[blubber]

"found numerous examples of bloat and inefficiencies in Tan’s site code, and used a single (Anthropic) Claude session to review the files he downloaded from the website to confirm his observations"

1. I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software.

2. So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?

[embedding-shape]

Personally, I've used my newfound productivity to build higher quality software at the same rate as I produced mediocre quality software before. Some people, like Gary Tan for example, seem to instead produce software at the same quality or worse than before, but just produce a ton more software regardless of quality.

I guess the article in reality is just these two perspectives pitted against each other for some cheap views.

[_visgean]

Yes but for that you need to focus on the quality. There are probably horrible issues on backend as well.

[arcticbull]

I'd suggest looking at the review itself, there's an X-the-everything-app thread on it.

https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316

Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs, I'm having trouble understanding what 78,000 lines of ruby in the context of a Rails blog could ... do.

I'm sure there's some powerful ugly stuff in Office but in a good code that's calcified kind of way. It got that way over like 30 years of releasing to the public across platforms, not over a weekend.

I'd be surprised if microsoft.com is shipping their entire test suite unminified and their back-end posting rich text editor with index.html (with two title tags in the head) and rendering the entire DOM for desktop and mobile regardless of your platform.

I'm not critiquing Garry or the site. I think it's great people are using AI to build things that bring them joy, or that they find useful. I certainly do.

I am opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code. It has always been the worst metric on earth as a proxy for productivity. Every line is a liability, and it always was. AI has not changed that, if anything it's amplifying it.

The best PRs remove code, not add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC are OpenAI and Anthropic. Everyone else seems to be rummaging around for an ROI.

[andrewingram]

> Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs

This doesn't seem right. Yes, the "build a blog in 15 minutes" demo was pretty memorable, but I don't think it's ever really been pitched as a sweet spot for Rails. IIRC Rails was essentially extracted out of the 37Signals codebases for Basecamp et al.

[arcticbull]

Ah yeah that is indeed what I was thinking of. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

[close04]

> I hope they never get hold of the code of MS Office or almost any other piece of real-world business software.

Except he's not building Office, a software with decades of legacy, used by hundreds of millions of users. He's coding a website, effectively writing bloat with a silver lining of useful features. AI automated and inflated the worst of practices too. Anyone outputting 37K LoC daily is creating bloat and inefficiencies at unprecedented rate.

And enterprise software was already the butt of all jokes in this regard. We found ways to make that worse at scale even for the basic things. It's not a good look when you need to use this "whatabout".

[63stack]

That was the strangest line for me as well. The article tries to play up this "Polish engineer with an MSc in computer science who has 13 years of industry experience" who ... used claude to review the code. My mom could have done this without an MSc or years of industry experience.

[croes]

Your mom couldn’t distinguish Claude‘s BS analysis and hallucinations from real bloat and errors.

You need experience to check Claude‘s findings

[streetfighter64]

> So anyone with claude access could arrive at the same conclusions ... and ask claude to fix it?

Begs the question of why the original "author" of the code hasn't just asked Claude to fix it? Or asked Claude to generate good code from the beginning. I suppose the answer is that nobody cares about good or efficient code anymore. But that's been the case since long before LLM coding though (as stated in your point 1).

Why write clever code when we can just write JS slop and ask customers "upgrade" their hardware every year...

[lambdaone]

Absolutely. For him the bloat is not a problem; it's a negative externality.

[bluegatty]

It's worse than anything in MS really.

[zombot]

Careful, MS is vibe-coding crapware now too.

[bluegatty]

I'm not sure it's vibe-coding exactly, but fair to be aware for sure.

[coldtea]

>2. So anyone with a claude subscription could arrive at the same conclusions?

It's symmetrical: just like anyone with a claude subscription could arrive at the same vibe slop!