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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
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).
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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/
Can you give me more info about your own agentic setup ?
Here's a codeberg repo with the leaked source: https://codeberg.org/wklm/claude-code
> 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?
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
How many LoC should it be, for that kind of program?
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?
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.
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
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.
How was this generated ? I'm quite sure "with ai/claude code" but what are the actual steps ?
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.
Is there a reason to think it was done by an LLM?
It states "curation assisted by AI" at the bottom.
The biggest reason would be: do you know a single developer who could have produced this in a couple of hours?
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...
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.
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.
I'm not being a cynic here, I'm just telling you what I'm going to do tomorrow.
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.
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.
It is pretty good, shows numbers clearly on desktop and phone. Not sure what the criticism even means.
Claude itself can generate this in minutes if you know how to ask.
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.
that's really awesome. how did you go about building the component library?
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.
But somehow, according to HN, LLMs make you less productive, not more :)
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.
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.
.
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
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.
“Che cos’è il genio? È fantasia, intuizione, colpo d’occhio e velocità di esecuzione”
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.
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 :)
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
When you say it’s not a massive codebase, I’m curious, what are you comparing it to?
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.
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code said he uses CC to build CC.
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"
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?
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).
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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
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.
Feel free to add this to Awesome Claude code. https://github.com/rosaboyle/awesome-cc-oss
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
I need the dragon pet... someone add it to open code / pi, please!
It's live! If you're on the latest cc you can use /buddy now.
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.)
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"
Ok! First prompt, obviously:
“Complete thyself.”
And I want an octopus. Who orchestrates octopuses.
> also related: https://www.ccleaks.com
This deployment is temporarily paused
It's available on the internet archive
https://web.archive.org/web/20260331105051/https://www.cclea...
BTW, that's why you should use your own infrastructure and not depend on Vercel
Same!
I think is unethical, and "everyone else is also doing it" is not a valid excuse.
Nice presentation. The reality is there is nothing really special about the claude code harness?
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?
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.
The classification is pretty weird sometimes, too. For example the `/exit` slash command is filed under advanced and experimental commands...
That's been corrected, I did another fact checking pass!
Another? Why weren't all the facts checked on the first pass?
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.
When you're picking most likely tokens, you get least surprising tokens, ones with least entropy and least information per token.
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.
Really Weird but then it's so easy spot AI text by this pattern
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.
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.
Is that safe to use?
what is so fascinating about claude code. we have codex that is open source already. is there something special to learn from claude code?
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…
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.
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
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.
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.
Clever architecture often can still beat clever programming.
This is AI slop.
First command I looked at:
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Projects like Beads help with memory consolidation by making it somewhat moot, since it stays "offline" and can be recollected at any moment.
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
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.
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.
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.
That's the hallmark of "vibe coding": optimizing for immediate output while treating the utils folder as a generic junk drawer.
Another "hallmark" that happens to describe pretty much every codebase people wrote even before LLMs were a thing.
Sadly, the AI’s have been trained on human developed repos.
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.
Ah, good well-architected code, finally... With most of the code in utils/other :D
why do people care so much? it's just an agentic loop
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.
nice example: Find all TODO spin the AI machine
i do shift ctrl F
I prefer this mapping from Nikita @ CosmoGraph: https://run.cosmograph.app/public/dfb673fc-bdb9-4713-a6d6-20...
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?
Nice site. I might suggest moving SendMessage to the Hidden Features as they don't appear to have implemented a ReadMessage or ListMessages tools.
So it does use ripgrep and not unix grep. [0] I knew it from some other commenters here on HN, but it's nice to see it in the source as well.
0 - https://github.com/zackautocracy/claude-code/blob/main/src/u...
I just stumbled on a fascinating replacement candidate while clicking around on embed models on hugging face: https://github.com/lightonai/next-plaid/tree/main/colgrep
it looks really interesting.
I hope /Buddy is ported across to OpenCode.
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?
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.
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.
Source leak or free code review? I can say that there is no bad publicity.
I got a goose
War flashbacks to genshin
How the hell is it 500k lines?
It is vibe coded.
Ccleaks is down?
cool Archaeologization Collection Output
Hey, nice job! Next time tell calude to add some explosions, car crashes and stuntment into the design! Who cares about content anyway ... https://speculumx.at/blogpost/getting-sick-of-ai-slop
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.
Are you not feeling the vibes?
In all seriousness. I think you‘re supposed to run these in some kind of sandbox.
> it just shows yet again that the emperor has no clothes
Which emperor, specifically?