[meetingthrower]

Correct. It's "good enough" for now and if it needs to be industrialized you can do that later. If it is brand new and has no traffic and is not exposing user data or opening up your keys to someone.... who cares how perfect the code is if it mostly works? Users don't have to use it...

[aljgz]

That is, until you have silent corruption of data because the admin tool is not aware of the new field you added to the website, and it's not written with forward compatibility in mind. (Have seen this lots of times)

Or a downstream service is overwhelmed and suddenly all the retired you added to different places DDOS your own service. (Also have seen this lots of times)

Some quality problems you can fix later. With others, once they happen, there's no "later"

[aljgz]

*retired -> retries

[rwmj]

In the thread the developer is only able to look at the front-end code. The real problem is more likely in the back-end code where there'll be hilariously bad security issues. Hopefully Tan isn't running this on the same server or network as anything important.

[officialchicken]

... and engineers don't have to consider this a good look coming from the head of YC. These are rookie mistakes - generated by both the human and AI model in a collaborative process. It's also the kind of mistake most of us aren't willing to make b/c we don't have the capital to sweep it under the rug if it goes pear-shaped.

[bluegatty]

It's not really a question about if GStack is 'good enough' - it's the claims about 37K LOC being legitimate.

Because it's producing 'functional slop' that has little bearing on how anything else would be made the 37K LOC is totally out of context and therefore a misrepresentation.

He has bragging rights over GStack - not 37K LOC, that's bad.

[meetingthrower]

That's a great way to put it: functional slop. That's what I mean tho - as long as it is minimally functional it does its job.

I totally get the shade thrown at ycombinator. But I guess my perception is that it has never been about the tech for them and more about getting quick hacks to get to market quickly. So it feels on brand?

[bluegatty]

You're right it's a fine line, but I think there was always a kind of underlying 'tech legitimacy'. PG is a big Lisp nerd. HN is ultra minimal and well designed.

It's one thing to say 'just make it work' - it's another to create hype on top of nonsense.

I don't want to diss vibecoding - because it has it's place, but GStack is being presented in the context of something new and amazing in terms of engineering productivity - not just 'a thing that works good enough'.

But there's an on-brand element to it.

It's a bridge to far though.

There is already backlash, whereas, I'm not sure there is backlash to AirBnB's initial attempts - literally nobody is going to care what their stack is.

[swat535]

> functional slop

I suppose the question is: will customers and business people care?

At the end of the day, if the system does what it needs to do to in exchange for money, then it's a success if people's eyes. Heck, even basic security and privacy features get ignored in most systems.

Average person treats their computers like any other appliance, they don't care if the app takes 10 minutes to load, or is slow, or ad ridden, they just want it to work.

Engineers obsess about code quality as an artistic expression but the reality is that executives and investors won't care. You can scream "maintenance burden!" all you want, but investors will happily throw money at the problem down the line to make it go away.

Our industry simply doesn't have any required rigor outside of a few edge cases in heavily regulated industries.