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Comment by Cu3PO42 | Hacker News Reader

I wanted a tiny helper tool to display my global keyboard shortcuts for me on macOS. I gave Kiro a short spec and some TypeScript describing the schema of the input data.

It wrote around 5000 LOC including tests and they... worked. It didn't look as nice as I would have liked, but I wasn't able to break it. However, 5000 lines was way too much code for such a simple task, the solution was over-engineered along every possible axis. I was able to (manually) get it down to ~800LOC without losing any important functionality.

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Kiro is from Amazon, so Conway's law in action?

> I was able to (manually) get it down to ~800LOC without losing any important functionality.

This is funny. Why would you a) care how many LOC it generated and b) bother injecting tedious, manual process into something otherwise fully automated?

I care about the complexity because I want/need to maintain the code down the line. I find it much easier to maintain shorter, simpler code than long, complex code.

Also because it was an experiment. I wanted to see how it would do and how reasonable the code it wrote was.

I'm sure somebody is going to point out that it was written by AI and is a toy, therefore it can be maintained by AI. I share your desire to have human maintainable code, but I imagine one of the goals of AI written code is to allow the AI to manage it, end-to-end.

> one of the goals of AI written code is to allow the AI to manage

Another reason to favour shorter code.

What year is it? Back in 2000 or before, the same arguments were made about webpages made in Dreamweaver and Frontpage. Shortly after there was a big push towards making the web faster and more efficient, which included stepping away from web page builders and building tools that optimized and minified all aspects of a webpage.

Then, we ended up bundling 50MB of minified frameworks in every page load. Maybe the next part of the cycle will be for optimizing this aspect of LLMs, maybe even to be able to fit more meaningful code in the context windows of these very LLMs.

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