alt.hn

4/1/2026 at 5:15:37 AM

Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

 https://ccunpacked.dev/

by autocracy101

4/1/2026 at 9:47:04 AM

Author here. I built this in a few hours after the Claude Code leak.

I've been working on my own coding agent setup for a while. I mostly use pi [0] because it's minimal and easy to extend. When the leak happened, I wanted to study how Anthropic structured things: the tool system, how the agent loop flows, A 500K line codebase is a lot to navigate, so I mapped it visually to give myself a quick reference I could come back to while adapting ideas into my own harness and workflow.

I'm actively updating the site based on feedback from this thread. If anything looks off, or you find something I missed, lmk.

[0] https://pi.dev/

by autocracy101

4/1/2026 at 12:39:44 PM

How about releasing your own source code? It is a beautiful site, love the UX as well as functionality.

by lateforwork

4/1/2026 at 2:48:28 PM

It screams vibe coding. This is the anthropic look. Just ask Claude and give it a screenshot.

by azinman2

4/1/2026 at 3:44:50 PM

Vibe coding is also why this was released hours after leak instead of days/weeks.

by cowlby

4/1/2026 at 2:53:10 PM

Of course I expect it is vibe coding. It would be insane to code anything by hand these days. But that doesn't mean there is no creative input by the author here.

by lateforwork

4/1/2026 at 3:12:31 PM

>> It would be insane to code anything by hand these days.

I strongly disagree, but it made me chuckle a bit, thinking about labeling software as "handmade" or marketing software house as "artisanal".

by zeroq

4/2/2026 at 4:42:56 AM

There's a lot of errors you can miss by coding by hand, even as a seasoned developer. Try taking Claude Code, point it at your repo, and ask it to find bugs. I bet it will.

Claude is actually a crazy good vuln researcher. If you use it that way, your code might just be more secure than written purely by hand.

by alistairmayo

4/1/2026 at 11:59:24 PM

Our organic artisanal code is written by free-range developers

by small_scombrus

4/2/2026 at 1:03:05 AM

"free-range" means fully remote, right?

by Viliam1234

4/1/2026 at 6:51:10 PM

Depends on what you’re building and whether it’s recreational or not. Complex architecture vs a ui analysis tool, for example. For a ui analysis tool, the only reason you code by hand is for the joy of coding by hand. Even though you can drive a car or fly in a plane there are times to walk or ride a bike still.

by eric_cc

4/1/2026 at 6:35:41 PM

Depending on your standards and what company is making it you could even have “cruelty free.”

by bobthepanda

4/1/2026 at 7:21:31 PM

[dead]

by kitsune1

4/1/2026 at 7:14:39 PM

You well on the path to AI-fueled psychosis if you genuinely believe this.

by archagon

4/1/2026 at 7:24:16 PM

I genuinely believe this. Even if you're inventing a new algorithm it is better to describe the algorithm in English and have AI do the implementation.

by lateforwork

4/2/2026 at 3:17:39 AM

At least it's more productive than AI Derangement Syndrome.

by joquarky

4/1/2026 at 8:11:25 PM

Must everything be artisanal for some people? </s>

by QuantumGood

4/1/2026 at 2:12:12 PM

Guess what? People have ZERO reason to Open Source anything now.

by kordlessagain

4/1/2026 at 7:14:30 PM

One reason, beside basic altruism, is so you can put the projects on your resume. This is especially helpful if the project does very well or gets lots of stars.

by DustinKlent

4/1/2026 at 2:40:46 PM

This said Jeavon's Paradox will likely mean far more code is open sourced simply due to how much code will get written in total.

by pixl97

4/2/2026 at 3:21:48 AM

We should be applauding the promotion of science and useful arts that genAI is fueling.

But egos are involved.

by joquarky

4/1/2026 at 2:37:42 PM

Why would you think that?

by vntok

4/1/2026 at 3:24:50 PM

I'm a committed open source dev and I've flipped my own switch from "default public" to "default private".

by saulpw

4/2/2026 at 1:56:31 AM

Because nobody wants their shit stolen by some punk.

by kordlessagain

4/1/2026 at 12:54:05 PM

As a cynical modern eng look for landing page skills

by smrtinsert

4/1/2026 at 11:06:18 AM

This is nice, I really like the style/tone/cadence.

The only suggestion/nit I have is that you could add some kind of asterisk or hover helper to the part when you talk about 'Anthropic's message format', as it did make me want to come here and point out how it's ackchually OpenAI's format and is very common.

Only because I figure if this was my first time learning about all this stuff I think I'd appreciate a deep dive into the format or the v1 api as one of the optional next steps.

by boomskats

4/1/2026 at 1:46:33 PM

I’m using pi and cc locally in a docker container connected to a local llama.cpp so the whole agentic loop is 100% offline.

I had used pi and cc to analyze the unpacked cc to compare their design, architecture and implementation.

I guess your site was also coded with pi and it is very impressive. Wonderful if you can do a visualization for pi vs cc as well. My local models might not be powerful enough.

Thanks for the hard work!

by ontouchstart

4/1/2026 at 9:53:39 PM

I thought that early coding assistants came to be written in some Java/TypeScript, because AI companies just had web-devs playing around and then made it a product even though the languages being such a misfit for terminal. Why did you decide for TypeScript?

by couscouspie

4/1/2026 at 10:04:43 AM

Can you give me more info about your own agentic setup ?

by haliliceylan

4/2/2026 at 1:23:15 AM

This is actually a GREAT example of vibe-coding + skill.

by tipoffdosage904

4/1/2026 at 5:11:43 PM

Thank you for this brother, well done

by hatmanstack

4/1/2026 at 6:58:08 PM

Is there any nice themes for pi?

by andoando

4/2/2026 at 10:02:54 AM

The tool system breakdown is useful. I've been running Claude Code daily for a few months and some things in there explain behaviors I noticed but couldn't figure out. Like why sometimes it re-reads files it already read 30 seconds ago. Makes more sense now seeing how the context window management works internally, it's being more conservative about what it assumes is still accurate. The permission gate flow is the part I care about most. When I'm away from my machine and the agent hits a permission prompt, that's where my workflow falls apart. Knowing how it structures those requests internally is helpful for anyone building tooling around it. One thing the guide doesn't cover much is how sessions are meant to be resumed. The checkpoint system is interesting but in practice I find session resume pretty fragile once you go past a certain context length.

by psychomfa_tiger

4/1/2026 at 11:10:20 AM

A 500k line codebase for an agent CLI proves one thing: making a probabilistic LLM behave deterministically is a massive state-management nightmare. Right now, they're great for prompting simple sites/platforms but they break at large enterprise repos.

If you don't have a rigid, external state machine governing the workflow, you have to brute-force reliability. That codebase bloat is likely 90% defensive programming; frustration regexes, context sanitizers, tool-retry loops, and state rollbacks just to stop the agent from drifting or silently breaking things.

The visual map is great, but from an architectural perspective, we're still herding cats with massive code volume instead of actually governing the agents at the system level.

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 1:20:53 PM

I find it really strange that there is so much negative commentary on the _code_, but so little commentary on the core architecture.

My takeaway from looking at the tool list is that they got the fundamental architecture right - try to create a very simple and general set of tools on the client-side (e.g. read file, output rich text, etc) so that the server can innovate rapidly without revving the client (and also so that if, say, the source code leaks, none of the secret sauce does).

Overall, when I see this I think they are focused on the right issues, and I think their tool list looks pretty simple/elegant/general. I picture the server team constantly thinking - we have these client-side tools/APIs, how can we use them optimally? How can we get more out of them. That is where the secret sauce lives.

by ttcbj

4/1/2026 at 1:42:13 PM

The tools was mostly already known, no? (I wish they had a "present" tool which allowed to model to copy-paste from files/context/etc. showing the user some content without forcing it through the model)

by olejorgenb

4/1/2026 at 3:13:57 PM

Yeah in fact one thing claude is freaking great at is decompilation.

If you can download it client side you can likely place a copy in a folder and ask claude

‘decompile the app in this folder to answer further questions on how it works. As an an example first question explain what happens when a user does X’.

I do this with obscure video games where i want to a guide on how some mechanics work. Eg. https://pastes.io/jagged-all-69136 as a result of a session.

It can ruin some games but despite the possibility of hallucinations i find it waaay more reliable than random internet answers.

Works for apps too. Obfuscation doesn’t seem to stop it.

by AnotherGoodName

4/1/2026 at 2:58:26 PM

Why are "tools" for local IO interesting and not just the only way to do it? I can't really imagine a server architecture that gets to read your local files and present them without a fat client of some kind.

What is the naive implementation you're comparing against? Ssh access to the client machine?

by jayd16

4/1/2026 at 3:14:03 PM

It's early days and we don't fully understand LLM behavior to the extent that we can assume questions like this about agent design are resolved. For instance, is an agent smarter with Claude Code's tools or `exec_command` like Codex? And does that remain true for each subsequent model release?

by abossy

4/1/2026 at 3:29:31 PM

It’s a distinction that IMHO likely doesn’t make much difference, at least for the mostly automated/non-interactive coding agent use case. What matters more is how well the post-training on synthetic harness traces works.

by woodson

4/1/2026 at 2:15:10 PM

> but so little commentary on the core architecture.

The core architecture is not interesting? its an LLM tui, theres not much there to discuss architecturally. The code itself is the actual fascinating train wreck to look at.

by acedTrex

4/1/2026 at 2:32:59 PM

[dead]

by 3abiton

4/2/2026 at 10:36:57 AM

Exactly right. Files on disk as the shared state, not the conversation window. Each step reads current state, does its job, writes output. Next step starts fresh from those files. No accumulated context means no drift, and the LLM can hallucinate in its reasoning all it wants as long as the output passes a check before anything advances.

by viktorianer

4/1/2026 at 12:04:40 PM

It’s not surprising. There has been quite a bit of industrial research in how to manage mere apes to be deterministic with huge software control systems, and they are an unruly bunch I assure you.

by sunir

4/1/2026 at 1:24:09 PM

Sunir! Hope you are doing well man, I got a good chuckle from this.

by RALaBarge

4/1/2026 at 1:53:11 PM

I am! I’ll reach out in another channel to connect.

by sunir

4/1/2026 at 12:23:49 PM

It's hard to tell how much it says about difficulty of harnessing vs how much it says about difficulty of maintaining a clean and not bloated codebase when coding with AI.

by comboy

4/1/2026 at 12:32:41 PM

Why not both? AI writes bloated spaghetti by default. The control plane needs to be human-written and rigid -> at least until the state machine is solid enough to dogfood itself. Then you can safely let the AI enhance the harness from within the sandbox.

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 1:45:14 PM

Were human organizations (not individuals) any good at the latter anyway?

by whiplash451

4/1/2026 at 2:03:57 PM

We propped the entire economy up on it. Just look at the s&p top 10. Actually even top 50 holdings.

If it doesn't deliver on the promise we have bigger problems than "oh no the code is insecure". We went from "I think this will work" to "this has to work because if it doesn't we have one of those 'you owe the bank a billion dollars' situations"

by chrismarlow9

4/1/2026 at 3:04:46 PM

It's weird to look at the world like this. If they deliver doesn't that invalidate thousands of other business plans? What about paying for that?

If they fail, doesn't software and the giant companies that make it go back to owning the world?

by jayd16

4/1/2026 at 4:07:26 PM

“if they deliver”

As I’m reading this, I’m thinking about how in 1980. It was imagined that everyone needed to learn how to program in BASIC or COBOL, and that the way computers would become ubiquitous would be that everybody would be writing program programs for them. That turned out to be a quaint and optimistic idea.

It seems like the pitch today is that every company that has a software-like need will be able to use AI to manifest that software into existence, or more generally, to manifest some kind of custom solution into existence. I don’t buy it. Coding the software has never been the true bottleneck, anyone who’s done a hackathon project knows that part can be done quickly. It’s the specifying and the maintenance that is the hard part.

To me, the only way this will actually bear the fruit it’s promising is if they can deliver essentially AGI in a box. A company will pay to rent some units of compute that they can speak to like a person and describe the needs, and it will do anything - solve any problem - a remote worker could do. IF this is delivered, indeed it does invalidate virtually all business models overnight, as whoever hits AGI will price this rental X%[1] below what it would cost to hire humans for similar work, breaking capitalism entirely.

[1] X = 80% below on day 1 as they’ll be so flush with VC cash, and they’d plan to raise the price later. Of course, society will collapse before then because of said breaking of capitalism itself.

by xp84

4/2/2026 at 10:04:09 AM

> breaking capitalism

It seems non sequitur. This hypothetical scenario sounds like entrenching capitalism, because it would concentrate capital even more.

It would probably weaken democracy and weaken free market (esp. the job market), yes.

> society will collapse before then because of said breaking of capitalism itself

Or, maybe the society would continue to exist with even more inequality? And, of course, much changed from what it is today.

by kubanczyk

4/1/2026 at 3:56:06 PM

The time is ripe for deterministic AI; incidentally, this was also released today: https://itsid.cloud/ - presumably will be useful for anyone who wants to quickly recreate an open source Python package or other copyrighted work to change its license.

by pred_

4/1/2026 at 5:24:16 PM

Can you please explain the use here? I tried the demo, and cat, cp, echo, etc... seem to do the exact same thing without the cost.

Their demo even says:

   `Paste any code or text below. Our model will produce an AI-generated, byte-for-byte identical output.`
Unless this is a parody site can you explain what I am missing here?

Token echoing isn't even to the lexeme/pattern level, and not even close to WSD, Ogden's Lemma, symbol-grounding etc...

The intentionally 'Probably approximately complete' statistical learning model work, fundamentally limits reproducibility for PAC/Stastical methods like transformers.

CFG inherently ambiguity == post correspondence problem == halt == open domain frame-problem == system identification problem == symbol-grounding problem == entscheidungsproblem

The only way to get around that is to construct a grammar that isn't. It will never exist for CFGs, programs, types, etc... with arbitrary input.

I just don't see why placing a `14-billion parameter identity transformer` that just basically echos tokens is a step forward on what makes the problem hard.

Please help me understand.

by nyrikki

4/1/2026 at 7:46:37 PM

It's satire - just see the About page.

by yw3410

4/1/2026 at 8:25:02 PM

April's fool. Check the career page

by ericfr11

4/1/2026 at 4:30:02 PM

I don’t understand what this is, is it satire? What is it supposed to be doing or solving?

by BloondAndDoom

4/1/2026 at 6:18:45 PM

Take a look at the demo or about page ;)

edit: or click 'Start Pro Trial'

by climclam

4/1/2026 at 1:05:18 PM

Kinda depends how much of it is vibe coded. It could easily be 5x larger than it needs to be just because the LLM felt like it if they've not been careful.

by nicoburns

4/1/2026 at 1:16:59 PM

Claude folks proudly claim to have Claude effectively writing itself. The CEO claims it will read an issue and automatically write a fix, tests, commit and submit a PR for it.

by saynay

4/1/2026 at 1:18:49 PM

Bingo. And them 'being careful' is exactly what bloats it to 500k lines. It's a ton of on-the-fly prompt engineering, context sanitizers, and probabilistic guardrails just to keep the vibes in check.

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 1:22:32 PM

> Right now, they're great for prompting simple sites/platforms but they break at large enterprise repos

Can you expand on this?

My experience is they require excessive steering but do not “break”

by whycombagator

4/1/2026 at 1:36:24 PM

I think the "breakage" is in terms of conciseness and compactness, not outright brokenness.

Like that drunk uncle that takes half an hour and 20 000 words to tell you a 500 word story.

by oblio

4/1/2026 at 3:50:30 PM

Indeed. In some ways, this is just kind of an extrapolation of the overall trend toward extreme bloat that we’ve seen in the past 15 years, just accelerated because LLMs code a lot faster. I’m pretty accustomed to dealing with Web application code bases that are 6-10 years old, where the hacks have piled up on top of other hacks, piled on top of early, tough-to-reverse bad decisions and assumptions, and nobody has had time to go back and do major refactors. This just seems like more of the same, except now you can create a 10 year-old hack-filled code base in three hours.

by xp84

4/1/2026 at 4:12:41 PM

[dead]

by jessai202699

4/1/2026 at 8:16:54 PM

You need state oriented programming to handle that. I know, because I made one. The keyword is „unpredictability”. Embrace nondeterminism.

by pancsta

4/1/2026 at 6:06:43 PM

There seem to be multiple mechanisms compensating for imperfect, lossy memory. "Dreaming" is another band-aid on inability to reliably store memory without loss of precision. How lossy is this pruning process?

It's one thing to give Claude a narrow task with clear parameters, and another to watch errors or incorrect assumptions snowball as you have a more complex conversation or open-ended task.

by cheesecompiler

4/1/2026 at 2:50:49 PM

> they break at large enterprise repos.

I don't know where you get this. you should ask folks at Meta. They are probably the biggest and happiest users of CC

by tracyhenry

4/1/2026 at 2:57:23 PM

You mean the company where engineers ask chat bots to write chess games in their spare time in order to hit their AI usage requirements? That Meta?

by batshit_beaver

4/1/2026 at 5:45:23 PM

idk why you bring this up. this is irrelevant to whether CC actually works at big corps

by tracyhenry

4/1/2026 at 5:23:14 PM

I missed that, source?

by jimbokun

4/1/2026 at 12:11:26 PM

What do you mean by "actually governing the agents at the system level", and how is it different from "herding cats"?

by bogdanoff_2

4/1/2026 at 12:19:44 PM

Herding cats is treating the LLM's context window as your state machine. You're constantly prompt-engineering it to remember the rules, hoping it doesn't hallucinate or silently drop constraints over a long session.

System-level governance means the LLM is completely stripped of orchestration rights. It becomes a stateless, untrusted function. The state lives in a rigid, external database (like SQLite). The database dictates the workflow, hands the LLM a highly constrained task, and runs external validation on the output before the state is ever allowed to advance. The LLM cannot unilaterally decide a task is done.

I got so frustrated with the former while working on a complex project that I paused it to build a CLI to enforce the latter. Planning to drop a Show HN for it later today, actually.

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 3:24:30 PM

> The database dictates the workflow, hands the LLM a highly constrained task, and runs external validation on the output before the state is ever allowed to advance.

This sounds like where lat.md[0] is headed. Only thing is it doesn't do task constraint. Generally I find the path these tools are taking interesting.

[0] https://github.com/1st1/lat.md

by skeledrew

4/2/2026 at 1:29:53 AM

I looked into lat.md. They are definitely thinking in the same direction by using a CLI layer to govern the agent.

The key difference is the state mechanism. They use markdown; I use an AES-encrypted SQLite database.

Markdown is still just text an LLM can hallucinate over or ignore. A database behind a compiled binary acts as a physical constraint; the agent literally cannot advance a task without satisfying the cryptographic gates.

I just dropped the Show HN for it here if you want to check out the architecture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601608

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 1:17:03 PM

I started that very personal project on Monday, waiting with baited breath, make sure to add a sponsor me a coffee link.

by mywacaday

4/1/2026 at 2:58:26 PM

Just posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601608 Thank you so much for the coffee offer, that genuinely made my day! I don't have a sponsor link set up. Honestly, the best support is just hearing if this actually helps you ship your personal project faster without losing your mind to prompt engineering. I really hope it gives you your sanity back. Let me know how it goes!

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 5:29:27 PM

Some of your comments have already been marked as "dead" oddly enough that just seemed like normal comments explaining your rationale.

edit: Also seems like peoples replies are getting downvoted to hell and getting marked as dead and dissapear. Someone must not like your idea :-)

by Melatonic

4/1/2026 at 11:20:03 PM

Comments are marked dead by automatic processes, not through downvotes. They're dead before anyone sees them, and you can't vote on a dead comment. amangsingh's comments have probably triggered some automated moderation. Probably at least partially because they sound LLM-generated.

by zargon

4/2/2026 at 1:42:11 AM

Spot on regarding the automod. Unfortunately, the way I naturally structure my writing almost always triggers a 50/50 flag on AI content detectors. It is the absolute bane of my existence.

The filter instantly shadowbanned the Show HN post when I submitted it, which is why the link was dead for a while. Thankfully, human mods reviewed it and restored it. The link is fully live for a while now!

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 12:39:03 PM

Sounds good, I'll keep an eye out.

by fallinditch

4/1/2026 at 2:58:56 PM

Just dropped the Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601608. Would love to hear your thoughts on the architecture!

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 3:26:22 PM

There's nothing at that link. Not even a title.

by skeledrew

4/1/2026 at 6:06:43 PM

Looks like it was downvoted to hell and marked as dead super fast. I leave the flag for "dead" on in my HN settings (leaves it super desaturated) and this seems unusual

by Melatonic

4/1/2026 at 2:20:33 PM

I think these folks are attempting to build systems with IAM, entity states, business rules: all built over two foundational DSLs - https://typmo.com

by marcuscog

4/1/2026 at 3:22:30 PM

Thousands of developers are using Claude Code successfully (I think?).

So what specifically is the gripe? If it works, it works right?

by mbesto

4/1/2026 at 3:50:16 PM

So this is more like an art than science - and Claude Code happens to be the best at this messy art (imo).

by ap99

4/1/2026 at 2:38:43 PM

brute-forcing pattern-matching at scale. These are brittle systems with enormous duct-taping to hold everything together. workarounds on workarounds.

by bwfan123

4/1/2026 at 12:04:51 PM

> A 500k line codebase for an agent CLI proves one thing: making a probabilistic LLM behave deterministically is a massive state-management nightmare.

Considering what the entire system ends up being capable of, 500k lines is about 0.001% of what I would have expected something like that to require 10 years ago.

You can combine that with all the training and inference code, and at the end of the day, a system that literally writes code ends up being smaller than the LibreOffice codebase.

It boggles the mind, really.

by p-e-w

4/1/2026 at 12:24:33 PM

> You can combine that with all the training and inference code, and at the end of the day, a system that literally writes code ends up being smaller than the LibreOffice codebase.

You really need to compare it to the model weights though. That’s the “code”.

by sarchertech

4/1/2026 at 2:36:06 PM

>You really need to compare it to the model weights though

Then you'd need to compare the education of any developer in relation to how many LOC their IDE is. That's the "code".

So yea, the analogy doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

by pixl97

4/1/2026 at 1:40:52 PM

It even wrote an entire browser!

By "just" wrapping a browser engine.

by oblio

4/1/2026 at 1:12:58 PM

... what are you even talking about? "The system that literally writes code" has a few hundreds of trillions of parameters. How is this smaller than LibreOffice?

I know xkcd 1053, but come on.

by raincole

4/1/2026 at 4:08:12 PM

[dead]

by jessai202699

4/1/2026 at 1:11:52 PM

[dead]

by quantumquantara

4/1/2026 at 8:30:13 PM

[dead]

by gbibas

4/1/2026 at 12:10:13 PM

[flagged]

by dolomo

4/1/2026 at 12:17:55 PM

If writing concise architectural analysis without the fluff makes me an AI, I'll take the complement. But no - just a tired Architect who has spent way too many hours staring at broken agent state loops haha.

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 3:13:57 PM

This reply is quite literally AI as well, and so was your initial comment. It's so so obvious after spending enough time on Twitter and seeing the pattern used by all the AI reply bots. Absolutely insane that the HN crowd isn't able to see this.

by avarun

4/1/2026 at 2:25:49 PM

I'll bet you $20 you ran your original comment through an LLM. Likely an OpenAI model.

by airstrike

4/1/2026 at 12:41:53 PM

What makes you think that’s AI-written?

by thfuran

4/1/2026 at 12:27:53 PM

AI witch-hunters are even more annoying.

by samusiam

4/1/2026 at 1:34:41 PM

Seriously, people are becoming deranged.

Drop an em dash or a bullet point and they go into spasms.

by WarmWash

4/1/2026 at 12:40:53 PM

>A 500k line codebase for an agent CLI proves one thing: making a probabilistic LLM behave deterministically is a massive state-management nightmare. Right now, they're great for prompting simple sites/platforms but they break at large enterprise repos.

Is that the case? I'm pretty sure Claude Code is one of the most massively successful pieces of software made in the last decade. I don't know how that proves your point. Will this codebase become unmanageable eventually? Maybe, but literally every agent harness out there is just copying their lead at this point.

by ramesh31

4/1/2026 at 1:13:59 PM

Claude code is a massively successful generator, I use it all the time, but it's not a governance layer.

The fact that the industry is copying a 500k-line harness is the problem. We're automating security vulnerabilities at scale because people are trying to put the guardrails inside the probabilistic code instead of strictly above it.

Standardizing on half a million lines of defensive spaghetti is a huge liability.

by amangsingh

4/1/2026 at 2:25:42 PM

>Standardizing on half a million lines of defensive spaghetti is a huge liability.

Again, maybe it will be. Or maybe the way we make software and what is considered good practice will completely change with this new technology. I'm betting on the latter at this point.

by ramesh31

4/1/2026 at 11:53:34 AM

I know it seems counter-intuitive but are there any agent harnesses that aren’t written with AI? All these half a million LoC codebases seem insane to me when I run my business on a full-stack web application that’s like 50k lines of code and my MvP was like 10k. These are just TUIs that call a model endpoint with some shell-out commands. These things have only been around in time measured in months, half a million LoC is crazy to me.

by throwatdem12311

4/1/2026 at 2:51:08 PM

Who cares about LoC? Its a metric that hasn't mattered since we measured productivity in it in the 1980s. For all we know they made these design choices so they could more easily reuse the code in other codebases. Ideally you'd build the library to do that at the same time, but this is start up time constraints to repay loans and shit.

by rkozik1989

4/1/2026 at 5:32:24 PM

Bugs and vulnerabilities are roughly linear to lines of code in a project.

by jimbokun

4/1/2026 at 3:15:26 PM

"Who cares how much concrete we used in this bridge?"

by imdoxxingme

4/1/2026 at 3:23:07 PM

That would be a sensible comparison if concrete was free

by nojs

4/1/2026 at 4:51:59 PM

Since when are tokens free?

by lossyalgo

4/1/2026 at 5:27:58 PM

The bloat is mostly error handling for a fundamentally unpredictable system. A simple agent loop is 200 lines. But then you need graceful recovery when the model hallucinates a tool call, context window management, permission boundaries so it doesn't rm -rf your repo, state persistence across crashes, rate limiting, and cost tracking. Each one is simple individually. Together they're 500k lines.

by justin_vin

4/1/2026 at 1:54:39 PM

> just TUIs

For starters, CC's TUI is React-based.

by raincole

4/1/2026 at 2:44:36 PM

Somebody somewhere is bragging to someone about using React to render a grid of ASCII characters.

by ale

4/1/2026 at 3:46:08 PM

https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

" Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine".

For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then -> layouts elements -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen -> diffs that against the previous screen -> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw

We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written. "

by GoatInGrey

4/1/2026 at 4:04:42 PM

You can argue that any UI is like a game engine in that sense. Some make sensible choices and don't need to pretend they have to render at 60fps.

by xendo

4/1/2026 at 10:29:08 PM

60fps is pathetic for a TUI when most terminals worth their salt are GPU accelerated and displays can be up to 240fps or even more. But let’s be real if I can play Quake at >500 fps they have no excuse.

by throwatdem12311

4/1/2026 at 7:51:17 PM

Do they reconstruct the scene graph for each frame?! Maybe I'm overinterpreting the phrasing. Someone take a peek at the source?

by thinkling

4/2/2026 at 3:43:34 AM

Not reliably.

by joquarky

4/1/2026 at 3:39:52 PM

[dead]

by JDups

4/1/2026 at 2:16:39 PM

Opencode actually has a pretty solid codebase quality wise. I have done brief pokes and its been largely fine.

by acedTrex

4/1/2026 at 1:10:32 PM

> These are just TUIs that call a model endpoint with some shell-out commands.

Claude Code CLI is actually horrible: it's a full headless browser rendering that's then converted in real-time to text to show in the terminal. And that fact leaks to the user: when the model outputs ASCII, the converter shall happily convert it to Unicode (no latter than yesterday there was a TFA complaining about Unicode characters breaking Unix pipes / parsers expecting ASCII commands).

It's ultra annoying during debugging sessions (that is not when in a full agentic loop where it YOLOs a solution): you can't easily cut/paste from the CLI because the output you get is not what the model did output.

Mega, mega, mega annoying.

What should be something simple becomes a rube-goldberg machinery that, of course, fucks up something fundamental: converting the model's characters to something else is just pathetically bad.

Anyone from Anthropic reading? Get your shit together: if you keep this "headless browser rendering converted to text", at least do not fucking modify the characters.*

by TacticalCoder

4/1/2026 at 2:42:16 PM

No it is not. Ink does not use a browser.

by user34283

4/1/2026 at 7:35:43 AM

If it was 2020, it would be hard to imagine that after some hours/days you getting a visual representation of the leak with such detailed stats lol

by Andebugulin

4/1/2026 at 10:53:56 AM

I don't have a lot of experience with them but I would have thought static analysis tools circa 2020 would have managed it just fine.

by spzb

4/1/2026 at 7:48:00 AM

How was this generated ? I'm quite sure "with ai/claude code" but what are the actual steps ?

by makapuf

4/1/2026 at 8:25:35 AM

For the animations specifically, it's using Motion (fka Framer Motion) Javascript library. If you describe some animations from the site to an LLM and ask it to use Framer motion, you get very similar results. The creator likely just prompted for a while until they were happy with the outcome.

by rzmmm

4/1/2026 at 9:14:11 AM

Is there a reason to think it was done by an LLM?

by FartyMcFarter

4/1/2026 at 3:01:06 PM

AI-generated UIs, at least ones aimed at an engineering audience, have a very distinct appearance. They seem to always have the following attributes:

- Dark mode design with lots of colors

- Buttons that have vibrant, bright borders and duller backgrounds

- Excessive (IMO) usage of monospace fonts for stylistic reasons

None of this proves that it's AI (the other comments have covered that) but in my experience it's always correct.

by marcellus23

4/1/2026 at 9:20:33 AM

It states "curation assisted by AI" at the bottom.

by rzmmm

4/1/2026 at 12:19:10 PM

That doesn't mean the code in question was written by AI.

by FartyMcFarter

4/1/2026 at 1:36:09 PM

The author posted in this thread. It's AI.

by Chaosvex

4/1/2026 at 4:49:54 PM

You’re missing the point. It’s not a witch hunt, but rather a discussion on whether things are too quickly attributed to be AI generated.

by hxugufjfjf

4/1/2026 at 10:40:20 AM

The biggest reason would be: do you know a single developer who could have produced this in a couple of hours?

by spiderfarmer

4/1/2026 at 11:07:57 AM

Yup, strange to see people still don’t understand LLMs massively speed up coding greenfield pet projects. Anytime you see a bee web app it’s better to assume AI use rather than not anymore.

by foolserrandboy

4/1/2026 at 12:19:42 PM

I'm not familiar enough with this animation library to answer that. Someone could be very used to this type of website and just copy paste things they've done before.

by FartyMcFarter

4/1/2026 at 2:40:00 PM

What does Occam's razor say?

by spiderfarmer

4/1/2026 at 8:07:30 AM

[dead]

by franze

4/1/2026 at 10:11:57 AM

> 500k lines of code

Isn't it a simple REPL with some tools and integrations, written in a very high level language? How the hell is it so big? Is it because it's vibecoded and LLMs strive for bloat, or is it meaningful complexity?

by ernst_klim

4/1/2026 at 12:34:10 PM

I just checked competitors' codebases:

- Opencode (anomalyco/opencode) is about 670k LOC

- Codex (openai/codex) is about 720k LOC

- Gemini (google-gemini/gemini-cli) is about 570k LOC

Claude Code's 500k LOC doesn't seem out of the ordinary.

by samusiam

4/1/2026 at 1:45:22 PM

> Claude Code's 500k LOC doesn't seem out of the ordinary.

Aren't all the other products also vibe-coded? "All vibe-coded products look like this" doesn't really seem to answer the question "Why is it so damn large?"

It's a repl, that calls out to a blackbox/endpoint for data, and does basic parsing and matching of state with specific actions.

I feel the bulk of those lines should be actions that are performed. Either this is correct or this is not:

1. If the bulk of those lines implement specific and simple actions, why is it so large compared to other software that implements single actions (coreutils, etc)

2. If the actions constitute only a small part of the codebase, wtf is the rest of it doing?

by lelanthran

4/1/2026 at 1:55:34 PM

You're complaining about vibe coding while also complaining about how you "feel" about the code. Do you see the irony in that?

by samusiam

4/1/2026 at 2:00:59 PM

>> I feel the bulk of those lines should be actions that are performed. Either this is correct or this is not:

> You're complaining about vibe coding while also complaining about how you "feel" about the code. Do you see the irony in that?

Where did I complain about how I feel about the actual code? I have feelings, negative ones, about the size of the code given the simple functionality it has, but I have no feelings on the code because I did not look at the code.

by lelanthran

4/1/2026 at 2:17:50 PM

Are you ESL by any chance? You’re missing the forest for the trees.

by arandomhuman

4/1/2026 at 12:55:14 PM

All of them are really, REALLY bad.

by johnisgood

4/1/2026 at 1:32:59 PM

Bad by whose definition? They work really well in my experience. They aren't perfect but the amount of hand holding has gone down dramatically and you can fix any glaring problems with a code review at the end. I work on a multimillion line code base which does not use any popular frameworks and it does a great job. I may be benefiting from the fact that the codebase is open source and all models have obviously been trained on it.

by surajrmal

4/1/2026 at 2:30:23 PM

It takes 10 seconds for Gemini CLI to load. 10 seconds to show an input field. This is for a CLI program.

For comparison, it takes me less time to load Chrome and go to gemini.google.com.

by bdhtu

4/1/2026 at 2:40:42 PM

> They work really well in my experience.

Yeahhh strong disagree there, I find Codex and CC to be buggy as hell. Desktop CC is very bad and web version is nigh unusable.

by causal

4/1/2026 at 1:45:08 PM

At least Gemini and Claude constantly break down with scrolling in various Linux terminals, something which was solved by countless TUIs decades ago.

I think a lot of the people prasing Claude & co are on Macs.

by oblio

4/1/2026 at 1:46:13 PM

Most of their issues have been solved a long time ago, with 1000x less code. It is depressing at this point. I really had no clue IT was in the shitters this much. I knew it was theatrical but I had no idea that it was by this much.

by johnisgood

4/1/2026 at 2:53:32 PM

All these AI tools teams have most valid excuse "We are just a bunch of people who only know Javascript/typescript/NodeJS. Please bear with us while we resolve 10,000 open issues."

by geodel

4/1/2026 at 1:53:32 PM

I haven't seen the scrolling glitch in months, where previously it was happening multiple times a day. Also haven't seen anyone complain about it in quite some time. Pretty sure they have resolved that.

by samusiam

4/1/2026 at 3:27:37 PM

They have not! If I am scrolled up while more output is produced, the scrollback jumps to the top pretty consistently.

by msully4321

4/1/2026 at 4:55:30 PM

I'll try again but lately I've been using strictly the VS Code terminal. Gnome Terminal and Termux in Ubuntu 24.04 were unusable even with 1000 hacks.

by oblio

4/1/2026 at 2:41:40 PM

I'm on a mac! And I still find bugs on a regular basis...

by causal

4/1/2026 at 10:58:28 AM

yeah its honestly full of vibe fixes to vibe hacks with no overarching desig. . some great little empirical observations though!i think the only clever bit relative to my own designs is just tracking time since last cache ht to check ttl. idk why i hadnt thought of that, but makes perfect sense

by carterschonwald

4/1/2026 at 2:45:57 PM

There’s probably a subconscious incentive to make a tool that’s “complex” because the underlying LLM also is complex.

by ale

4/1/2026 at 10:37:22 AM

I don't know if you're mindlessly repeating the HN trope that JS/typescript/Electron is bad and that all bloat can easily prevented, but if you're truly interested in answers to your questions: RTFA.

by spiderfarmer

4/1/2026 at 10:34:46 AM

How many LoC should it be, for that kind of program?

by fragmede

4/1/2026 at 11:29:36 AM

Other notable agents' LOC: Codex (Rust) ~519K, Gemini (TS) ~445K, OpenCode (TS) ~254K, Pi (TS) ~113K LOC. Pi's modular structure makes it simple to see where most of code is. Respectively core, unified API, coding agent CLI, TUI have ~3K, ~35K, ~60K, ~15K LOC. Interestingly, the just uploaded claw-code's Rust version is currently at only 28K.

edit: Claude is actually (TS) 395K. So Gemini is more bloat. Codex is arguable since is written in lower-level language.

by forgotpwd16

4/1/2026 at 11:58:06 AM

Well FFmpeg is roughly 1500k, but it's C+Asm and it's dozens of codecs and pretty complex features. SBCL is around 500k I guess.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily too much, I'm genuinely asking if this is a bloat or if it's justified.

by ernst_klim

4/1/2026 at 10:53:37 AM

It's a TUI API wrapper with a few commands bolted on.

I doubt it needs to be more than 20-50kloc.

You can create a full 3D game with a custom 3D engine in 500k lines. What the hell is Claude Code doing?

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 11:49:27 AM

Just check the leaked code yourself. Two biggest areas seem to be the `utils` module, which is a kitchen sink that covers a lot of functionality from sandboxing, git support, sessions, etc, and `components` module, which contains the react ui. You could certainly build a cli agent with much smaller codebase, with leaner ui code without react, but probably not with this truckload of functionality.

by neurostimulant

4/1/2026 at 2:07:47 PM

They are doing some strange "reinvent the wheel" stuff.

For example, I found an implementation of a PRNG, mulberry32 [1], in one of the files. That's pretty strange considering TS and Javascript have decent PRNGs built into the language and this thing is being used as literally just a shuffle.

[1] https://github.com/AprilNEA/claude-code-source/blob/main/src...

by cogman10

4/1/2026 at 4:04:42 PM

mulberry32 is one of the smallest seedable prngs. Math.random() is not seedable.

If you search mulberry32 in the code, you'll see they use it for a deterministic random. They use your user ID to always pick the same random buddy. Just like you might use someone's user ID to always generate the same random avatar.

So that's 10 lines of code accounted for. Any other examples?

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 2:42:25 PM

Well, at least that confirms they weren't lying when they said all recent updates to claude code were made by claude. You certainly won't do this stuff if you were writing the code yourself.

by neurostimulant

4/1/2026 at 11:55:14 AM

Software doesn’t end at the 20k loc proof of concept though.

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?

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 12:28:37 PM

I think that’s why the author was comparing to to a finished 3D game.

by sarchertech

4/1/2026 at 12:43:51 PM

I guess because you see 3D stuff in a 3D game instead of text, people assume that it must be the most complex thing in software? Or because you solve hard math problems in 3D, those functions are gonna be the most loc?

It's a completely different domain, e.g. very different integration surface area and abstractions.

Claude Code's source is dumped online so there's probably a more concrete analysis to be had than "that sounds like too many loc".

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 12:50:39 PM

It is a different domain but that wasn’t your argument. Your argument was that someone was comparing it to a POC when in fact they were comparing to a finished product.

Also a AAA game (with the engine) with physics, networking, and rendering code is up there in terms of the most complex pieces of software.

by sarchertech

4/1/2026 at 12:57:35 PM

They just claimed that you can build a 3D game in 500k loc, thus Claude Code shouldn't use so many loc. They/you didn't render the argument for that.

For example, without looking at the code, the superstition also works in the opposite direction: Claude Code is an interface to using AI to do any computer task while a 3D game just lets you shoot some bad guys, so surely the 3D game must be done in fewer loc. That's equally unsatisfying.

You'd have to be more concrete than "sounds like a lot".

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 1:48:34 PM

> Claude Code is an interface to using AI to do any computer task

Shouldn't interfaces be smaller than the implementation?

by lelanthran

4/1/2026 at 4:08:45 PM

No. We aren't talking about .h vs .c files nor PL interfaces.

A GUI/client can be arbitrarily more or less complex than the things it's GUI'ing.

by hombre_fatal

4/2/2026 at 10:29:16 AM

> A GUI/client can be arbitrarily more or less complex than the things it's GUI'ing.

If it's an interface to ffmpeg, then sure, the GUI could be extremely complicated code.

But that's not what we are talking about, is it? We are talking about an interface to a chatbot that can accept and return chats, accept and return files, and run a selection of internal commands (which include invoking itself recursively).

The interface to this chatbot that has a settings entry for "personality" is still only going to map that to one of a small number of chatbot inputs. Same with basically anything else (read the skills file, etc).

I dunno... maybe 500kSloC for a fancy IRC client is the going rate, but the last time I wrote an interface to a chat client, it was barely 10k lines, not counting the lib*.so that the the program called to interact with the chatbot, with said chatbot supporting file uploads and '/' commands.

by lelanthran

4/1/2026 at 1:47:36 PM

> Claude Code is an interface to using AI to do any computer task

Claude Code is quite literally a wrapper around a few APIs. At one point it needed 68GB of RAM to run and requires 11ms to "lay a scene graph" to display a few hundred characters on screen. All links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488

> while a 3D game just lets you shoot some bad guys, so surely the 3D game must be done in fewer loc.

Yes, most games should be done in fewer loc

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 4:14:41 PM

Your claim was that they could implement the same app in 50k lines of code.

A cursory glance at the codebase shows that it's not just a wrapper around a few APIs.

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 5:14:41 PM

Yes, because they've vibed it into phenomenally unnecessary complexity. The mistake you continually make in this thread is to look at complexity and see something that is de facto praiseworthy and impressive. It is not.

by mpalmer

4/1/2026 at 5:30:22 PM

[dead]

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 3:42:16 PM

I could run a text adventure with a Zmachine emulator under a 6502 based machine and 48k of RAM, with Ozmoo you can play games like Tristam Island. On a Commodore 64, or an Apple II for you US commenters. I repeat the game it's being emulated in a simple computer with barely more processing power than a current keyboard controller.

As the ZMachine interpreter (V3 games at least, enough for the mentioned example), even a Game Boy used to play Pokemon Red/Blue -and Crystal/Sylver/Blue, just slightly better specs than the OG GB- can run Tristam Island with keypad based input picking both selected words from the text or letter by letter as when you name a character in an RPG. A damn Game Boy, a pocket console from 1989. Not straightly running a game, again. Emulating a simple text computer -the virtual machine- to play it. No slowdowns, no-nothing, and you can save the game (the interpreter status) in a battery backed cartridge, such as the Everdrive. Everything under... 128k.

Claude Code and the rest of 'examples' it's what happens when trade programmers call themselves 'engineers' without even a CS degree.

by anthk

4/1/2026 at 1:01:46 PM

Check out `print.ts` to see how "more LOC" doesn't mean "more polished"

by mpalmer

4/1/2026 at 1:07:29 PM

Okay, I'm looking at it. Now what?

This file is exactly what I'm talking about.

Take the loadInitialMessage function: It's encumbered with real world incremental requirements. You can see exactly the bolted-on conditionals where they added features like --teleport, --fork-session, etc.

The runHeadlessStreaming function is a more extreme version of that where a bunch of incremental, lateral subsystems are wired together, not an example of superfluous loc.

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 5:09:59 PM

The file is more than 5000 lines of code. The main function is 3000. Code comments make reference to (and depend on guarantees in connection with) the specific behavior of code in other files. Do I need to explain why that's bad?

by mpalmer

4/1/2026 at 5:22:37 PM

By real-world polish, I don't mean refining the code quality but rather everything that exists in the delta between proof of concept vs real world solution with actual users.

You don't have to explain why there might be better ways to write some code because the claim is about lines of code. It could be the case that perfectly organizing and abstracting the code would result in even more loc.

by hombre_fatal

4/1/2026 at 11:07:07 AM

Comments like these remind me of the football spectators that shout "Even I could have scored that one" when they see a failed attempt.

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.

by spiderfarmer

4/1/2026 at 11:15:35 AM

I don't think this is warranted given that the comment you're criticising is simply expressing an opinion explicitly solicited by the comment it's responding to.

by boomskats

4/1/2026 at 12:31:18 PM

It’s more like “Player A is better than Player B” coming from a professional player in a smaller league who is certainly qualified to have that opinion.

by sarchertech

4/1/2026 at 2:48:47 PM

Yes, exactly. I like this analogy. I am surprised the level of pearl clutching in these discussions on Hacker News. Everybody wants to be an attention sharecropper, lol.

by vardalab

4/1/2026 at 11:57:09 AM

> Sure. You could have. But you're not the one playing football in the Champions League.

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).

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 2:38:55 PM

"Even I would have scored that goal" == "I would never ever have created a bloated mess like Anthropic"

You just repeat the same statement.

That bloated mess is what got them to the Champions League. They did what was necessary to get them here. And they succeeded so far.

But hey, according to some it can be replicated in 50k lines of wrapper code around a terminal command, so for Anthropic it's just one afternoon of vibe coding to get rid of this mess. So what's the problem? /s

by spiderfarmer

4/1/2026 at 3:01:34 PM

> Even I would have scored that goal" == "I would never ever have created a bloated mess like Anthropic"

Since you keep putting words in my mouth that I never said, and keep being deliberately obtuse, this particular branch is over.

Go enjoy Win11 written by same level of champions or something.

Adieu.

by troupo

4/2/2026 at 1:20:16 AM

Ah, Winning Eleven.

Not what you were referring to.

by boomskats

4/1/2026 at 5:38:59 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

4/1/2026 at 11:08:17 AM

Honest question: Why does it matter? They got the product shipped and got millions of paying customers and totally revolutionized their business and our industry.

Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.

by criley2

4/1/2026 at 11:27:23 AM

More code means more entropy, more room for bugs, harder to find issues, more time to fix, more attack surface, more memory used, more duplication, more inconsistencies... I bet you at some point we'll get someone reporting how AI performance deteriorates as the code base grows, and some blog post about how their team improved the success of their AI by trimming the code base down to less than 100k LOC or something like that.

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.

by dandellion

4/1/2026 at 11:33:10 AM

The history of programming is also each generation writing far less performant code than the one before it. The history of programming is each generation bemoaning the abstractions, waste and lack of performance of the code of the next generation.

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.

by criley2

4/1/2026 at 11:39:47 AM

> far less performant code than the one before it.

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.

by sarchertech

4/1/2026 at 12:20:12 PM

You asked why the size of the code matters, I gave you the answer. If you want to ramble about the non technical aspects of software development talk to someone else, I'm not interested.

by dandellion

4/1/2026 at 12:34:17 PM

I asked a rhetorical question to get the reader to think about a topic. I was not looking for a rote recitation of a well-known textbook answer. Maybe you should not be on the comment section of an engineering website if you find discussion so offensive.

by criley2

4/1/2026 at 11:18:06 AM

It doesn't. LoC is only meaningful when you use it to belittle others' code.

by raincole

4/1/2026 at 11:43:44 AM

hehe, belittle (to make smaller)

by ulbu

4/1/2026 at 11:34:47 AM

The reason it’s not useful as a measure of productivity is because it’s measure of complexity (not directly, but it’s correlated). But it tells you nothing about whether that complexity was necessary for the functionality it provides.

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.

by sarchertech

4/1/2026 at 1:35:39 PM

Among the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that Anthropic produced was one that leaked the source code. It is likely to be a config file, not part of the Claude Code software itself, but it still something to track.

The more lines of code you have the more likely there is for one of them to be wrong and go unnoticed. It results in bugs, vulnerabilities,... and leaks.

by GuB-42

4/1/2026 at 12:44:26 PM

More bugs. More costly maintenance.

by viktorcode

4/1/2026 at 11:40:31 AM

Exactly. Imagine if Claude Code was a PHP script. Some folks would lose their damn minds

by blantonl

4/1/2026 at 11:29:23 AM

> Honest question: Why does it matter?

Because it's unmaintainable slop that they themselves don't know how to fix when something happens? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 1:06:20 PM

It will be exactly that. But that is a 'them' problem. I can look at it a go 'that looks like a bad idea' but they are the ones who have to live with it.

At some point someone will probably take their LLM code and repoint it at the LLM and say 'hey lets refactor this so it uses less code is easier to read but does the same thing' and let it chrun.

One project I worked on I saw one engineer delete 20k lines of code one day. He replaced it with a few lines of stored procedure. That 20k lines of code was in production for years. No one wanted to do anything with it but it was a crucial part of the way the thing worked. It just takes someone going 'hey this isnt right' and sit down and fix it.

by sumtechguy

4/1/2026 at 2:04:31 PM

> But that is a 'them' problem. I

When a TUI requires 68 GB of RAM to run, or when they spend a week not being able to find a bug that causes multiple people to immediately run out of tokens, it's not a "them" problem.

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 8:31:00 PM

[dead]

by gbibas

4/2/2026 at 8:54:39 AM

I have no engineering background. I build websites and tools for a living. Claude Code changed what's possible for me in a way that's hard to overstate.

I can't evaluate the source code architecture. What I can say is that before this, I had ideas I couldn't execute without hiring a developer. Now I ship them myself. Not prototypes, not demos. Real products that people use and pay for.

The leaked internals are interesting to engineers. From where I sit, the interesting part is that it works well enough that someone without a CS degree can build production software with it. That's the actual story.

by JoostBoer

4/2/2026 at 9:25:53 AM

I don't think CS degree was needed pre-LLM era, you just needed to know what you're doing. Maybe learning and doing got faster, but you still need to learn and know. There are CS grads that don't know still. I hope you know what is required for "production software". Claude code doesn't.

by maxyurk

4/1/2026 at 8:45:29 AM

Even today, I'm still astounded that there are people capable of building a gorgeous and interesting site like this in less than 2 days...

by brauhaus

4/1/2026 at 9:15:59 AM

Well, I assume this is all just generated with Claude Code, right? Whether there is much back and forth with the LLM is a valid question and nothing wrong with generating websites (I do it too for some side projects). Claude loves generating websites with a particular style of serif font. We also saw this with https://tboteproject.com/timeline/ and I've just generally seen it from various designs that coworkers have spit out over months using Claude defaults.

I guess I just find it weird because all the signals are messed up so whenever I see these sorts of layouts, I feel like I'm looking at the average where I don't think "gorgeous and interesting" at all. Instead, I'm forced to think "I should be skeptical of this based on the presentation because it presents as high quality but this may be hiding someone who is not actually aware of what they're presenting in any depth" as the author may have just shoved in a prompt and let it spin.

There's actually a similarly designed website (font weights, font styles etc) here in New Zealand (https://nzoilwatch.com/) where at a glance, it might seem like some overloaded professional-backed thing but instead it's just some guy who may or may not know anything about oil at all, yet people are linking it around the place like some sort of authoritative resource.

I would have way less of an issue if people just put their names by things and disclosed their LLM usage (which again, is fine) rather than giving the potentially false impression to unequipped people that the information presented is actually as accurate and trustworthy as the polish would suggest.

by spondyl

4/1/2026 at 9:32:25 AM

I really wish I had that clout-chasing gene - it doesn't even occur to me until I see someone else do it.

I'm serious. The hype chasing clearly clearly matters. .

things like this: https://github.com/instructkr/claw-code I mean ok, serious people put in years of effort for 100 of those stars ...

it's continually wild how extremely irrelevant hard effortful careful work is.

I think that's the game. Get up, look at the headlines, figure out how you can exploit them with vibe coding, do some hyphy project and repeat.

Maybe some lobster themed bullshit between openclaw and the claudecode leak.

I'm not being a cynic here, I'm just telling you what I'm going to do tomorrow.

by kristopolous

4/1/2026 at 12:13:17 PM

We do need "hard effortful careful work" to keep planes flying, electrical grids running and medical devices safe. It's very relevant but very undervalued by our current economy.

by simgt

4/1/2026 at 12:10:46 PM

That was the leaked code and now it's just some random dudes harness btw. He swapped it out. Did a sloppy find and replace for "claude" and made it claw.

It's sloppy work

Does not matter. Sloppiness is unimportant

by kristopolous

4/1/2026 at 9:59:48 AM

This website has "Curation assisted by AI." at the bottom.

Personally, I don't think I will be putting any such disclaimers or disclosures on my work, unless I deem it relevant to the functionality.

by user34283

4/1/2026 at 9:09:29 AM

Claude itself can generate this in minutes if you know how to ask.

by ricardobeat

4/1/2026 at 9:30:42 AM

I was talking to one of the people who works at a big agentic coding tools. If I recall correctly, he was talking about how they use the tool to build the tool. I was complaining that all of the websites/frontends I make look pretty weak, and I'm amazed they get much slicker looking UIs with the same tool. He showed me that one way they do it is by having an extensive UI library of components/graphics/whatever, and also mentioned that the folks build their UIs know how to prompt/use the tool because it's backed by years of UI development knowledge & superior resources. I realized I didn't have any of that, and it actually made me feel better.

Last week we I was struggling to go from vague prompt to a OMG-it's-so-nice-looking web app, I remembered that example above and then decided to create my own component library, which I did in a couple days: https://www.substrateui.dev/. I was actually super happy that I was able to accomplish that, and then I realized I wanted to better understand the content that I had vibe coded into existence. So now I'm recreating that design system step by step w/ Claude code, filling in gaps in my knowledge & learning a bit about colors, typography, CSS, blah blah blah. It's actually a lot of fun because I'm able to explore all of the concepts and learn enough to build a front end that doesn't suck & is good enough for my use case without getting stuck for days on trying to center a stupid div by hand or play whack-mole-fix-something-and-break-something-else when trying to clean up AI slop.

by MikeNotThePope

4/1/2026 at 9:36:22 AM

that's really awesome. how did you go about building the component library?

by zem

4/1/2026 at 9:54:10 AM

I was referencing https://www.neobrutalism.dev/ and https://www.retroui.dev/ and slopped my way through it. A lot of it was just asking Claude Code "is this a proper design system?", then I kept doing that until it didn't have anything useful to add. Now I'm using my that as the template for understanding such things in more detail.

by MikeNotThePope

4/1/2026 at 9:05:51 AM

Is this gorgeous?

Content resizing, needing to juggle a speed knob to read, and the overall presentation makes it feel like Edward Tufte flavored nightmare fuel.

by oasisbob

4/1/2026 at 9:45:24 AM

It is pretty good, shows numbers clearly on desktop and phone. Not sure what the criticism even means.

by nurettin

4/1/2026 at 4:31:29 PM

I'm criticizing the readability of that first "Agent Loop" section.

It's basically a slideshow which advances and presents several content areas which are intended to be read, all while advancing and resizing themselves.

Pausing and clicking through manually stepwise is also pretty obnoxious.

Would much rather just see the content all laid out at once

by oasisbob

4/1/2026 at 9:11:04 AM

But somehow, according to HN, LLMs make you less productive, not more :)

by raincole

4/1/2026 at 9:18:53 AM

The people who don’t know how to use an LLM to make them more productive, or are scared it’s going to take their job, are louder than the people who are making good use of them to make them more productive.

That just seems to be human nature unfortunately - the complainers are always louder.

by supersparrow

4/1/2026 at 12:39:21 PM

As someone currently "making good use of" generative AI while simultaneously being painfully aware of its shortcomings, I think the overall discourse is a bit more nuanced. Bucketing folks into simple "for" and "against" GenAI camps does nothing to cover the vast spectrum in between, making your take ultimately built on a false dichotomy. Further implying those camps fall on the lines of those "in the know" of AI vs "those in denial/scared of" is patronizing at best, and I've grown tired of this oversimplification parroted out every time the topic of LLM systems come up.

Those within well informed, technical circles will fall somewhere in between the for/against labels, myself included.

The GenAI hype cycle is finally starting to collapse as the general population starts to realize that these systems aren't the panacea for "everything" after all. They provide enormous utility in some domains like coding, but even then there are massive tradeoffs, footguns and the usual horse blinder ills that come with every hype cycle. I just hope we stop having to "learn the hard way" with respect to undisciplined use of current-gen LLM systems writ large, and cooler heads prevail sooner rather than later.

by drzaiusx11

4/1/2026 at 9:33:44 AM

What? We must have different internets, I agree in general, but the "AI is the second coming" crowd is louder than standing next to a jet on takeoff. I'm in the "AI is making me more productive but a worse developer" crowd, don't know what I count as.

by techpression

4/1/2026 at 11:40:51 AM

You got shuttled into one bubble and the previous commenter into another advertising / news bubble. It's incredible how different the media experience is for people in different media bubbles.

by bsenftner

4/1/2026 at 4:08:31 PM

That's a bit dishonest, the consensus on HN seems to be that LLMs are very good at oneshotting small projects from scratch. Especially when using super mainstream technologies like html and tailwind, as does the discussed website. And especially when it's a one time operation and the project will never need to be maintained, like the discussed website.

by ggregoire

4/1/2026 at 2:16:30 PM

More like 2 hours.

by kordlessagain

4/1/2026 at 8:56:25 AM

.

by piker

4/1/2026 at 9:05:11 AM

I mean, tools change, but I'd be happy to hear if any tool can create that by just saying create "Claude Code Unpack" with nice graphics. or some other single prompt. It likely was an iterative process and it would be lovely if more people started sharing that, because the process itself is also very interesting.

I've created some chinese characters learning website and I took me typing 1/3 of LoTR to get there[1]. I would have typed like 1% of that writing code directly. It is a different process, but it still needs some direction.

1. https://hanzirama.com/making-of

by comboy

4/1/2026 at 9:04:33 AM

I think it is accurate. Where are the autonomous AI who beat the creator to the punch? When we write "Hello, World!" in C and compile it with `gcc`, do we give credit to every contributor to GNU? AI is a tool that thus far only humans are capable of using with the unique inspiration. Will this change in the future? Certainly. But is it the case now? I think my questions imply some reasonable objections.

by ipnon

4/1/2026 at 9:02:00 AM

“Che cos’è il genio? È fantasia, intuizione, colpo d’occhio e velocità di esecuzione”

by oriettaxx

4/1/2026 at 6:12:25 AM

I guess they really do eat their own dogfood and vibe code their way through it without care for technical debt? In a way, it’s a good challenge, but it’s fairly painful to watch the current state of the project (which is about a year old now, so it should be in prime shape).

by stingraycharles

4/1/2026 at 7:10:30 AM

> is about a year old now, so it should be in prime shape

A 1yo project may be in good shape if written by just one dev, maybe a few. But if you have many devs, I can guarantee it will be messy and buggy. If anything, at 1yo it is probably still full of bugs because not enough time has elapsed for people to run into them.

by brabel

4/1/2026 at 8:22:06 AM

It's only 510k LoC, at ~100 lines of code a day for a year, this code base would take 23 engineers a year to write. That's for 220 working days in somewhere civilized.

And I'm sure we all know that when working on a greenfield project you can produce a lot more LoC per day than maintaining a legacy one.

Given that vibe code is significantly more verbose, you're probably talking about ~15 engineers worth of code?

I know that's all silly numbers, but this is just attempting to give people some context here, this isn't a massive code base. I've not read a lot of it, so maybe it's better than the verbose code I see Claude put out sometimes.

by mattmanser

4/1/2026 at 2:06:06 PM

> It's only 510k LoC, at ~100 lines of code a day for a year, this code base would take 23 engineers a year to write.

Correction: a code base of 500kLoC would take 23 engineers a year to write. There is no indication that the functionality needed in a TUI app that does what this app does needs 500kLoC.

by lelanthran

4/1/2026 at 9:17:02 AM

When you say it’s not a massive codebase, I’m curious, what are you comparing it to?

by cududa

4/1/2026 at 9:32:08 AM

The previous poster was making out that in a year the code base would be a mess if people had done it.

This is a two-pizza team sized project, so it's not a project that the code quality would inevitably spiral out of control due to communication problems.

A single senior architect COULD have kept the code quality under control.

by mattmanser

4/1/2026 at 2:17:21 PM

Splunk.

by kordlessagain

4/1/2026 at 11:30:46 PM

Who writes only 100loc per day, especially on a greenfield project?

by shepherdjerred

4/1/2026 at 10:32:07 AM

Put yourself in their shoes; either the quality of Claude's coding continues to improve or else their business is probably doomed if it stagnates, so for them it makes sense to punt technical debt to the future when more capable versions of their models will be able to better fix it.

This is why I personally don't take technical debt arguments about how LLM maintained code bases deteriorate with size/age seriously; it presumes that at some point I'll give up with the LLM and be left with a mess to clean up by hand, but that's not going to happen, future maintenance is to be left to LLMs and if that isn't possible for some reason then the project is as good as dead anyway. When you start a project with a LLM the plan should be to see it through with LLMs, planning to have unaided humans take over maintenance at some point is a mistake.

by mikkupikku

4/1/2026 at 12:41:53 PM

Doesn't this contradict the popular wisdom that "what's good for a human engineer is good for an LLM"? e.g. documentation, separation of concerns, organized files, DRY.

I find LLMs very useful and capable, but in my experience they definitely perform worse when things are unorganized. Maintenance isn't just aesthetics, it's a direct input to correctness.

by blanched

4/1/2026 at 12:57:04 PM

Maybe a little. I don't hold fast to that popular wisdom, e.g. I think comments are not always a net positive for LLMs. With respect to technical debt, how much debt is too much debt before it gums up the works and arrests forward progress on the software? It probably depends on the individual programmer. LLMs do seem to have a higher tolerance for technical debt than myself personally at least.

by mikkupikku

4/1/2026 at 3:11:56 PM

Good points, I've also found that comments are really hit or miss. Especially because the agents tend not to update them (sounds familiar!).

by blanched

4/1/2026 at 11:08:23 AM

I am more worried that we are moving toward creating black boxes and this might turn software "development" into a field as confused as philosophy and dialectics.

by openfoliage

4/1/2026 at 6:29:03 AM

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code said he uses CC to build CC.

by coldtrait

4/1/2026 at 7:27:46 AM

Which makes for an interesting thought / discussion; code is written to be read by humans first, executed by computers second. What would code look like if it was written to be read by LLMs? The way they work now (or, how they're trained) is on human language and code, but there might be a style that's better for LLMs. Whatever metric of "better" you may use.

Just a thought experiment, I very much doubt I'm the first one to think of it. It's probably in the same line of "why doesn't an LLM just write assembly directly"

by Cthulhu_

4/1/2026 at 7:53:30 AM

LLMs read and write human-code because humans have been reading and writing human-code. The sample size of assembly problems is, in my estimate, too small for LLMs to efficiently read and write it for common use cases.

I liken it to the problem of applying machine learning to hard video games (e.g. Starcraft). When trained to mimic human strategies, it can be extremely effective, but machine learning will not discover broadly effective strategies on a reasonable timescale.

If you convert "human strategies" to "human theory, programming languages, and design patterns", perhaps the point will be clear.

But: could the ouroboric cycle of LLM use decay the common strategies and design patterns we use into inexplicable blobs of assembly? Can LLMs improve at programming if humans do not advance the theory or invent new languages, patterns, etc?

by syphia

4/1/2026 at 9:24:52 AM

But starcraft training is not through mimicking human strategies - it was pure RL with a reward function shaped around winning, which allows it to emerge non-human and eventually super-human strategies (such as the worker oversaturation).

The current training loop for coding is RL as well - so a departure from human coding patterns is not unexpected (even if departure from human coding structure is unexpected, as that would require development of a new coding language).

by Mentlo

4/1/2026 at 7:58:26 AM

> It's probably in the same line of "why doesn't an LLM just write assembly directly"

My suspicion is that the "language" part of LLMs means they tend to prefer languages which are closer to human languages than assembly and benefit from much of the same abstractions and tooling (hence the recent acquisition of bun and astral).

by tempay

4/1/2026 at 9:40:42 AM

The problem with that is that assembly isn't portable, and x86 isn't as dominant as it once was, so then you've got arm and x86(_64). But you could target the LLVM machine if you wanted.

by fragmede

4/1/2026 at 8:18:19 AM

Yes but my point was that they seem to explicitly not care about code quality and/or the insane amount of bloat, and seem to just want the LLM to be able to deal with it.

by stingraycharles

4/1/2026 at 8:21:37 AM

I've heard somewhere that they have roughly 100% code churn every few months, so yes, they unfortunately don't care about code quality. It's a shame, because it's still the best coding agent, in my experience.

by lukaslalinsky

4/1/2026 at 8:55:57 AM

> they unfortunately don't care about code quality.

> It's a shame, because it's still the best coding agent, in my experience.

If it is the best, and if it delivers the value users are asking for, then why would they have an incentive to make further $$$ investments to make it of a "higher" quality if the value this difference could make is not substantial or hurts the ROI?

On many projects I found this "higher quality" not only to be false of delivering more substantial value but actually I found it was hurting the project to deliver the value that matters.

Maybe we are after all entering the era of SWE where all this bike-shedding is gone and only type of engineers who will be able to survive in it will be the ones who are capable of delivering the actual value (IME very few per project).

by menaerus

4/1/2026 at 10:31:43 AM

Is this why they ran into a bug with people hitting usage limits even on very short sessions and had to cease all communications for over a day after a week of gaslighting users because they couldn't find the root cause in the "quality doesn't matter" code base?

Or that's why tgey had to buy bun with actual engineers to work on Claude Code to reduce memory peaks from 68 GB (yes, 68 gigabytes) to a "measely" 1.7? Because code quality doesn't matter?

Or that a year later they still cannot figure out how to render anything in the terminal without flickering?

The only reason people use Claude Code is because it's the only way to use Anthropic's heavily subsidized subscription. You get banned if you use it through other, better, tools.

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 1:35:45 PM

Sure, now the only thing remaining is you convincing Anthropic that they're doing wrong. Or alternatively you change your perspective.

by menaerus

4/1/2026 at 2:00:05 PM

"Windows is the world's most popular desktop consumer OS. Microsoft are doing everything right, and should never ever change. Who are we to criticise them"

Meanwhile I apparently need to change my persoective about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598488

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 8:31:01 AM

Yes, but as I said, it’s in a way the ultimate form of dogfooding: ideally they’ll be able to get the LLM smart enough to keep the codebase working well long-term.

Now whether that’s actually possible is a second topic.

by stingraycharles

4/1/2026 at 8:40:15 AM

[dead]

by drakezone

4/1/2026 at 8:55:59 AM

They explicitly boast about using claude code to write code: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179836704600237

That's how you get "oh this TUI API wrapper needs 68GB of RAM" https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 or "we need 16ms to lay out a few hundred characters on screen that's why it's a small game engine": https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

by troupo

4/1/2026 at 9:13:38 AM

Just finished looking at Ink here.. frontend world has no shame. Love the gloating about 40x less RAM as if that amount of memory for a text REPL even approaches defensible. "CC built CC" is not the flex people seem to suggest it is.

by 000ooo000

4/1/2026 at 1:23:46 PM

Indeed a sad state of affairs.

by johnisgood

4/1/2026 at 3:36:13 PM

Frontend losers not realizing the turds they are releasing. An LLM client fits under netcat+echo+awk+jq runnable under a 486 if there's no SSL/TLS on its way, Pentium II could drive fast TLS connections like nothing and under 32MB of RAM with NetBSD for a simple terminal install, maybe with X and a simple WM with RXVT if you care.

by anthk

4/1/2026 at 4:45:44 PM

Any loser is a "full stack software engineer" nowadays thanks to claude.

by ggregoire

4/2/2026 at 10:51:09 AM

nice

by root1107

4/1/2026 at 11:26:36 AM

Appreciate the effort, but this is very basic and nothing you need the source code to understand. I was expecting a deep dive into what specific decisions they made, but not how an loop of tool calls works

by euphetar

4/1/2026 at 1:15:57 PM

I found it a useful overview. My primary question about the client source was - is there any secret sauce in it? Based on this site, the answer is no, the client is quite simple/dumb, and all the secret sauce resides on the server/in the model.

I particularly valued the tool list. People in these comments are complaining about how bad the code is, but I found the client-side tools that the model actually uses to be pretty clean/general.

My takeaway was more that at a very basic level they know what they are doing - keep the client general, so that you can innovate on the server side without revving the client as much.

by ttcbj

4/1/2026 at 8:50:37 PM

I've been using Claude Code heavily for the last few weeks building out a multi-agent system, and the token economics caught me off guard — I hit 75% of my Pro weekly budget faster than expected. I don't code myself, so Claude Code handles all the actual implementation work.

What I've learned about cost management: the real decision isn't "should I code this myself or use Claude Code" — it's "should I spawn Claude Code or handle this through a different approach entirely?" For complex builds where I need something architected from scratch, Claude Code is worth it. For smaller tasks or iteration on existing code, I've started using Sonnet in the web interface with the file as context instead. The visual guide here is helpful because it shows you what Claude Code is actually doing under the hood — understanding that workflow helps you predict whether a task will be a quick fix or a deep exploration that burns through your budget.

by jghiglia

4/1/2026 at 5:36:39 AM

Okay those "hidden features" are amazing, especially the cross-session referencing. I hope we can look forward to that in the future

Also I definitely want a Claude Code spirit animal

by restlessforge

4/1/2026 at 5:51:16 AM

It's live! If you're on the latest cc you can use /buddy now.

by jwilliams

4/1/2026 at 6:16:35 AM

It's a ridiculous folly. I've already lost a well-constructed question because I accidentally tabbed into my pointless 'buddy'.

(Yes, I know I can turn it off. I have.)

by jen729w

4/1/2026 at 7:10:51 AM

I find Claude Code features fall into 2 categories, "hmmmm that could be actually useful" vs "there is more kool aid where that came from"

by binocarlos

4/1/2026 at 6:12:57 AM

Ok! First prompt, obviously:

“Complete thyself.”

And I want an octopus. Who orchestrates octopuses.

by Nevermark

4/1/2026 at 9:16:10 AM

[dead]

by franze

4/1/2026 at 9:58:46 AM

I need the dragon pet... someone add it to open code / pi, please!

by Scaled

4/2/2026 at 4:31:07 AM

The interesting thing about agent tool use is how binary it is. The agent either calls the tool or doesn't. The harder problem is social agency, where the AI has to decide whether to participate at all. We built a pre-filter for this (cheap model reads the room before the expensive model runs) and the failure modes are fascinating. The model would reason correctly in its chain-of-thought, 'this person is left hanging, I should respond' and then output the opposite boolean. Turned out Haiku has a systematic false-bias on boolean tool outputs. Had to invert the schema

by mtrifonov

4/1/2026 at 5:55:37 AM

There's this weird thing about AI generated content where it has the perfect presentation but conveys very little.

For example the whole animation on this website, what does it say beyond that you make a request to backend and get a response that may have some tool call?

by jatins

4/1/2026 at 6:07:16 AM

Also it's just randomly incorrect in places. For instance, it lists "fox" as one of the "Buddy" species, but that's not in the code.

by roughly

4/1/2026 at 9:34:29 AM

The classification is pretty weird sometimes, too. For example the `/exit` slash command is filed under advanced and experimental commands...

by hecanjog

4/1/2026 at 6:30:09 AM

That's been corrected, I did another fact checking pass!

by autocracy101

4/1/2026 at 8:36:31 AM

Another? Why weren't all the facts checked on the first pass?

by dare944

4/1/2026 at 8:43:09 AM

We've moved from "move fast and break things" to "hallucinate fast and patch later." It's the inevitable side effect of using AI to curate AI-written codebases.

by afferi300rina

4/1/2026 at 7:26:12 AM

When you're picking most likely tokens, you get least surprising tokens, ones with least entropy and least information per token.

by IsTom

4/1/2026 at 6:28:51 AM

That's fair. The site isn't meant to be a deep technical dive, it's more of a visual high-level guide of what I've curated while exploring the codebase while assisted by AI, 500k loc codebase is just too much to sift through in a short amount of time.

by autocracy101

4/1/2026 at 5:58:41 AM

Really Weird but then it's so easy spot AI text by this pattern

by siva7

4/1/2026 at 8:49:42 AM

I agree with you and I'm generally an AI "defender" when people superficially dismiss AI capabilities, but this is a more subtle point.

If you prompt with little raw material and little actual specification of what you want to see in the end, eg you just say make a detailed breakdown dashboard-like site that analyzes this codebase, the result will have this uncanny character.

I'd describe it as a kind of "fanfic", it (and now I'm not just talking about this website but my overall impression related to this phenomenon) reminds me a bit like how when I was 15 or so, I had an idea about how the world works then things turned out to be less flashy, less movie-like, less clear-cut, less-impressive-to-a-teenage-boy than I had thought.

If you know the concept of "stupid man's idea of a smart man", I'd say AI made stuff (with little iteration) gives this outward appearance of a smart man from the Reddit-midwit-cinematic-universe. It's like how guns in movies sound more like guns than real guns. It's hyperreality.

Again this is less about the capabilities of AI and it's more connected to the people-pleasing nature of it. It's like you prompt it for some epic dinner and it heaps you up some hmmm epic bacon with bacon yeah (referring to the hivemind-meme). Or BigMac on the poster vs the tray, and the poster one is a model made with different components that are more photogenic. It's a simulacrum.

It looks more like your naive currently imagined thing about what you think you need vs what you'd actually need. It's like prompting your ideal girlfriend into AI avatar existence. I'm sure she will fit your ideal thought and imagination much better but your actual life would need the actual thing.

This relates to the Persona thing that Anthropic has been exploring, that each prompt guides the model towards adopting a certain archetypal fiction character as it's persona and there are certain attraction basins that get reinforced with post training. And in the computer world, simulated action can be easily turned into real action with harnesses and tools, so I'm not saying that it doesn't accomplish the task. But it seems that there are more sloppy personas, and it seems that experts can more easily avoid summoning them by giving them context that reflects more mundane reality than a novice or an expert who gives little context. Otherwise the AI persona will be summoned from the Reddit midwit movie.

I'm not fully clear about all this, but I think we have a lot to figure out around how to use and judge the output of AI in a productive workflow. I don't think it will go away ever, but will need some trimming at the edges for sure.

by bonoboTP

4/1/2026 at 10:16:34 AM

If you need flashy motion graphics to explain 'returns data from API,' you probably can't justify the pixel budget or the user's time.

by hrmtst93837

4/1/2026 at 3:35:28 PM

Pardon me, but I think it's rather obvious that it worked this way?

The real value of Anthropic is in the models that they spent hundreds of millions training. Anyone can build a frontend that does a loop, using the model to call tools and accomplish a task. People do it every day.

Sure, they've worked hard to perfect this particular frontend. But it's not like any of this is revolutionary.

by apeace

4/1/2026 at 4:48:17 PM

Is this what perfection looks like?

by hxugufjfjf

4/1/2026 at 9:57:01 AM

Thanks to Claude Code, we got such a beautifully polished and dazzling website that gives a complete introduction to itself the very moment the leak happened :)

by WaterRun

4/1/2026 at 6:35:16 AM

Kairos and auto-dream are more interesting than anything in the agent loop section. Memory consolidation between sessions is the actual unsolved problem. The rest is just plumbing tbh

by sibtain1997

4/1/2026 at 7:25:55 AM

Projects like Beads help with memory consolidation by making it somewhat moot, since it stays "offline" and can be recollected at any moment.

by giancarlostoro

4/1/2026 at 1:34:49 PM

I built a site that lets you explore and browse all the Claude Code prompts in a structured way:

https://ccprompts.info

by jamalawd

4/1/2026 at 6:15:04 AM

Is it just me or do I not find the Claude Code application that fascinating?

I use it all day and love it. Don't get me wrong. But it's a terminal-based app that talks to an LLM and calls local functions. Ooookay…

by jen729w

4/1/2026 at 7:21:02 AM

I think it's good that it's out there, and I wonder why Anthropic have been keeping it closed source; clearly they can't possibly think that the CC source code is a competitive advantage...?

Agents in general are easy to make, and trivial to make for yourself especially, and the result will be much better than what any of the big providers can make for you.

`pi` with whatever commands/extensions you want to make for yourself is better than CC if you really don't want to go through the trouble of making your own thing.

by 59nadir

4/1/2026 at 1:47:00 PM

If you think this is not a competitive advantage then youre missing the point. LLMs arent so good that they work through bad abstractions and pretty much everyone has bad abstractions. CC is what invents some of the best abstractions (not the first). I think theyre they first ones who nailed subagents well. Theres a lot to learn from them and while im learning a lot from their source code my heart bleeds that this happened to them.

Sincerely, someone running a team building similar things for analytics.

by ramraj07

4/1/2026 at 7:53:15 AM

why do you think agents you make yourself will be better for you? integration with tooling that you prefer? your local dev setup built in?

curious as i haven't gotten around to writing my own agent yet

by ariwilson

4/1/2026 at 12:54:40 PM

All of the above at exactly the token cost that it requires for you.

Anything general is always going to be worse for specific use cases, and agents from these big providers are very general. They'll spend tons of tokens doing things that you might not need, including spend extra tokens on supporting MCP, etc., when you might not even need that.

by 59nadir

4/1/2026 at 6:27:34 AM

I feel the same way. Given it's AI-written, looking at the code isn't even worth it to me. I would rather read a blog post about how they develop it day to day.

by parasti

4/1/2026 at 7:43:59 AM

That’s what every agent does. They are fundamentally simple.

But you can do a lot of interesting things on top of this. I highly recommend writing an agent and hooking it up to a local model.

by dgb23

4/1/2026 at 6:19:30 AM

Clever architecture often can still beat clever programming.

by j45

4/1/2026 at 11:00:56 AM

ccleaks.com seems to be "temporarily paused" from Vercel.

Here is another one that goes in depth as well: www.markdown.engineering for anyone going deep on learning.

by brandensilva

4/1/2026 at 6:17:39 AM

would be nice if the transformers code for one of these frontier LLM models got leaked, HN will have a field day with a reveal like that

by vivzkestrel

4/1/2026 at 6:25:00 AM

I doubt there is anything special about the transformer code the frontier labs use. The only thing proprietary in it are probably the infrastructure-specific optimizations for very large scale distributed training and some GPU kernel tricks. The real moat is the training data, especially the RLHF/finetuning data and verifiable reward environments, and the GPU clusters of course.

The open source models are quite close, and they'd probably be just as good with the equivalent amount of compute/data the frontier labs have access to.

by loveparade

4/1/2026 at 7:36:20 AM

That’s what I‘m thinking as well.

However, I assume that usage data could be increasingly valuable as well. That will likely help the big commercial cloud models to maintain a head start for general use.

by dgb23

4/1/2026 at 12:11:35 PM

Nice job - I'm a fan. Makes it easy to get the big picture so I know where to dive in.

by jbdamask

4/1/2026 at 9:04:01 AM

This is AI slop.

First command I looked at:

  /stickers:
  
  Displays earned achievement stickers for milestones like first commit, 100 tool calls, or marathon sessions. Stickers are stored in the user profile and rendered as ASCII art in the terminal.
That is not what it does at all - it takes you to a stickermule website.

What is the motivation for someone to put out junk like this?

by AJRF

4/1/2026 at 9:11:27 AM

> What is the motivation for someone to put out junk like this?

Getting something with a link to their GitHub onto the frontpage of HN. Because form matters much more in this world than substance.

by thepasch

4/1/2026 at 9:10:38 AM

Clout and reaching the top of HN apparently.

The animated explanation at the top is also way too fast at 1x, almost impossible to follow; that immediately hinted at the author not fully reading/experiencing the result before publishing this.

by ricardobeat

4/1/2026 at 10:14:23 AM

Why is it that some people feel entitled to take this kind of tone as soon as AI is used?

It's inappropriate to label a free side project 'junk' or 'slop' even if it contains major errors.

Particularly when there's a disclaimer about possible inaccuracies on the page.

by user34283

4/1/2026 at 2:56:38 PM

> Why is it that some people feel entitled to take this kind of tone as soon as AI is used?

BECAUSE ITS WRONG! THE DATA IS WRONG!

by AJRF

4/1/2026 at 11:27:24 AM

People don't like having their time wasted

by euphetar

4/1/2026 at 2:21:14 PM

On the one hand I don't understand why it needs to be half a million lines. However code is becoming machine shaped so the maintenance bloat of titanic amounts of code and state are actually shrinking.

by samuelknight

4/1/2026 at 1:43:27 PM

I like the Claude desktop interface. The color scheme, presentation, fonts, etc. Is there a CSS I can find for the desktop version - I assume it's using some kind of web rendering engine and CSS is part of it.

by deskamess

4/1/2026 at 1:19:25 PM

I don't know why people obsess and spend so much time on this codebase. It isn't (and never was)alien technology. It's just mediocre typescript generated by an LLM

by 0zwan

4/1/2026 at 11:22:33 AM

I'm developing an agent focused on A2A, support for small models, and privacy (https://swival.dev).

I looked at the leaked code expecting some "secret sauce", but honestly didn't found anything interesting.

I don't get the hype around Claude Code. There's nothing new or unique. The real strength are the models.

by jedisct1

4/1/2026 at 2:23:43 PM

Don't do the "noise" thing this web page does. It hurts my eyes so bad. Why would you purposefully make your page look like a low-quality JPG?

by MattCruikshank

4/1/2026 at 3:35:06 PM

Please share the prompt/skills used to build it

by tallesborges92

4/1/2026 at 6:50:02 AM

Really nice visualisation of this, makes understanding the flow at a high levle pretty clear. Also the tool system and command catalog, particularly the gated ones are super interesting.

by rhofield

4/1/2026 at 6:20:12 PM

This is funny because this looks exactly like my vibe coded Portfolio - colors and all.

by RishabhGarg12

4/1/2026 at 4:06:55 PM

I'm just admiring the visualizations this guy built in under a day. Wondering how he did it so fast

by diyseguy

4/1/2026 at 2:18:50 PM

Has anyone tried USER_TYPE "ant"? I might be crazy, but I have not hit my limit yet after 3 questions.

by ramon156

4/1/2026 at 10:44:19 PM

To me the question isn’t “why is the codebase so large,” it’s “why is the model still being asked to do orchestration at all.”

by pandemik09

4/1/2026 at 12:16:07 PM

Btw, the 500K is just the source - it does not include tests. I would imagine there are at least 2-4x tests.

by _pdp_

4/1/2026 at 6:08:34 AM

Nice site. I might suggest moving SendMessage to the Hidden Features as they don't appear to have implemented a ReadMessage or ListMessages tools.

by simonreiff

4/1/2026 at 12:09:42 PM

A year ago I wouldn't have guessed a TUI could be a competitive advantage. But "harness engineering" became a thing, and it turns out the agent wrapper — tool orchestration, context management, permission flows — is where real product value lives. Not as much as the models themselves, but more than most people expected. This leak is a painful reminder of that.

by shuntaka9576

4/1/2026 at 6:35:10 AM

I mean, I get it: vibe-coded software deserves vibe-coded coverage. But I would at least appreciate it if the main part of it, the animation, went at a speed that at least makes it possible to follow along and didn't glitch out with elements randomly disappearing in Firefox...

How is this on the front page?

by m132

4/1/2026 at 7:14:02 AM

It's on the front page because it looks really cool. You can complain about it being vibe coded, but it still looks good. If you ask Claude to allow the user to slow down the animation, it can do that quite easily, that's just not a problem caused by vibe coding. And I'm on FF and didn't notice anything glitching out.

by brabel

4/1/2026 at 6:25:31 AM

I hope /Buddy is ported across to OpenCode.

by lastdong

4/1/2026 at 5:08:19 PM

FYI - This pops at my work as a sec threat via Cisco Umbrella. :D

by tonymucci

4/1/2026 at 10:05:10 AM

Nice presentation. The reality is there is nothing really special about the claude code harness?

by sourcecodeplz

4/1/2026 at 8:40:51 AM

However, excellent development practices involve modularizing code based on functional domains or responsibilities.

The utils directory should only contain truly generic, business-agnostic utilities (such as date retrieval, simple string manipulation, etc.).

We can see that the code produced by Vibe is not what a professional engineer would write. This may be due to the engineers using the Vibe tool.

by lanbin

4/1/2026 at 8:51:48 AM

That's the hallmark of "vibe coding": optimizing for immediate output while treating the utils folder as a generic junk drawer.

by afferi300rina

4/1/2026 at 9:11:10 AM

Another "hallmark" that happens to describe pretty much every codebase people wrote even before LLMs were a thing.

by TeMPOraL

4/1/2026 at 9:24:07 AM

Sadly, the AI’s have been trained on human developed repos.

by lll-o-lll

4/1/2026 at 8:57:19 AM

[dead]

by huflungdung

4/1/2026 at 1:40:39 PM

No point in reading this, they are continuing to lobotomize it daily...

by sscaryterry

4/1/2026 at 12:18:21 PM

Looks like ccleaks is down eek - not long before ccunpacked has same fate.

by delphic-frog

4/1/2026 at 8:27:13 AM

Ah, good well-architected code, finally... With most of the code in utils/other :D

by nitnelave

4/1/2026 at 5:39:21 PM

You guys all get it’s an April joke?

by anonyfox

4/1/2026 at 9:02:14 AM

why do people care so much? it's just an agentic loop

by fersarr

4/1/2026 at 10:22:49 AM

Many people seem to believe the Claude Code has some sort of secret sauce in the agent itself for some reason.

I have no idea why because in my experience Claude Code and the same models inside of Cursor behave almost identically. I think all the secret sauce is in the RLHF.

by __alexs

4/1/2026 at 1:34:51 PM

Same guide for opencode would be nice too

by bilalbayram

4/1/2026 at 11:43:10 AM

No mention of undercover mode?

by a3w

4/1/2026 at 9:38:34 AM

519K lines of code for something that is using the baseline *nix tools for pretty much everything important, how do they even manage to bloat it this much? I mean I know how technically, but it's still depressing. Can't they ask CC to make it good, instead of asking it to make it bigger?

by techpression

4/1/2026 at 6:13:55 AM

I expect dozens more "research articles" that

- find nothing - still manage to fill entire lages - somehow have a similar structure - are boring as fuck

At least this one is 3/4, the previous one had BINGO.

by ramon156

4/1/2026 at 10:54:22 AM

Is that safe to use?

by Hannah_Adam

4/1/2026 at 8:46:05 AM

I got a goose

War flashbacks to genshin

by spirelab

4/1/2026 at 5:51:53 AM

How the hell is it 500k lines?

by mdavid626

4/1/2026 at 6:00:10 AM

It is vibe coded.

by twsted

4/1/2026 at 11:16:24 AM

it's just bunch of useless junk

by dankobgd

4/1/2026 at 11:07:19 AM

its April fools joke. this has really gone wide

by blueTiger33

4/1/2026 at 10:08:28 AM

nice example: Find all TODO spin the AI machine

i do shift ctrl F

by chrz

4/1/2026 at 6:52:03 AM

Ccleaks is down?

by fartfeatures

4/1/2026 at 5:48:35 AM

cool Archaeologization Collection Output

by inside_story

4/1/2026 at 10:53:47 AM

I think this is unethical, and "everyone else is also doing it" is not a valid excuse.

by cubefox

4/1/2026 at 8:31:38 AM

Source leak or free code review? I can say that there is no bad publicity.

by fsniper

4/1/2026 at 8:22:35 PM

Now we just let the AI "move fast and break things".

by ezekiel68

4/1/2026 at 2:34:40 PM

Anthropic is now more open than OpenAI Itself lmao!

by steveharing1

4/1/2026 at 10:56:57 AM

what is so fascinating about claude code. we have codex that is open source already. is there something special to learn from claude code?

by dominotw

4/1/2026 at 11:13:11 AM

this claude code leak is such a fuck up...

The fact that now every agent designer knows what was already built is a huge shot of steroids to their codebase!

by kinnth

4/1/2026 at 5:46:43 AM

Thanks, I'll use this for teaching next week (on what not to do). BashTool.ts :D But, in general, I guess it just shows yet again that the emperor has no clothes.

by jruohonen

4/1/2026 at 8:02:01 AM

Are you not feeling the vibes?

In all seriousness. I think you‘re supposed to run these in some kind of sandbox.

by dgb23

4/1/2026 at 7:45:42 AM

> it just shows yet again that the emperor has no clothes

Which emperor, specifically?

by petesergeant

4/1/2026 at 3:13:28 PM

Holy fukking hell thats some bad code. Full blown AI slop.

by phplovesong

4/1/2026 at 2:59:51 PM

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4/1/2026 at 9:09:58 AM

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4/1/2026 at 6:46:14 AM

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by T3RMINATED

4/1/2026 at 6:00:52 AM

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by tontinton

4/1/2026 at 6:16:16 AM

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by robonot

4/1/2026 at 6:22:07 AM

Please don’t use AI to write comments on HN.

by stingraycharles

4/1/2026 at 6:31:06 AM

huh?

by robonot

4/1/2026 at 8:32:58 AM

You edited your comment. It very much first said something about using regexes as being the most important takeaway and whatnot.

by stingraycharles

4/1/2026 at 1:42:23 PM

Enshitification galore

by sscaryterry

4/1/2026 at 1:44:43 PM

What exactly is shitty here? A program i use for hours every day to do the job previously done by many N human beings, without many bugs, seems to have code thats seemingly messy but still clearly works.

by ramraj07

4/1/2026 at 2:45:07 PM

Maybe if it was working the way it was 2 months ago, life would be good?

by sscaryterry