How credible are the claims that the Claude Code source code is bad?

AI naysayers are heavily incentivized to find fault with it, but in my experience it's pretty rare to see a codebase of that size where it's not easy to pick out "bad code" examples.

Are there any relatively neutral parties who've evaluated the code and found it to be obviously junk?

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59nadir 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you not think that ~400k lines of code for something as trivial as Claude Code is a great indication that there is an immense amount of bloat and stacking of overwrought, poor "choices" by LLMs in there? Do you not encounter this when using LLMs for programming yourself?

I routinely write my own solutions in parallel to LLM-implemented features from varying degrees of thorough specs and the bloat has never been less than 2x my solution, and I have yet to find any bloat in there that would cover more ground in terms of reliability, robustness, and so on. The biggest bloat factor I've found so far was 6x of my implementation.

I don't know, it's hard to read your post and not feel like you're being a bit obtuse. You've been doing this enough to understand just how bad code gets when you vibecode, or even how much nonsense tends to get tacked onto a PR if someone generates from spec. Surely you can do better than an LLM when you write code yourself? If you can, I'm not sure why your question even needs to be asked.

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simonw 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Do you not think that ~400k lines of code for something as trivial as Claude Code is a great indication that there is an immense amount of bloat and stacking of overwrought, poor "choices" by LLMs in there?

I certainly wouldn't call Claude Code "trivial" - it's by far the most sophisticated TUI app I've ever interacted with. I can drag images onto it, it runs multiple sub-agents all updating their status rows at the same time, and even before the source code leaked I knew there was a ton of sophistication in terms of prompting under the hood because I'd intercepted the network traffic to see what it was doing.

If it was a million+ lines of code I'd be a little suspicious, but a few hundred thousand lines feels credible to me.

> Surely you can do better than an LLM when you write code yourself?

It takes me a solid day to write 100 lines of well designed, well tested code - and I'm pretty fast. Working with an LLM (and telling it what I want it to do) I can get that exact same level of quality in more like 30 minutes.

And because it's so much faster, the code I produce is better - because if I spot a small but tedious improvement I apply that improvement. Normally I would weigh that up against my other priorities and often choose not to do it.

So no, I can't do better that an LLM when I'm writing code by hand.

That said: I expect there are all sorts of crufty corners of Claude Code given the rate at which they've been shipping features and the intense competition in their space. I expect they've optimized for speed-of-shipping over quality-of-code, especially given their confidence that they can pay down technical debt fast in the future.

The fact that it works so well (I get occasional glitches but mostly I use it non-stop every day and it all works fine) tells me that the product is good quality, whether or not the lines of code underneath it are pristine.

	▲	59nadir 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I certainly wouldn't call Claude Code "trivial" - it's by far the most sophisticated TUI app I've ever interacted with. I'll be honest, I think we just come to this from very different perspectives in that case. Agents are trivial, and I haven't seen anything in Claude Code that indicated to me that it was solving any hard problems, and certainly not solving problems in a particularly good way. I create custom 3D engines from scratch for work and I honestly think those are pretty simple and straight forward; it's certainly not complicated and it's a lot simpler than people make it out to be... But if Claude Code is "not trivial", and even "sophisticated" I don't even know what to classify 3D engines as. This is not some "Everything that's not what I do is probably super simple" rant, by the way. I've worked with distributed systems, web backend & frontend and more, and there are many non-trivial things in those sub-industries. I'm also aware of this bias towards thinking what other people do is trivial. The Claude Code TUI (and what it does as an agent) is not such a thing. > So no, I can't do better that an LLM when I'm writing code by hand. Again, I just think we come at this from very different positions in software development.

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larodi 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How credible are the claims code en masse is good? Because I despise nearly every line of unreasonably verbose Java, that is so much waste of time and effort, but still deployed everywhere.