Child labour with 10 years of experience, 'AI-native' accepting 250k lines of Cursor code

I hope he didn't use Claude because oh boy it maybe costed more than a real developer.

You have the r and n flipped: userjourneys.ai
- thanks!

The fallback is gonna be hilarious, the codebase rewrote by AI? With basically no considerations of business need and system capacity?

I can't wait for the humiliating rollback

I bet you their "10x coder" can't describe what a unit test is nor its purpose
Then again, can you even unit test AI generated slop with how often it's rewritten?
- Unit tests are exactly for code that is often rewritten, because it ensures that whatever interface still behaves the same, regardless of the implementation. This a large portion of the point of unit tests: not for testing the initial implementation but confirming that any subsequent implementation behaves the same.
- Using AI to write Unit tests is one of the few use cases I somewhat understand, but even that turns out horrible with improper supervision. I reviewed one Pull Request once where the testing was so horribly cobbled together and nonsensical that I rewrote those tests by hand (after asking the person I was reviewing to fix it twice and them only making it worse by letting their AI rewrite them)

But not his job right? He alone is far too valuable to be replaced by an IDE. /s

That's not healthy

That's why he's a cracked developer. Already broken under the heel of his capitalist overlord.
- literally cracked

I only want to see ai remove code while keeping tests passing. until it can do that what value does it bring

The democratization of technology is a double-edged sword.

For every improvement in UX and lowering of a once impassible barrier of entry, we seem to inevitably gain a massive number of “eXpErTs” who can suddenly stand upon the now much lower skill floor.

Shortly thereafter seems to be a destruction of the general reliability of whatever field these “eXpErTs” flood - usually a field which used to be inherently cryptic and had complex prerequisites just to begin operation within, let alone master.

Like… it makes me almost miss when “using a computer” meant you had to understand how to browse a directory in DOS…

Because at least then you literally couldn’t begin to operate in the field unless you could wrap your head around understanding the basics of syntax.

Now you can just have an entire legion of dullards misspell or misspeak 30% of a malformed question to some random free LLM that still has trouble telling you “how many Rs are in the word strawberry,” and have it confidently fart back out a wrong answer that they will then copy-paste into a paper or article which will then be added to the pile of growing misinformation currently stuffing a frighteningly expanding part of our collective knowledge base.

One of my biggest pet-peeves right now is tech companies selling paid, proprietary "low code/no code" software as "democratic". Especially when writing code was never the hard part of software development, it's designing usable, scalable, and efficient data structures and algorithms.
Yeah we're gooing to need to go back and clean up the internet from 2022-50. Because of the scam they call AI it's only going to get worse.

There are two kinds of Linkedin posters - those who are open about being trolls and those who aren't.

How could someone 'joke' about this? Its not funny
- it's not funny only if it's your job to clean up after them

Can we fast forward to the Hard Lessons part because it's going to be hilarious

As an AI native he knows how to prompt, for example to always include "don't make errors" and "make sure to follow security best practices". It's really easy once you know.
All of those senior devs that got sacked will be laughing for the rehire salary increase, assuming their company doesn't fold on the ai code house of cards.

aI-nAtIvE tEnX

What an obnoxious buzzword bro

250k lines of ai generated code means he didn't do anything

Yeah like whoopty doo you created 250k lines of cruft that someone competent will have to sift through later
Well, what he did was bringing something into the code base that might blow up the whole company one day in the future. Becuase what he didn't do was thoroughly review the code that the AI made.

red flag number 1: measuring progress in lines of code

redflag number 2: not seeing the issue with accepting 250k lines of code generated by AI supervised by a teenager without a software engineering background
- Wdym man the guy has 10 years of experience

Are we just going to ignore that the guy posting this looks 14

Just write the AI to accept non deterministic outcomes, slap it on its ass, and push it into production.

Can they come take my job any sooner so I can finally retire, please?

I remember being obsessed with code and finishing a bootcamp and feeling unstoppable... but I never got the job. I can still refresh my skills whenever I want, but shit like this makes me wonder why I am always late to the party...

you’re not late to the party you’re just never invited in the first place.
class is a bitch, man. nepo babies walk the earth
- There are a lot of highly paid software devs who started with no connections or college degree. This might be the hardest time to enter the field as a junior, but it's definitely not full of nepo babies. You must be thinking of finance/law.

The code:

I used to think this is pretty much how games were really made when I was a tiny child. I couldn't get over how many images needed to be created to get every possibility from every angle.
- I watched this awhile ago and it was very interesting how they made super small games for NES.
  https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM

Programming is one of those skills and industries that is accessible enough that basically anyone can do it, but you will run into trouble later if you're doing anything serious without learning how to do it well. There are hundreds or thousands of ways to make something work, but if it's an unmaintainable mess or you don't even understand how it works, then we end up with our financial institutions running COBOL in 2025. Good luck when regulations change. Have fun when your operating system becomes unsupported and you have to replace the underlying dependencies. Hope your boss doesn't sue when they have to hire people to rewrite your hackjob.

And these were all already problems before AI code came onto the scene. We had the programming equivalent of script kiddies, people who would blindly copy and paste code from web searches without even reading the date or the comments saying "this is bad and this is why". But this probably makes it even easier to do, and possibly harder to spot. Combine this with how many universities don't even focus on lower-level languages so you get plenty of people who can't understand how to fix any of the trickier errors in their code. And that's not to say everyone has to be able to, but it's a problem when so few are able to. So these programmers are unlikely to know if the code has problems so long as it passes their tests, and unlikely to know how to fix those problems when they become clear.

Automation tools are good ideas for assisting and detecting possible mistakes. They're not good at generating that much code. In fact, that amount of code in that amount of time is suspicious, hinting that it's unlikely to be well-designed, maintainable or efficient.

This is a great write-up. And a bit generous to the "developer" in question.
I'm not entirely sure I've written 250,000 lines of code yet, in my entire decades as a professional developer. If I have, it's a near thing.
Not to brag, but I can reuse existing libraries and get many things done with 5 or 10 lines of code.
It's hard to crack 250,000 when 5-10 lines solves each of my employer's problems.
And this young developer supposedly solved one problem with 250,000 lines of code.
After giving it some thought, I'm like ~~90%~~ 40% (edit: okay, 40% after hearing some anecdotes, haha.) sure this is just a parody post. Even AI can't be that bad at this, right?
- This is just some library too, not their main application. I know "lines of code" is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can't imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.
- This kind of thing is real. Newbies don't have experience to know how important architecture is. They continuously mash code without thinking too much. Generative machines have made the problem orders of magnitude worse. It used to be limited to the amount of garbage a human could mash into their keyboard. Now it's like generated art. People churn out infinite images. They haven't actually drawn the image themselves.
I agree with your main point, although I think your example of COBOL being used to this day in financial institutions is actually the opposite problem. The guys that originally developed that shit were damn good programmers, but they were severely constrained by the available hardware, limitations of the language, etc. So they had to get really clever in order to make these massive, complicated systems work. In my experience, those really old legacy systems tend to be rock solid with near 100% uptime and almost no errors. They've never been rewritten because doing so would be a multi-year effort costing millions of dollars, and the end result would be a system that is most likely slower, buggier, and has less functionality.
TLDR: The old COBOL systems are unmaintainable messes not because of incompetent developers, but because the limitations of the available technology when they were originally developed forced a bunch of really good devs to have to get extremely creative and hacky with their solutions.

lololoo expecting a follow up - everything is broken now need help post

If this is serious, that entire codebase is fucked

And I seriously don't trust ai with anything mildly more different in scope than what is always shown

That's how you do marketing.

From my experience, being "good" at vibe coding is more about being unable to detect flaws in AI generated code rather than being able to code well. Add AI to the workflow of someone who actually understands scalability and maintenance and that won't be able to get past a couple functions before they drop the AI.

Also, assuming this kid gets weekends off, he would be writing 12k lines of code each day. I don't think the average programmer could even review that number of lines in a day, so there's likely no actual supervision for what the kid is feeding into the codebase.

I'd estimate within four months the project will be impenetrable, and they'll scrap the whole thing.

Also, assuming this kid gets weekends off, he would be writing 12k lines of code each day. I don’t think the average programmer could even review that number of lines in a day
I usually estimate that it takes 1-2 hours of highly focused work to review 1k lines of code well (this is not even considering that this is AI-generated mess that probably requires a lot more attention). A typical developer is capable of ~6 hours of focused work per day (8-10 with a lot of caffeine). So no, according to my estimates at least there's no way in hell this gets any review at all.
- In what world? 1k lines is a lot... Even a few hundred can take hours if everything is unknown, code is legacy, and naming is bad.
  Like if there is a line like this memcpy(ptr, src, 4 * 6 * sizeof(real));
  What's that 4?
  What's that 6?
  Is real a float? A double?? What are we copying, where, why???
  This is a line I saw recently. 1k code is huge even if readable.
I, a 10x developer, can hit approve on at least 50k lines a day. 30k if you want me to also add a "LGTM" comment

I can certainly understand why one of your libraries was bothering you if you're merging 250,000 lines of AI generated code in a month.

Someone I know genuinely tried this in a test branch for a Blazor application developed at a university, and the AI introduced insanely hidden UI breaking bugs because it touched every single file and renamed variables to plural without correctly refactoring in every dependent file lmao.

AI is a powerful tool, but throwing an entire codebase at it is exactly how you nuke your development lol. Even the latest and greatest models can't handle complexity beyond a few thousand lines even with increased input limits. And if it's anything proprietary or even not well published, you're basically screwed.

It is a sharp knife that if used correctly can improve your performance.
However if you use an agent that runs through your code and changes shit randomly....
It is like taking the knife strapping it on a water hose and turn on the pressure.
It may cut through the things you want. It also may go crazy and kill everyone in range. You don't know.
- More like a dull knife that only cuts because you're putting enough force behind it.
- It convinces people it improves their performance. It doesn't in reality: https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown.
It's crazy to me that cursor has been out for a while now, and it's basically a fork of vscode, and it support tool use, but it doesn't have the refactoring vscode tools as tools available to it.
Like there are tools out there that make sure that these kinds of changes won't break anything and they're just like "Naw dog, just give me access to the terminal and grep" wat.
- There's an MCP that uses LSP (Language server protocol) which is what vscode and other ides use to navigate and refactor code.
  The problem is it trips over cursor trying to do things

now ask them to maintain the 250k lines, probably fine for rew more commits, but after that? Oh look, they left the company for the next ai-nonsense-startup.

M...maintain...? I don't understand... Is that an AI command?
which is great, tbh. love to see these people pay us to ruin their codebase.
- I hate how much I love this reply.
  At the end of the day: IT-man return to monke. Please. Please?
Does their app need to be 250k lines? Who knows... definitely not them.
- You made me wonder how many lines our product contains. Looks to be around 600k total right now. Granted, that's just the front end. It includes comments, blank lines, and lines that are just brackets and such. Also includes some dev only code. So, far more bloated than the actual code. Excludes code from any external libraries we use though.
  I don't have an easy way to see how many lines our backend is. A large portion of the files aren't for our front-end and I don't feel like figuring it out. Couldn't even tell you if it's more or less code than the frontend.
  I'd be extremely worried if someone added or re-wrote 250k lines of code in our code base in one month. We actually have regulations to follow.

Translated:

High-schoolers are even cheaper and easier to exploit than new grads, and if I don't care if they know nothing as long as they can prop up our crappy app just long enough for me to sell the company, pocket a bunch of cash, get them all fired, and move on to my next ~~scam~~ entrepreneurial venture while preaching to people about being an innovator and a job creator. Maintenance is for whichever sucker ends up holding the shit bag, but who cares? I've got mine.

AI coding is just the latest spin on this age-old practice.

250,000 lines of brand new legacy code nobody has ever thought about or understood? Good luck with that.

I believe that our combined "lines of code" "productivity" will soon reach an all time high.
I wonder if I can make some money off the demand for cleanup that will follow...

They're going to take your job.

🤓📚🤚🦋 Is this an empathetic message?

I wonder why everyone hates CEOs

The “CEO” looks like he is 12 - typically LinkedIn BS
It’s always open season on ceos!!!
- @LadyMeow @drolex Just choose the way
- And body knows it!!

Omg his company sells one of those meeting notes bots

I'd bet everything I own that they leak sensitive information from some company within the next couple of months.

This product will 100% have more security holes than a sieve

... I'm starting to think I need to take up freelance pentesting

These MFs don't even pay developers, what makes you think you're going to hire an actual pentester
- The secret is to sell the vulnerabilities in the black market
  Or perform some huge insider trading with all the meetings details you stole.
- I guess it depends how legally I want to go about it—there's always someone that will pay for the exploit details
... I'm starting to think I need to take up freelance pentesting
Is this before or after they hand that job off to AI? You know they're gonna and then just complain when an actual expert finds 3000 holes per line of AI gen code.
- These MFs don't even pay developers, what makes you think you're going to hire an actual pentester
  Edit: oops I missed

And that profile picture suggests he is a Roblox kid.
...Who got rich "hiring" kids to build his Roblox games because that whole ecosystem is built on the unpaid labor of children.

"The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.”" Vibe Code is Legacy Code

The crash out from AI when all this debt starts to catch up is going to be so massive, not just in terms of market losses for the rich, but literal lost ability to think critically among possibly an entire generation of people depending on how long the grifting can keep going.

The crash out from AI when all this debt starts to catch up is going to be so massive, not just in terms of market losses for the rich, but literal lost ability to think critically among possibly an entire generation of people depending on how long the grifting can keep going.
It's going to be catastrophic.
but literal lost ability to think critically among possibly an entire generation of people depending on how long the grifting can keep going.
Eh, have some faith in today's youth. They're brighter than you give them credit for, if nothing else because they've got records of the experiences of other recent generations.
If I'm that kid I'm pulling in plenty of cash from some dipshit tech bro to fund my own goals or just fuck around and have fun while he gets legacy code that's already out there and isn't bright enough to figure out. Also, he's in high school, there's no real price he'll pay when the scam comes undone, he's just a kid.
- Eh, have some faith in today’s youth. They’re brighter than you give them credit for, if nothing else because they’ve got records of the experiences of other recent generations.
  Just because the records are there, doesn't mean anyone is going to actually look at them.
  How many generations ago was WWII? Seems like everyone already forgot the lessons from that one...
- They're brighter than you give them credit for, if nothing else because they've got records of the experiences of other recent generations.
  I'd like to think most people learn from history, but they clearly don't.
- Well I do have faith in the youth, its just the elder capitalists that are looking to exploit them I'm worried about. I'm worried there will be a point when taking the time to actually learn how things work will put someone at a disadvantage under capitalism because those who are willing to "vibe code" their way into jobs will have the advantage of stuff that works "right now" instead of working "well", and the people doing the hiring and running the companies are all about "right now".
It's going to be unthinkable. There were memes about managing legacy code but that was from people that at least knew what 'objects' and 'functions' were. This...this will be horrendous.

God, imagine debugging 250,000 lines of code to find some bug the AI created.

You expect those 250k lines to be comprehensible? In my experience they'll be an utter clusterfuck.
You can't fix the airplane if it turns out to be a boat with legs, 2 holes (worked around with 5 pumps) and 3.5 enormous ears tagged "wings".
- a boat with legs, 2 holes (worked around with 5 pumps) and 3.5 enormous ears tagged “wings”
One of a bajillion bugs.

Lauri is a recent teenager-turned-CEO himself... and that "intern" is basically responsible for building Lauri's entire codebase. The whole service his "company" offers is what that teen bodged together in a month.

Capitalism makes me fucking sick

Typical CEO thinking number of lines of code is the same as productivity. What was the functionality of those 250k lines? Do arithmetic ops between two ints? Compute if an int is even?

    
if n% 2 == 0:
    print("Even")
else:
    print("Odd")
if (n+1)%2 == 0:
    print("Even")
else:
    print("Odd")
.
.
.

To circumvent a peculiar bottleneck that randomly sprouted up just after their new hire arrived, it’s just 250k lines marking specific numbers odd or even.
- Breaks as soon as they get to 250k+1 ~~and thinks 0 is an even number~~.
I've been playing with cursor a bit at work (non-dev here - I'm a mechanical engineer writing custom tools for me & my team).
it might just be the way I use it, because my AI-positive boss seems to be more successful than me, but it's... not great. cursor itself seems to have many problems following instructions. and then the code it comes up with.. I've seen it make a complete replica of the original code when I asked it to add another scenario to the four already there, and mixed and matched between the two copies to access functions etc so that you couldn't just remove one.
it's definitely helped me a bit when I got stuck with a particular issue and didn't know what API calls to be using, but in general... idk. I don't have enough time with it yet, nor am I skilled enough to judge it properly, I think.
- I'm a dev and I think my experience is mostly similar to yours. Where AI seems to work well, is when the boundaries of the problem are very well defined. For example : "Take this C++ implementation of the LCS algorithm and convert it to JS". That would have taken me a few hours at least, but AI appears to have nailed it. However, anything where a large amount of context is needed and it starts to fail fast, and suggest absolutely insane things. I have turned of copilot on my IDE because it slows me down, but I will still ask questions to chatgpt when I have a specific problem I think it can help me with. I also will ask pointed questions when I review other dev's code, and my expectation is the author can explain why they wrote it.
- It’s not just you. Cursor is horrible.
  So far, the only time AI seems to works well - and only sometimes - is as autocomplete for a single line. It does such a terrible job at generating larger chunks of code that you will spend more time correcting the problems than if you had written it yourself or used the template-based features of a half-decent IDE. It doesn’t matter which LLM you use, they are all bad. Everything an AI outputs is a hallucination, even when it’s correct. The system is not capable of reasoning or thinking, it can’t apply logic to problems. As a result, you can’t trust any code it gives you in the least.
- It's exactly as bad as you describe.
- I can assure you LLMs are, in general, not great at extracting concepts and work upon it, like a human mind is. LLMs are statistical parrots, that have learned to associate queries with certain output patterns like code chunks, or text chunks, etc. They are not really intelligent, certainly not like a human is. They cannot follow instructions like a human does, because of this. Problem is, they seem just intelligent enough that they can fool someone wanting to believe them to be intelligent even though there is no intelligence, by any measure, behind their replies.
Whatever the language's equivalent of x86 assembly "NOP" is (forgive me - been decades since I programmed, so I'm not up on the modem languages).

I am old enough to remember ms frontpage. It could take a 50 line html page and make it 500 lines or more without changing the external appearance. Didn't make it better.

And how do you even explain the requirements of somethingvthat took that much code to implement to an AI. The context window is only so big.

ms frontpage was great as an ide actually. i mean if you didn't use the wysiwyg features.

Waiting for the "our database got deleted, but I still love AI" post any day now.

Why ain't this post making any fucking sense to me? Especially the last paragraph. I read it like 5 times.

It says:
Young programmers don't check their work - they just ship garbage that they haven't reviewed and wrecks everything. If you are an incompetent CEO who doesn't understand software engineering,you should break labour laws and hire these people
- Yeah but the line for "shipped code" goes up which looks GREAT in meetings! Look! The line! Lines going up! As lines must! Always!
- Technically nothing illegal happening here. I mean he's a shithead by the sound of it, but year of highschool left = 17 or 18, quite likely 18 since it's summer right now. 18 year olds you can hire for 40 hour weeks even. Younger teenagers, fewer hours, but legal.
  How do I know this? This shithead is from my country, at least according to his name. You don't see the letter 'ü' in a lot of American names, do ya
  Quick google says that 2 years ago he was still an intern. He's probably something like 22, 23 himself. Working for multiple startups, at one of which he's the CEO. He's either hustling big time and will burn out soon, or he's only pretending to do anything, and will fizzle out anyway.
  Edit: Never mind, he's 24. Q2, the company he runs with his friends paid 2k EUR in labor taxes, average monthly turnover is 3k. Sounds like they're selling ChatGPT consulting services to someone, but just one client lol
the last paragraph is just saying the young programmers who embrace using AI to generate code are more productive and thus more competitive.
10x refers to being ten times more productive or useful than the average programmer, or a programmer as productive as ten other programmers.
Shipping is when you put out a new feature or product, roughly the same meaning as launching.
AI-native is a buzzword for programmers who have only vibe coded (i.e. used AI tools to do the coding and thinking for them), as opposed to normal / experienced devs who might be more skeptical or hesitant to embrace AI tools.
- Oh wow. I guess I'm just too old then. Damn, are we really going to live in a world where developers are just rare and all code is done by this combo(AI and these so called vibe "developers")?
  Edit: Also, thank you.

I am trying to imagine how bad that library must have been before for this to be better.

Well, you see, it's better because it has 250,000 lines of code. Bigger number means better.
- This is literally how CEOs think.
- Yeah, before that it did the exact same thing in 3000 lines of code, which was obviously worse!
- More lines of code mean harder to hack right... right? :)

Kill all CEOs

Both Ai and Child labour problem solved!

Spaghetti Monster Coder

I'm shocked, shocked þat "CEO @ userjourneys.ai" would suggest AI is better þan human developers.

Shocked.

þat and þan? Do you mean ðat and ðan?
- Using eth and thorn to show the voiced-unvoiced distinction is basically only a thing in Icelandic and the IPA (and even then it's not a consistent feature of Icelandic), and when they were used in English they seem to have been basically interchangeable
  That said if someone wants to bring them back to English it seems to me like using them to distinguish the sounds is the most sensible approach, it's the one that makes spelling less ambiguous even if it doesn't have a historical foundation in English

How come these 10x devs always seem to actually get requirements that don't change and never need to attend meetings

I'd love that but I live in a x today y tomorrow of business.

Doesn't the poster look underage as well?

Early 20s, from his LinkedIn, teen-turned-CEO.

That "CEO" Looks like they could still be in highschool as well

Also perfect for !linkedinlunatics@sh.itjust.works

It fits that they don't mention testing or QA.

Future AI will ~~fix this~~ fuck this up as well
I love the thought of productivity being measured as more and more LoC accepted month over month. This month it was 250k, but maybe next month it will be 350! Soon their OpenAI API front end will have more LoC than the Linux Kernel!!

"cracked"...

short for crack head

Can the bubble please burst already?

I'm expecting a full on Hindenburg

yeah NO SHIT he's the "10x developer", he's working on TWO laptops at once !

All the gear, no idea

I just can't get over why he needs a massive mousepad for software development and yet is using the shittiest keyboard possible. Maybe in between builds he's queueing up for Fortnite?
- Why two laptops

"He Is also my son."

wait, I finally get it. 10x developers write 10x lines of code. They're just verbose AF, so that many more lines of liability. That's it. Yeah, I'm not 10x.

I'm not saying, reduce lines of code in favor of readability, but that's a different argument. I've heard it said that no abstraction is better than the wrong abstraction, but are 10xers opting for no abstraction all the time?

I barely know how to code, but I think I could write a lot of lines of code too. They would be incredibly inefficient and poorly written though.

If you can use AI to get your degree, don’t be surprised if it replaces you.