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Is that final number really that crazy? With a well defined goal, you can put out 5-8K per day by writing code the old fashioned way. Also would love to see the code, since in my experience (I use Cursor as a daily driver), AI bloats code by 50% or more with unnecessary comments and whitespace especially when making full classes/files.

> I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success.

Normally I wouldn't post this because it's not constructive, but this piece stuck out to me and had me wondering if it's worth the trade-off. Not to mention programmers have spent decades fighting against LoC as a metric, so let's not start using it now!






You'll never see the code. They will just say how amazingly awesome it is, how it will fundamentally alter how coding is done, etc... and then nothing. Then if you look into who posts it, they work in some AI related startup and aren't even a coder.

Not open source but depending on certain context i can show whoever. im not hard to find.

Ive done just about everything across the full & distributed stack. So I'm down to jam on my code/systems and how I instruct & rely on (confidently) AI to help build them.


5k likes of code a day is 10 lines of code a minute solidly for 8 hours straight. Whatever way you cut that with white space, bracket alignment, that’s a pretty serious amount of code to chunk out.

If I am writing Go, it is easy to generate enough if/else and error checks. When working in java, basic code can bloat to big LoC over several hours(first draft, which is obviously cleaned up later before going to PR). React and other FE frameworks also tend to require huge LoC count(mostly boilerplate and auto completed rather than thoughtfully planned and written). It is not that serious amount as you may think.

Nitpicking like this must be fair, if you look at typical AI code - styles, extra newlines, comments, tests/fixtures, etc. it is the same. And again LoC isn't a good measurement in the first place.

Not all my 5k lines are hand-written or even more than a character; a line can be a closing bracket etc. which autocomplete has handled for the last 20 years. It's definitely an achievement, which is why it's important to get clarity when folks claim to reach peak developer productivity with some new tools. To quote the curl devs, "AI slop" isn't worth nearly the same as thoughtful code right now.


are people really committing 5k lines a day without AI assistance even once a month?

I don't think I've ever done this or worked with anyone who had this type of output.


It depends upon how well mapped out the problem is in your head. If it's an unfamiliar domain, no way.

Maybe if you are copy-pasting some html templates, but then it is not “writing code”. Handwriting complex logic, at 5k sloc per day, no way.

Nobody is writing 5k consistently on a daily basis. Sure if it’s a bunch of boiler scaffolding maybe.

I daily drive cursor and I have rules to limit comments. I get comments on complex lines and that’s it.




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