I've been working on my own coding agent setup for a while. I mostly use pi [0] because it's minimal and easy to extend. When the leak happened, I wanted to study how Anthropic structured things: the tool system, how the agent loop flows, A 500K line codebase is a lot to navigate, so I mapped it visually to give myself a quick reference I could come back to while adapting ideas into my own harness and workflow.
I'm actively updating the site based on feedback from this thread. If anything looks off, or you find something I missed, lmk.
[0] https://pi.dev/
The only suggestion/nit I have is that you could add some kind of asterisk or hover helper to the part when you talk about 'Anthropic's message format', as it did make me want to come here and point out how it's ackchually OpenAI's format and is very common.
Only because if this was my first time learning about all this stuff I reckon I'd appreciate a deep dive into the format or the v1 api as an optional next step.
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?
I doubt it needs to be more than 20-50kloc.
You can create a full 3D game with a custom 3D engine in 500k lines. What the hell is Claude Code doing?
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.
Or you can, but whatever.
Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.
I guess I just find it weird because all the signals are messed up so whenever I see these sorts of layouts, I feel like I'm looking at the average where I don't think "gorgeous and interesting" at all. Instead, I'm forced to think "I should be skeptical of this based on the presentation because it presents as high quality but this may be hiding someone who is not actually aware of what they're presenting in any depth" as the author may have just shoved in a prompt and let it spin.
There's actually a similarly designed website (font weights, font styles etc) here in New Zealand (https://nzoilwatch.com/) where at a glance, it might seem like some overloaded professional-backed thing but instead it's just some guy who may or may not know anything about oil at all, yet people are linking it around the place like some sort of authoritative resource.
I would have way less of an issue if people just put their names by things and disclosed their LLM usage (which again, is fine) rather than giving the potentially false impression to unequipped people that the information presented is actually as accurate and trustworthy as the polish would suggest.
I'm serious. The hype chasing clearly clearly matters. .
things like this: https://github.com/instructkr/claw-code I mean ok, serious people put in years of effort for 100 of those stars ...
it's continually wild how extremely irrelevant hard effortful careful work is.
I think that's the game. Get up, look at the headlines, figure out how you can exploit them with vibe coding, do some hyphy project and repeat.
Maybe some lobster themed bullshit between openclaw and the claudecode leak.
I'm not being a cynic here, I'm just telling you what I'm going to do tomorrow.
Personally, I don't think I will be putting any such disclaimers or disclosures on my work, unless I deem it relevant to the functionality.
Content resizing, needing to juggle a speed knob to read, and the overall presentation makes it feel like Edward Tufte flavored nightmare fuel.
Last week we I was struggling to go from vague prompt to a OMG-it's-so-nice-looking web app, I remembered that example above and then decided to create my own component library, which I did in a couple days: https://www.substrateui.dev/. I was actually super happy that I was able to accomplish that, and then I realized I wanted to better understand the content that I had vibe coded into existence. So now I'm recreating that design system step by step w/ Claude code, filling in gaps in my knowledge & learning a bit about colors, typography, CSS, blah blah blah. It's actually a lot of fun because I'm able to explore all of the concepts and learn enough to build a front end that doesn't suck & is good enough for my use case without getting stuck for days on trying to center a stupid div by hand or play whack-mole-fix-something-and-break-something-else when trying to clean up AI slop.
That just seems to be human nature unfortunately - the complainers are always louder.
I've created some chinese characters learning website and I took me typing 1/3 of LoTR to get there[1]. I would have typed like 1% of that writing code directly. It is a different process, but it still needs some direction.
Here is another one that goes in depth as well: www.markdown.engineering for anyone going deep on learning.
This is why I personally don't take technical debt arguments about how LLM maintained code bases deteriorate with size/age seriously; it presumes that at some point I'll give up with the LLM and be left with a mess to clean up by hand, but that's not going to happen, future maintenance is to be left to LLMs and if that isn't possible for some reason then the project is as good as dead anyway. When you start a project with a LLM the plan should be to see it through with LLMs, planning to have unaided humans take over maintenance at some point is a mistake.
A 1yo project may be in good shape if written by just one dev, maybe a few. But if you have many devs, I can guarantee it will be messy and buggy. If anything, at 1yo it is probably still full of bugs because not enough time has elapsed for people to run into them.
And I'm sure we all know that when working on a greenfield project you can produce a lot more LoC per day than maintaining a legacy one.
Given that vibe code is significantly more verbose, you're probably talking about ~15 engineers worth of code?
I know that's all silly numbers, but this is just attempting to give people some context here, this isn't a massive code base. I've not read a lot of it, so maybe it's better than the verbose code I see Claude put out sometimes.
This is a two-pizza team sized project, so it's not a project that the code quality would inevitably spiral out of control due to communication problems.
A single senior architect COULD have kept the code quality under control.
Just a thought experiment, I very much doubt I'm the first one to think of it. It's probably in the same line of "why doesn't an LLM just write assembly directly"
I liken it to the problem of applying machine learning to hard video games (e.g. Starcraft). When trained to mimic human strategies, it can be extremely effective, but machine learning will not discover broadly effective strategies on a reasonable timescale.
If you convert "human strategies" to "human theory, programming languages, and design patterns", perhaps the point will be clear.
But: could the ouroboric cycle of LLM use decay the common strategies and design patterns we use into inexplicable blobs of assembly? Can LLMs improve at programming if humans do not advance the theory or invent new languages, patterns, etc?
The current training loop for coding is RL as well - so a departure from human coding patterns is not unexpected (even if departure from human coding structure is unexpected, as that would require development of a new coding language).
My suspicion is that the "language" part of LLMs means they tend to prefer languages which are closer to human languages than assembly and benefit from much of the same abstractions and tooling (hence the recent acquisition of bun and astral).
> It's a shame, because it's still the best coding agent, in my experience.
If it is the best, and if it delivers the value users are asking for, then why would they have an incentive to make further $$$ investments to make it of a "higher" quality if the value this difference could make is not substantial or hurts the ROI?
On many projects I found this "higher quality" not only to be false of delivering more substantial value but actually I found it was hurting the project to deliver the value that matters.
Maybe we are after all entering the era of SWE where all this bike-shedding is gone and only type of engineers who will be able to survive in it will be the ones who are capable of delivering the actual value (IME very few per project).
Or that's why tgey had to buy bun with actual engineers to work on Claude Code to reduce memory peaks from 68 GB (yes, 68 gigabytes) to a "measely" 1.7? Because code quality doesn't matter?
Or that a year later they still cannot figure out how to render anything in the terminal without flickering?
The only reason people use Claude Code is because it's the only way to use Anthropic's heavily subsidized subscription. You get banned if you use it through other, better, tools.
Now whether that’s actually possible is a second topic.
That's how you get "oh this TUI API wrapper needs 68GB of RAM" https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 or "we need 16ms to lay out a few hundred characters on screen that's why it's a small game engine": https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
Also I definitely want a Claude Code spirit animal
(Yes, I know I can turn it off. I have.)
“Complete thyself.”
And I want an octopus. Who orchestrates octopuses.
This deployment is temporarily paused
https://web.archive.org/web/20260331105051/https://www.cclea...
BTW, that's why you should use your own infrastructure and not depend on Vercel
For example the whole animation on this website, what does it say beyond that you make a request to backend and get a response that may have some tool call?
If you prompt with little raw material and little actual specification of what you want to see in the end, eg you just say make a detailed breakdown dashboard-like site that analyzes this codebase, the result will have this uncanny character.
I'd describe it as a kind of "fanfic", it (and now I'm not just talking about this website but my overall impression related to this phenomenon) reminds me a bit like how when I was 15 or so, I had an idea about how the world works then things turned out to be less flashy, less movie-like, less clear-cut, less-impressive-to-a-teenage-boy than I had thought.
If you know the concept of "stupid man's idea of a smart man", I'd say AI made stuff (with little iteration) gives this outward appearance of a smart man from the Reddit-midwit-cinematic-universe. It's like how guns in movies sound more like guns than real guns. It's hyperreality.
Again this is less about the capabilities of AI and it's more connected to the people-pleasing nature of it. It's like you prompt it for some epic dinner and it heaps you up some hmmm epic bacon with bacon yeah (referring to the hivemind-meme). Or BigMac on the poster vs the tray, and the poster one is a model made with different components that are more photogenic. It's a simulacrum.
It looks more like your naive currently imagined thing about what you think you need vs what you'd actually need. It's like prompting your ideal girlfriend into AI avatar existence. I'm sure she will fit your ideal thought and imagination much better but your actual life would need the actual thing.
This relates to the Persona thing that Anthropic has been exploring, that each prompt guides the model towards adopting a certain archetypal fiction character as it's persona and there are certain attraction basins that get reinforced with post training. And in the computer world, simulated action can be easily turned into real action with harnesses and tools, so I'm not saying that it doesn't accomplish the task. But it seems that there are more sloppy personas, and it seems that experts can more easily avoid summoning them by giving them context that reflects more mundane reality than a novice or an expert who gives little context. Otherwise the AI persona will be summoned from the Reddit midwit movie.
I'm not fully clear about all this, but I think we have a lot to figure out around how to use and judge the output of AI in a productive workflow. I don't think it will go away ever, but will need some trimming at the edges for sure.
I use it all day and love it. Don't get me wrong. But it's a terminal-based app that talks to an LLM and calls local functions. Ooookay…
Agents in general are easy to make, and trivial to make for yourself especially, and the result will be much better than what any of the big providers can make for you.
`pi` with whatever commands/extensions you want to make for yourself is better than CC if you really don't want to go through the trouble of making your own thing.
curious as i haven't gotten around to writing my own agent yet
But you can do a lot of interesting things on top of this. I highly recommend writing an agent and hooking it up to a local model.
First command I looked at:
/stickers:
Displays earned achievement stickers for milestones like first commit, 100 tool calls, or marathon sessions. Stickers are stored in the user profile and rendered as ASCII art in the terminal.
What is the motivation for someone to put out junk like this?
Getting something with a link to their GitHub onto the frontpage of HN. Because form matters much more in this world than substance.
The animated explanation at the top is also way too fast at 1x, almost impossible to follow; that immediately hinted at the author not fully reading/experiencing the result before publishing this.
It's inappropriate to label a free side project 'junk' or 'slop' even if it contains major errors.
Particularly when there's a disclaimer about possible inaccuracies on the page.
The open source models are quite close, and they'd probably be just as good with the equivalent amount of compute/data the frontier labs have access to.
However, I assume that usage data could be increasingly valuable as well. That will likely help the big commercial cloud models to maintain a head start for general use.
The utils directory should only contain truly generic, business-agnostic utilities (such as date retrieval, simple string manipulation, etc.).
We can see that the code produced by Vibe is not what a professional engineer would write. This may be due to the engineers using the Vibe tool.
I have no idea why because in my experience Claude Code and the same models inside of Cursor behave almost identically. I think all the secret sauce is in the RLHF.
i do shift ctrl F
0 - https://github.com/zackautocracy/claude-code/blob/main/src/u...
it looks really interesting.
How is this on the front page?
- find nothing - still manage to fill entire lages - somehow have a similar structure - are boring as fuck
At least this one is 3/4, the previous one had BINGO.
War flashbacks to genshin
In all seriousness. I think you‘re supposed to run these in some kind of sandbox.
Which emperor, specifically?