Paul Graham (@paulg): "I met a founder today who said he writes 10,000 lines of code a day now thanks to AI. This is probably the limit case. He's a hotshot programmer, he knows AI tools very well, and he's talking about a 12 hour day. But he's not naive. This is not 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap." | XCancel
Paul Graham
@paulg
7 Aug 2025
I met a founder today who said he writes 10,000 lines of code a day now thanks to AI. This is probably the limit case. He's a hotshot programmer, he knows AI tools very well, and he's talking about a 12 hour day. But he's not naive. This is not 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap.
Aug 7, 2025 · 2:59 AM UTC
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Paul Graham
@paulg
7 Aug 2025
He doesn't have any employees, and doesn't plan to hire any in the near future. Not because AI has made employees obsolete, but simply because he's so massively productive right now that he doesn't want to stop programming to spend time interviewing candidates.
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Shiva Talwar
@shivatalwar_
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
This post is so out of touch I don’t even know what to say
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Paul Graham
@paulg
7 Aug 2025
So you've solved that problem by saying nothing.
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Dwayne
@CtrlAltDwayne
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
paul. buddy. this is the opposite of a success story.<br>you met a guy who tricked himself into thinking productivity means flooding a repo with 10,000 lines of code a day and your takeaway was "wow, what a wizard."
no. what you saw was a man deep in the throes of AI assisted mania, mainlining synthetic velocity and calling it engineering.
this is not craftsmanship. this is cope with autocomplete.
and the worst part is you fell for it.
what matters isn't how much code you generate.<br>it's whether that code should exist at all. whether it's legible. whether it's real. lines of code is not a meaningful metric in software, never has been.
AI can generate garbage that compiles at industrial scale. that doesn't mean we should applaud people who shovel it the fastest.
you're watching a guy pour concrete onto a foundation made of jello and calling it a skyscraper because it’s tall and he built it fast.
there is no way this person is producing 10k lines of code a day without bugs. this is slop paul and you know it.
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Paul Graham
@paulg
7 Aug 2025
I've known him for several years. I know he's a good programmer, and an expert in AI specifically and thus aware of the pitfalls. You really don't know what you're talking about here.
I'm not trying to change your mind, just explaining why I'm blocking you.
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John Barker
@johnbarker
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
10K LOC a day means there's no human reviewing that. So who's confirming the quality and more importantly, the security?
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Paul Graham
@paulg
7 Aug 2025
As it turns out I met another startup today that's using AI to do ongoing testing of changing codebases. (He's not using them yet though.)
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faizan khan
@faizan10114
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
can you imagine, not hiring an Editor to review your book?
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Paul Graham
@paulg
7 Aug 2025
Yes. In fact I can't imagine letting an editor mangle my writing.
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Frank Rundatz
@FrankRundatz
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
Can you think of any reason why a founder might want to tell these tales to Paul Graham regardless of their truth?
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Paul Graham
@paulg
7 Aug 2025
In this case, no. YC already funded his company several years ago. We were just talking about the current state of AI-assisted programming.
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solst/ICE of Astarte
@IceSolst
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
I’m on line 702,244 today, keep up
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Yuchen Jin
@Yuchenj_UW
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
I highly doubt it can be 10k lines of high-quality and bug free code.
It also depends on what kind of code he wrote: e.g. frontend or backend, business logic or unit tests.
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γ13
@gammaThirteen
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
The best programmer I ever knew measured his productivity by how many lines of code he REMOVED from the code-base per day. So there's that.
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WarrenBuffering
@WarrenInTheBuff
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
your mom is 10,000 lines a day
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Xor
@XorDev
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
Why measure code in lines?
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Infinite Culture@1NF1N173CU17UR3
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
Writing code was never the bottleneck - what the hell is someone even doing with 10k lines of code per day?
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Yacine Mahdid
@yacinelearning
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
by the end of the year he’s at 3million LOC
that’s age of empire online!!
by the end of this decade 36 million !!!!!
it’s the equivalent of windows XP codebase!!!!!!!
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christina 死神
@chhopsky
7 Aug 2025
Replying to @paulg
yeah, AI guys say a lot of...