A developer audited the YC CEO's 37K-lines-a-day AI site. Then HN audited the audit.
Garry Tan, YC's CEO, says he ships about 37,000 lines of AI-written code a day. A developer downloaded his personal site and found a bear logo saved in eight formats, one of them a 0-byte empty file that shipped straight to production.
The frontend weighs 6.42 MB across 169 requests; Hacker News, also run by YC, serves its homepage in seven requests and 12 KB. The auditor, Gregorein, confirmed the whole list by feeding the files to a single Claude session.
That is where the thread turned on the auditor: anyone with a Claude subscription could run the same check, several noted, and Fast Company's own page pulls 29 MB over 300+ requests. The critique that outlived the pile-on wasn't about the bloat at all. It was about measuring work in lines of code.
37,000 lines a day, and a site to match
Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, has been talking up his output in a specific unit: lines of code, at a clip that works out to roughly 185,000 a week. A developer going by Gregorein, an MSc in computer science with 13 years in industry, pulled apart Tan's personal site to see what that volume actually produces.
The inventory reads like a checklist of everything a code review is supposed to catch. There are 28 test files pushed to every visitor's browser: 300 KB of developer scaffolding nobody asked for. There are 78 JavaScript controllers for features like AI image generation and voice extraction, none of them on the homepage, all downloaded "just in case." Uncompressed PNGs run near 2 MB each, so two images alone waste about 4 MB that modern formats would cut to 300 KB. A rich-text editor loads on a read-only page. There is duplicate page content, an empty CSS file, missing image descriptions. And analytics are deliberately routed through a proxy to dodge ad blockers, with a code comment admitting exactly that.
Fast Company's takeaway was tidy: AI makes it easy to pump out code, but quantity doesn't equal quality.
The thread audited the audit
The first pushback wasn't a defense of Tan. It was aimed at the messenger's own glass house.
"…it opens a website that also pulls in 6MB using more 'server requests' than 169… all it does is display a paywall. So let's not pretend this is something unique." — a developer-platform engineer
Someone else put a number on it: Fast Company's own article page fires 300+ requests and 29.4 MB. And the audit's method invited a shrug, since Gregorein had confirmed his findings with one Claude session:
"The article tries to play up this 'Polish engineer with an MSc… 13 years of industry experience' who… used claude to review the code. My mom could have done this without an MSc." — one reader
"They showed the code is bad. Not that it matters."
The strongest skeptics granted the bloat and went after the logic. The piece never connected bad code to a bad outcome.
"They showed that the code is bad quality, but not that it matters that it's bad." — one engineer
That is a real hole, and another developer closed it with a warning rather than a defense:
"It never matters. Until it does. …when you get hit by a security bug, or unexpected data loss, or your software is inexplicably displaying goatse, then you have no way to proceed." — another developer in the thread
Worth noting the audit only saw the frontend. An engineer pointed out the backend (auth, data, secrets) went unexamined, and if it matches the frontend, that is where the real risk lives.
Every line is a liability
The comment that outlasted the pile-on reframed the whole premise. Lines of code aren't an achievement to count up.
"Every line is a liability, and it always was. AI has not changed that, if anything it's amplifying it. The best PRs remove code, not add… and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC are OpenAI and Anthropic. Everyone else seems to be rummaging around for an ROI." — an iOS engineer
That last line is the sting. In a race scored by lines shipped, the only guaranteed winners are the companies selling the tokens.
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