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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, this doesn’t sound impressive at all. It sounds like a cowboy coder working on relatively small projects.

300k LOC is not particularly large, and this person’s writing and thinking (and stated workflow) is so scattered that I’m basically 100% certain that it’s a mess. I’m using all of the same models, the same tools, etc., and (importantly) reading all of the code, and I have 0% faith in any of these models to operate autonomously. Also, my opinion on the quality of GPT-5 vs Claude vs other models is wildly different.

There’s a huge disconnect between my own experience and what this person claims to be doing, and I strongly suspect that the difference is that I’m paying attention and routinely disgusted by what I see.

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300k especially isn’t impressive if it should have been 10k.

Yes, well put. And that’s a common failure mode.

I would guess that roughly 0.000087% devs on the planet do it in 10k (if it is possible) and 37.76% would do it in 876k so 300k is probably right in some middle :)

To be fair, codebases are bimodal, and 300k is large for the smaller part of the distribution. Large enterprise codebases tend to be monorepos, have a ton of generated code and a lot of duplicated functionality for different environments, so the 10-100 million line claims need to be taken with a grain of salt, a lot of the sub projects in them are well below 300k even if you pull in defs.

I'm fairly skeptical of the LLM craze but I deeply respect Peter Steinberger's work over the years, he truly is a gifted software developer in his own right. I'm sure his personal expertise helps him guide these tools better than many could.

(OP) 1/3rd of the code is tests.

There's an Expo app, two Tauri apps, a cli, a chrome extension. The admin part to help debug and test features is EXTREMELY detailed and around 40k LOC alone.

To give some perspective to that number.

Yeah, I read the post. Telling me that there's a chrome extension and some apps tells me nothing. Saying that the code is 1/3 tests is...something, but it's not exceptional, by any means.

I've got an code base I've been writing from scratch with LLMs, its of equivalent LOC and testing ratio, and my experiences trusting the models couldn't be more different. They routinely emit hot garbage.

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