What every developer learns during their “psh i could build that” weekendware attempt is that there is infinite polish to be had, and that their 20k loc PoC was <1% of the work.
That said, doesn't TFA show you what they use their loc for?
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 and how they did it.
Or you can, but whatever.
The only reason people are using Claude Code is because it's the only way to use their (heavily subsidized) subscription plans. People who are okay with using and paying for their APIs often opt out for other, better, tools.
Also, analogies don't work. As we know for a fact that Claude Code is a bloated mess that these "champions league-level engineers" can't fix. They literally talk about it themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488 (they had to bring in actual Champions League engineers from bun to fix some of their mess).
Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.
The principles of good software don't suddenly vanish just because now it's a machine writing the code instead of a human, they still have to deal with the issues humans have for more than half a century. The history of programming is new developers coming up with a new paradigm, then rediscovering all the issues that the previous generation had figured out before them.
It turns out that there is a tradeoff in code between velocity and quality that smart businesses consider relative to hardware cost/quality. The businesses that are outcompeting others are rarely those who have the highest quality code, but rather those that are shipping quickly at a quality level that is satisfactory for current hardware.
That worked because of rapid advancements in CPU performance. We’ve left that era.
It’s about more than performance. Code is and always has been a liability. Even with agents, you start seeing massive slowdowns with code base size.
It’s why I can nearly one shot a simple game for my kid in 20 minutes with Claude, but using it at work on our massive legacy codebase is only marginally faster than doing it by hand.
But given that we know the functionality of Claude Code, we can guess how much complexity should be required. We could also be wrong.
>Why does it matter?
If there’s massively more code than there needs to be that does matter to the end user because it’s harder to maintain and has more surface area for bugs and security problems. Even with agents.
Because it's unmaintainable slop that they themselves don't know how to fix when something happens? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488