alt Hacker NewsImpressive!
35 kLOC is quite a bit. I wonder how straightforward and maintainable this app ended up to be. This would require taking a look at the sources. While good Rails code tends to be very terse, frontend may be quite voluminous.
> I believe within a couple of months, when things like log tailing and automated testing and native version control get implemented
This sounds a bit too optimistic, especially around automated testing, but yes, eventually this all will be there.
> an extremely powerful tool for even non-technical people to write production-quality apps
But why would non-technical people would even think in terms of log tailing and version control, any more than they think about the gauge of wiring in their walls, or the kind of modulation their Wi-Fi device use? For really non-technical audience to make a good use of such tools, it won't just take the AI to be a competent coder. The AI should become a competent architect and a competent senior SWE to translate from the product management language to the software development language, without even surfacing it when not explicitly asked. It's going to be quite a bit of a challenge to make it work, and work about as reliably as with a human team.
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Yeah, without trying to be dismissive I'm a bit unsure where the 35kLOC are going?
The 35k lines of code is what made me think this was either a joke or the state of vibe coding, but no it turns out they're serious
I have entire codebases of embedded software in C without the shortcuts of modern programming languages in way fewer than 35k lines
> 35 kLOC is quite a bit. I wonder how straightforward and maintainable this app ended up to be. This would require taking a look at the sources. While good Rails code tends to be very terse, frontend may be quite voluminous.
I think people will have to recalibrate on this. The LOCs do things that you otherwise would not do. Features and details that simply would not happen — because they are too code/time intensive for most projects. It just won't matter anymore.
> But why would non-technical people would even think in terms of log tailing and version control
They won't! They won't have to. The obvious good stuff that everyone thinks the AI tool should be able do, will just work, because the people building the tools, will mostly obviously focus on making them work.
Yeah 35k of code is a red flag. There's no reason for this to be that large.
Since I wrote the blog post, I actually added automated tests which Windsurf / Claude Code runs before committing any change. It saved me a lot of headaches when the LLM decided to make random logic changes for no reason.