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Comment by thr0w | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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.

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