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Comments (50)

• mrandish
  > 1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.Relevant historical context: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.htmlWhen Apple Lisa managers started requiring weekly line-of-code counts in 1982, Bill Atkinson had just rewritten QuickDraw's region engine with a simpler algorithm that was 6× faster and 2,000 lines shorter, so he submitted -2000 on the form. Management quietly stopped asking him to fill it out.
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  drob518
  So, I’ve explored AI coding, but my conclusion up to this point has been that it’s interesting, but the code is sometimes a mess, and sometimes it will completely crater the project to the point where you just have to throw it all away and start over. After reading this article, I keep wondering if we’re really being productive or just creating lots of crappy code at machine speeds now. It’s one thing to say that we are using a “security agent,” for example, to ensure the security of the code, but quite another to actually know (or at least strongly believe) that our code is really secure. With all the froth of generating thousands of lines of code, how are we sure? In some sense, my question is whether we’re building a Winchester Mystery House or a house of cards.
• MBCook
  I’d just like to thank the author for giving the correct t reason for the Winchester Mystery House instead of just blindly repeating the “she went crazy” line story as truth.
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  hedora
  Does anyone have numbers for churn vs. cumulative code?Most of my commits (hand written and AI) have delete counts that are 75-110% the added line count.The point that many developers will probably forget to tell the LLM to run cleanup/refactoring paths is probably true though. (I’ve definitely found ghost-chasing bugfixes in all sorts of corners of LLM generated code).
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  gerikson
  The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.
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  gorfian_robot
  as an aside the lore about the "Winchester Mystery House" is all made up hogwash. here is one place where it is debunked:https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/08/the-truth-about-sallie...
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  jonah
  Too bad Winchester didn't become an architect.Julia Morgan, Winchester's contemporary, was the first woman to obtain an architecture license in California in 1904 and had a very prolific career throughout the state including her most famous - Hearst Castle - commissioned in 1919.
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  The_Goonies1985
  >"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture."That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was sufficiently labyrinthine, and endlessly expanding; to confuse them.Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.This is more akin to a programmer consciously obfuscating and expanding a codebase to make it impossible for their angry-users to ever finish auditing it, or to determine its author.
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  7rirdnj
  > Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning.How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future.Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.
• ece
  The movie Winchester, book from a local author (https://www.losaltosonline.com/community/santa-clara-valley-...) and going to the tour itself makes me wonder if Sarah Winchester invites the controversy over why she built the house. What would a rich woman during her time do for fame that outlasts her? Chase crazy architecture ideas if you liked architecture maybe. Make it so the home becomes a public place.The Winchester house a developer builds is only worth something if it delivers tangible value. The market clearly thinks one way, but plenty of people are still skeptical. The cathedral and bazaar delivered value in different ways, and the need came before the solution.
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  jFriedensreich
  Does anyone know what “agent tea” is in the second graph? There is a paper about a protocol but it seems a bit obscure to be featured in this context and the other two points on the graph are models.
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  DonHopkins
  >Gary Tan’s personal AI committee gstack is a Winchester Mystery House constructed mostly from Markdown.Winchester Mystery Potemkin Village.
• PaulDavisThe1st
  I'm pretty sure that I could consistently spew 1000 lines a day/per commit if it was mostly cut-n-pasting of existing code, that I had complete access to, with some minor variations.
• anon
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• anon
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• fragmede
  Before, when code was laboriously produced by hand, sharing it so other people could use it was seen as a gift. Today there is no such incentive. If I pick up some software and find a bug in it or a feature it's missing, I can (have Claude) fix that bug or add that feature, and keep it to myself. Why bother contributing that fix or feature to the world if it's just going to be met with complaints and accusations of it being vibe coded slop? Just as maintainers don't owe me anything, by the rules of the license, if I'm not distributing the binaries, I don't owe the world a public fork of the source code with my changes.The Winchester mystery house is notable for becoming a public tourist attraction instead of a closed private piece of real estate. How do we evolve the Cathedral and the Bazaar to the modern era? I don't know. I know that my life on my computer is drastically improved by spending an afternoon a week building better tooling for myself, and I realize it's built on top of other's contributions to the world, but at the same time, I don't know how to contribute back under the new regime.
• siruwastaken
  [dead]
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  sitagosan
  [flagged]