Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rapzid | Hacker News Reader

I would love to ask them why this scale is even necessary for a conceptually simple CLI app like Claude Code, but they wouldn't be able to answer because they don't even understand the scope of it apparently.

View on HN

It's absolutely insane that they can't keep track of a CLI application that makes shell calls. This is so far from rocket science even mentioning the term is misleading.

To be fair, rocket science is also easy. You just combine a propellant and an oxidiser in a reaction chamber.

In fact, everything is easy when you summarise it in one sentence and don't think very hard.

Yea not at all. There are dozens of oss Claude code clones written by 1 person with a few contributors that work as well if not better. So it's really not some massive challenge. A decent cs student with enough coffee could get 40% the way there in a week without any llms. The same can't be said for rocket building or even design...

What people believe are the core features has never been difficult to implement. Building "something like" Twitter or facebook or reddit has always been possible within a few days.

It's an iceberg, most of the complexity lies underneath the obvious stuff.

No like there are dozens of open source Claude code alternatives that are as good or better than Claude code. This isn't a theoretical thing. It's not new either.

Same goes for the reddit and twitter clones.

Do you use one of those open source alternatives?

Not a clone but yes I use alternative social media from twitter and reddit along with a few million other people. Its nice.

But in Twitter or Facebook, the complexity is not in the app but with the scale. How do you support the network, graph, querying, fetching, etc. That is not the case for a self-contained binary like Claude code CLI that talks to the same API irrespective of 100 people are using or 1M people are using around the world.

It needs to gather a bunch of inputs and feed into the remote GPUs correctly and as efficiently as possible. Lots of room to optimize under the constraints that users love cheap tokens, demand a fair billing structure, and want responsiveness and low latency.

They do have quite a few products now, the desktop apps, websites, cowork, cloud session sandboxes, API, enterprise, etc. have their own gotchas, but after a core development, the 30000 commits a day does not feel justified, or is that an online training dataset prep, that's hard to tell. That's why I feel with their endless tokens, it feels just petty marketing and that's sad because it does not bring much to our engineering table.

Is Claude code just the cli or does it include a bunch or backend services supporting?

It's also a desktop app, integrated into the mobile app, and it has cloud hosted session capabilities too. Plugs into Slack and Github, maybe others. So definitely there's backend stuff as well, beyond the inference.

I don’t think you can infer the scale for Claude Code alone. They said it doubled but not what the starting point was. The 30k figure is for the entire Anthropic monorepo.

Well I personally didn't say anything about 30k PRs. I still stand by my belief the "known" scope of Claude Code doesn't seem to warrant the scale of "vibe coding" and lack of comprehensive understanding they are communicating to us.

30k commits going into a monorepo would make me want to kms having to rebase the fucking PR's every 35 seconds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com