I'm wondering how much cross-pollination of ideas and subsequent implementation details there are between people working at these companies. It does seem like all of this could potentially converge.
Can anyone explain to me what this massive volume of code could actually be doing? They obviously have variations of model architectures, training infrastructure, serving infrastructure, and the source for their apps.
Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially? And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
What they do not have is a version of chatgpt.com that is not a slow, awkward, glitchy mess.
As a user of Astra, it writes code that appears to work. It does not necessarily write sensible code that is architected in a way that makes sense based on what it does. I just watched it do a major rework of a couple thousand lines of code by keeping the original organization and kludging up an adapter to make old code have new semantics.
I would expect that this approach, coupled with lots of fun asking for changes and none of the grunt work of actually thinking about the result, could result in exponentially increasing amounts of mess.
I haven’t used a recent Anthropic model - maybe it’s better at this.
Nah I made a workout app with Claude code. Today it loaded the same warmup exercise as my main block 3 times in a row. The program does not call AI to make the plan so that’s the code it wrote lol. In general though the app is good enough if you know what you’re doing which seems to be the theme with AI.
> Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially?
Because the limiting factor for software has always been the supply, not the demand. When the average human engineer would ship 100 lines of production code / week, you could only afford to do the most critical things. But if code gets cheaper to produce, the projects that were marginal become worth doing, and the projects that were obviously insane become marginal. And that's exactly what is happening as models get cheaper and better, leading to the frontier of worthwhile projects expanding rapidly.
> And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
That's got some nice But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? energy to it!
becuase devs stop coding by hand and start prompting AI even for smallest of tasks, for example "hey codex, check grafana alerts and tell me x, y, z" instead of navigating it by hand and figuring out in grafana UI
For one, they have the internal models that us normies don't have. Also, machine learning as a field is probably the most automate-able field for AI. It's 100% on computers without "real world" collisions at all, AI can do the whole stack today even with publicly available models. And since it's so empirical, you can make a lot of progress by just running more experiments with more compute.
But "big tech" companies have a lot of different components. And they hit git scaling limits long before the current AI age. The commenter was asking about OAI, not big tech, committing much more code.
At some point I imagine they will be writing their own software for the entire training and inference stack. Kernels, libraries, why not? With compute so constrained it must be beneficial to optimize everything as much as possible
I’m not buying this argument, the apps of the LLM providers are some of the most wasteful apps that exist. Have you ever looked at how much memory / CPU Claude and Codex use? They ship with entire virtual machine hypervisors for sandboxing.
I think it’s simply a matter of dogfooding and new feature development, they do have much higher velocity than companies of equivalent size and an unlimited token budget helps as well.
> Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially?
Surely it's obvious?
Slop cannons firing at a rate so high no human can hope to restrain them.
Such a colossal volume of slop that even the most well engineered, efficient technology on the planet, written by one of the greatest coders of all time, is no longer sufficient to contain it.
> Such a colossal volume of slop that even the most well engineered, efficient technology on the planet, written by one of the greatest coders of all time, is no longer sufficient to contain it.
And git is enough to version control some of the most complex software like the Linux Kernel, the FreeBSD operating system, QEMU, browsers like Firefox,... Git was insufficient for Facebook and Google because they wanted to put the whole org inside a single repo, which broke the assumption where decentralization in git would happen (repo level, not subtree level). Now it seems that another assumption is broken, that you wanted a version control system, not a snapshot or a rolling log.
It's AI slop. AI coding agents write much more voluminous code, in my experience. The base code is more expansive, and there are more tests, and there are many, many more commits as you keep fixing and fixing and fixing over and over and over.
I'd bet money they're capturing every change made by any agent, not just at the end of a 'task' (or even a turn). Free training material volume to see what was changed and then what was changed later in the same turn to fix the mistakes introduced.
If they allocate more compute internally than they sell on subs & APIs, then they should be generating more code than all the customers they sell to combined.
Anyone who has fallen into the ADR pit with agents could tell you this. Its just slop, slop to fix slop, docs about slop, slop to fix the docs, etc. 600 commits and 200k LOC/Docs for software that used to be 15 commits and 10k LOC +README and no real value to be found.
Or it's yet another iteration to get another test with overbuilt providence catalogling, boated code, overbuilt nonsense. Suddenly you're 2.5 Billion tokens deep and you just wonder "What the actual Feck did they do, how did they burn that many tokens? It's just a web app with a plugin system, my god."
While I don't have any particular interest in the topic this is a great blog post. No AI in every second line, no needless marketing or hype. Just a bunch of engineers talking in their own voice about a topic in great detail with numbers, charts, visualizations.
Haha, I'm also building a code forge (at eol.sh, just a placeholder is there now). I like that you don't look like yet another Github clone, which is my primary frustration with the alternatives.
> We built Pando with Codex, moving from kick-off to production, in just 10 weeks. The core of Pando was designed by a single engineer, implemented by teams of agents, and deployed by a handful of engineers. Pando began serving production traffic in April of this year, and is one part of a larger system of source control management tools used at OpenAI.
It is truly a strange time to be alive. I've made systems in the past month that I've wanted to do for years, and they're astronomically better than I would have been able to rush together had I found the time. And I'm even trying to be tempered and work out more careful approaches to some of the folks I've seen.
Another way to avoid having to maximize download speed is to use a global git cache per machine in a similar way that pnpm optimizes installing packages:
> Technical details aside, this volume is ridiculous. How on earth do they see this kind of "growth" as an asset and not a liability?
That coding volume is a liability only for human engineers, with their limited memory, short attention span, tiredness, and quirky coding preferences. LLMs don't have any of those problems.
Every bit of code is more context getting soaked up in future agent runs. More context used = worse output. More tests need to be written, then fixed, using up more compute, time and context without adding value compared to a more thoughtful, efficient implementation.
It's not just the GPUs that I was referring to, but also the time spent in test runners locally and in CI. There's also the possible runtime cost of extraneous abstractions, but that's beside the point I was getting at.
Thoughtful developers do take money, but so too does shitty code that reaches a point LLMs struggle to maintain. Having both- with the thoughtful developers in charge- is better than just throwing more LLMs at it and hoping for the best.
Not necessarily. High LoC software is a potential bad design smell (without a counterfactual for the same level of functionality it might not be easy to tell though). Badly designed code entering an agent context is always a liability, because it contaminates decisions down the road, and makes new work slower as it needs more tokens to process and navigate old code.
Over the last few months at Xavi Group, our team of one engineer has gone from ~1k commits a day to ~100k commits per day as a result of debilitating financial decisions and exponentially increasing agentic workflow capability. Our internal Gitea services began to get bogged down by our proprietary frontier coding agent (internal codename `xavi-polaris`) refactoring the monorepos comprising our three flagship projects, one of which of course is our widely unknown RSI harness project.
(At this time we are not accepting any additional requests for our closed private beta, unless you ask reaaaalllyyy nicely $$$)
These demands were increasingly straining our S3 bucket capacity (petabyte scale) and our CI/CD pipelines (3 DO droplets, a macbook mini, and a legacy windows server possibly compromised). Most critically it was straining the agentic wellfare of Xavi sessions themselves, which began to flag push/pull latencies that were taking so long their caches would go cold between tool calls, resulting in even greater financial hardship.
`xavi-polaris` sess-3LQGgyUxLGXiV7OTTIMo4TWm0a6 is credited with identifying that this unprecedented pace was unsustainable, with projections that by mid 2027, commits per day could be north of 1 billion as monorepo sizes increased and refactoring became increasingly challenging despite the profound software engineering capabilities unlocked by the RSI harness project.
To identify solutions, we first looked to ensure we wouldn’t reinvent the wheel we were reinventing. We noted projects at Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI that recently aimed to address the very same challenges, but after ~20k USD in session research that incidentally solved an open conjecture in statistical analysis, we decided that adopting any of these existing protocols would limit Xavi sessions in our internal promotion benchmarks that enable “contributor” sessions to progress to “lead” sessions, irrevocably inhibiting our expansion of upper agentic management.
AGIt is a drop in replacement for Git, which we identified as being critically important because xavi sessions are deeply familiar with git commands as a result of a massive distillation and theft of proprietary data. AGIt utilizes novel CRDT and distributed systems technology built from our extensive experience with scaling distributed systems off the back of YJS. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it didn’t make any sense to the individual human engineer at Xavi Group either.
Importantly, we don’t believe it needs to. The future is agentic workflows, and we’re excited to continue giving back to the nursery that birthed our projects and has delivered at scale for almost every other software company on the planet. We’ll be donating five `xavi-polaris` teams to pumping PRs as fast as possible to these open source projects. As we enter this new era we’d like to thank contributing sessions sess-3LQKRQrJUyAvYHlUDJcjos2CInf and sess-3LQKRnqna2emLvyUyPUqSEIaUh0, their teams were instrumental in this endeavor, and both will be promoted from “lead” to “steward” to reflect their tenacity in building this system over the last few hours.
- Cursor: https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale
- GitHub: https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...
- Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-contro...
- GitHub: https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/th...
Maybe also tangentially East River Source Control's too: https://ersc.io/blog/what-comes-after-git.
I'm wondering how much cross-pollination of ideas and subsequent implementation details there are between people working at these companies. It does seem like all of this could potentially converge.
Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially? And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
As a user of Astra, it writes code that appears to work. It does not necessarily write sensible code that is architected in a way that makes sense based on what it does. I just watched it do a major rework of a couple thousand lines of code by keeping the original organization and kludging up an adapter to make old code have new semantics.
I would expect that this approach, coupled with lots of fun asking for changes and none of the grunt work of actually thinking about the result, could result in exponentially increasing amounts of mess.
I haven’t used a recent Anthropic model - maybe it’s better at this.
Because the limiting factor for software has always been the supply, not the demand. When the average human engineer would ship 100 lines of production code / week, you could only afford to do the most critical things. But if code gets cheaper to produce, the projects that were marginal become worth doing, and the projects that were obviously insane become marginal. And that's exactly what is happening as models get cheaper and better, leading to the frontier of worthwhile projects expanding rapidly.
> And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
That's got some nice But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? energy to it!
If you are wondering what these changes are, you can take a peek at https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commits/main/
This isn't to say that such pace of iteration is good or bad. That's a separate discussion.
many yaks to shave. many bikesheds to paint.
if you're paid by the line, why not go to town...
I think it’s simply a matter of dogfooding and new feature development, they do have much higher velocity than companies of equivalent size and an unlimited token budget helps as well.
Give a verifiable benchmark for the AI agent to hit such as reduce token processing time by 5% without affecting output.
I do believe this will force the AI labs to eventually solve the bloat problem with AI, but we’re definitely not there yet.
It's better than the ductape and glue pipelines that we had previous to this.
The software is the definition of plumbing no one cares about and testing it is trivial.
Surely it's obvious?
Slop cannons firing at a rate so high no human can hope to restrain them.
Such a colossal volume of slop that even the most well engineered, efficient technology on the planet, written by one of the greatest coders of all time, is no longer sufficient to contain it.
And git is enough to version control some of the most complex software like the Linux Kernel, the FreeBSD operating system, QEMU, browsers like Firefox,... Git was insufficient for Facebook and Google because they wanted to put the whole org inside a single repo, which broke the assumption where decentralization in git would happen (repo level, not subtree level). Now it seems that another assumption is broken, that you wanted a version control system, not a snapshot or a rolling log.
Or it's yet another iteration to get another test with overbuilt providence catalogling, boated code, overbuilt nonsense. Suddenly you're 2.5 Billion tokens deep and you just wonder "What the actual Feck did they do, how did they burn that many tokens? It's just a web app with a plugin system, my god."
[0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ArchitectureDecisionRecord.ht...
I've seen it on other workplaces, but from what I see from open ai and anthropic, the code shouldn't be as extended.
But maybe I'm crazy lol
Disclaimer: I am building a code forge at https://juju.bi
Impressive!?
https://git-dedup.ben3d.ca
Also, maybe FUD, but is there anything useful to learn from (p)npm other than cautionary tales?
That coding volume is a liability only for human engineers, with their limited memory, short attention span, tiredness, and quirky coding preferences. LLMs don't have any of those problems.
LLM compute is getting cheaper, so one can re-run the coding agent until it produces the desired result.
> without adding value compared to a more thoughtful, efficient implementation
Thoughtful implementations require thoughtful developers, and thoughtful developers cost more money that dumb GPUs.
Thoughtful developers do take money, but so too does shitty code that reaches a point LLMs struggle to maintain. Having both- with the thoughtful developers in charge- is better than just throwing more LLMs at it and hoping for the best.
Over the last few months at Xavi Group, our team of one engineer has gone from ~1k commits a day to ~100k commits per day as a result of debilitating financial decisions and exponentially increasing agentic workflow capability. Our internal Gitea services began to get bogged down by our proprietary frontier coding agent (internal codename `xavi-polaris`) refactoring the monorepos comprising our three flagship projects, one of which of course is our widely unknown RSI harness project.
(At this time we are not accepting any additional requests for our closed private beta, unless you ask reaaaalllyyy nicely $$$)
These demands were increasingly straining our S3 bucket capacity (petabyte scale) and our CI/CD pipelines (3 DO droplets, a macbook mini, and a legacy windows server possibly compromised). Most critically it was straining the agentic wellfare of Xavi sessions themselves, which began to flag push/pull latencies that were taking so long their caches would go cold between tool calls, resulting in even greater financial hardship.
`xavi-polaris` sess-3LQGgyUxLGXiV7OTTIMo4TWm0a6 is credited with identifying that this unprecedented pace was unsustainable, with projections that by mid 2027, commits per day could be north of 1 billion as monorepo sizes increased and refactoring became increasingly challenging despite the profound software engineering capabilities unlocked by the RSI harness project.
To identify solutions, we first looked to ensure we wouldn’t reinvent the wheel we were reinventing. We noted projects at Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI that recently aimed to address the very same challenges, but after ~20k USD in session research that incidentally solved an open conjecture in statistical analysis, we decided that adopting any of these existing protocols would limit Xavi sessions in our internal promotion benchmarks that enable “contributor” sessions to progress to “lead” sessions, irrevocably inhibiting our expansion of upper agentic management.
We’re proud to introduce our new, closed source Git model: AGIt.
AGIt is a drop in replacement for Git, which we identified as being critically important because xavi sessions are deeply familiar with git commands as a result of a massive distillation and theft of proprietary data. AGIt utilizes novel CRDT and distributed systems technology built from our extensive experience with scaling distributed systems off the back of YJS. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it didn’t make any sense to the individual human engineer at Xavi Group either.
Importantly, we don’t believe it needs to. The future is agentic workflows, and we’re excited to continue giving back to the nursery that birthed our projects and has delivered at scale for almost every other software company on the planet. We’ll be donating five `xavi-polaris` teams to pumping PRs as fast as possible to these open source projects. As we enter this new era we’d like to thank contributing sessions sess-3LQKRQrJUyAvYHlUDJcjos2CInf and sess-3LQKRnqna2emLvyUyPUqSEIaUh0, their teams were instrumental in this endeavor, and both will be promoted from “lead” to “steward” to reflect their tenacity in building this system over the last few hours.