. They did what was necessary to get them here. And they succeeded so far.
But hey, according to some it can be replicated in 50k lines of wrapper code around a terminal command, so for Anthropic it's just one afternoon of vibe coding to get rid of this mess. So what's the problem? /s
Yes, exactly. I like this analogy. I am surprised the level of pearl clutching in these discussions on Hacker News. Everybody wants to be an attention sharecropper, lol.
Honest question: Why does it matter? They got the product shipped and got millions of paying customers and totally revolutionized their business and our industry.
Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.
More code means more entropy, more room for bugs, harder to find issues, more time to fix, more attack surface, more memory used, more duplication, more inconsistencies... I bet you at some point we'll get someone reporting how AI performance deteriorates as the code base grows, and some blog post about how their team improved the success of their AI by trimming the code base down to less than 100k LOC or something like that.
The principles of good software don't suddenly vanish just because now it's a machine writing the code instead of a human, they still have to deal with the issues humans have for more than half a century. The history of programming is new developers coming up with a new paradigm, then rediscovering all the issues that the previous generation had figured out before them.
The history of programming is also each generation writing far less performant code than the one before it. The history of programming is each generation bemoaning the abstractions, waste and lack of performance of the code of the next generation.
It turns out that there is a tradeoff in code between velocity and quality that smart businesses consider relative to hardware cost/quality. The businesses that are outcompeting others are rarely those who have the highest quality code, but rather those that are shipping quickly at a quality level that is satisfactory for current hardware.
> far less performant code than the one before it.
That worked because of rapid advancements in CPU performance. We’ve left that era.
It’s about more than performance. Code is and always has been a liability. Even with agents, you start seeing massive slowdowns with code base size.
It’s why I can nearly one shot a simple game for my kid in 20 minutes with Claude, but using it at work on our massive legacy codebase is only marginally faster than doing it by hand.
You asked why the size of the code matters, I gave you the answer. If you want to ramble about the non technical aspects of software development talk to someone else, I'm not interested.
The reason it’s not useful as a measure of productivity is because it’s measure of complexity (not directly, but it’s correlated). But it tells you nothing about whether that complexity was necessary for the functionality it provides.
But given that we know the functionality of Claude Code, we can guess how much complexity should be required. We could also be wrong.
>Why does it matter?
If there’s massively more code than there needs to be that does matter to the end user because it’s harder to maintain and has more surface area for bugs and security problems. Even with agents.
Among the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that Anthropic produced was one that leaked the source code. It is likely to be a config file, not part of the Claude Code software itself, but it still something to track.
The more lines of code you have the more likely there is for one of them to be wrong and go unnoticed. It results in bugs, vulnerabilities,... and leaks.
It will be exactly that. But that is a 'them' problem. I can look at it a go 'that looks like a bad idea' but they are the ones who have to live with it.
At some point someone will probably take their LLM code and repoint it at the LLM and say 'hey lets refactor this so it uses less code is easier to read but does the same thing' and let it chrun.
One project I worked on I saw one engineer delete 20k lines of code one day. He replaced it with a few lines of stored procedure. That 20k lines of code was in production for years. No one wanted to do anything with it but it was a crucial part of the way the thing worked. It just takes someone going 'hey this isnt right' and sit down and fix it.
When a TUI requires 68 GB of RAM to run, or when they spend a week not being able to find a bug that causes multiple people to immediately run out of tokens, it's not a "them" problem.
- Opencode (anomalyco/opencode) is about 670k LOC
- Codex (openai/codex) is about 720k LOC
- Gemini (google-gemini/gemini-cli) is about 570k LOC
Claude Code's 500k LOC doesn't seem out of the ordinary.