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Comment by einr | Hacker News Reader

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Hi, I'm on team that worked on this. No it's not vibe coded. We do pretty intense code review of every PR. It looks like the number you're seeing is including lock files and artifacts that are not part of the core coverage.

Fair enough if it’s not vibe coded, I’ll take your word for it. Code review seems like it’s mostly bots (Claude, Cursor, Greptile) from the PRs I looked at?

Nevertheless, AI use is not what really stood out to me. It’s that it’s SO MUCH CODE. I have no idea how you guys maintain or reason about the quality or security of something like this. Good luck, I guess.

Ah yeah, after accusing others that they vibe-code without proofs, no apology and steering the accusations to other things?

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please don't fulminate."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>120k LoC of probably largely vibecoded nonsense for a window with a text box and a button that lets you send and receive some data over a HTTP API.

"I will make loads of assumptions without checking so that I can invent reasons to get mad"

Note that about 30,000 of those lines are JSON files for localization and testing, as one example.

How much UI text does this thing have that it needs thousands of lines of localization? Where are these files?

Especially curious because I see a whole lot of hardcoded english text in there…

Are you arguing that 90k LoC for a window with a text box and an overengineered textarea tag is somehow more acceptable than 120k?

22,056 is not about 30,000. Per scc:

  Language      Files     Lines   Blanks  Comments     Code
  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  TypeScript      760    109110    14500      7397    87213
  JSON             41     22056        6         0    22050
  Markdown         56      7150     2086         0     5064
  YAML             33      3965      406       208     3351
  ... and many more with fewer than 1k lines

Regarding "loads of assumptions," it's hard to tell how much of this is vibecoded slop (definitely non-zero looking at the commit log), but I don't think it's that outrageous to claim 87k sloc is too much for a textbox and an API wrapper.

That's still an immense amount of code for a chat interface essentially consisting of a text box and a button, which any OS (mobile or desktop) can usually throw up in a few lines of code.

Maybe you wouldn't be so tired if you didn't make assumptions of things to be mad about

On the bright side - it doesn't load without javascript ...in Firefox...

I had to check the comments here to even see what this product was for that reason.

What fatigues you about this observation?

Would recommend exercise

Wait what ? Did you include libraries imported by NPM in this count ?

I don’t think so. I just used a public GitHub LoC counting tool directly on the repo, there are a few.

https://ghloc.vercel.app/thunderbird/thunderbolt?branch=main claims 141k and most of it is Typescript.

I imagine that would bump that number to milions.

I just checked one old take home task in Angular I did last year and the total number of lines is over five million over 35k+ files.

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