Founders report AI tools generate unshipped code
Investor Harry Stebbings quoted Jason Lemkin observing that developers using Claude Code and Codex for eight to ten hours daily produce large volumes of code that never reaches production. Founder Peter J. Liu replied that the view misses the point. Founder Boris Dayma added that the same tools accelerate updates to existing codebases yet frequently create over-engineered outputs for new repositories, scripts, and logic, unlike his prior Jupyter notebook workflow.
@HarryStebbings This dude doesn't get it.
Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbingsToken Maxing vs. The 100x Engineer "We don’t need as many tokens as we think. People are running Claude Code and Codex 8 to 10 hours a day, but it’s not necessary, you’re producing too much code that never gets committed to production. The folks that need this many Claude coding hours are the mediocre web developers that don’t know what they’re doing." @jasonlk Love to hear your thoughts @sundeep @0xDevShah @levie @mcannonbrookes
#947Boris Dayma 🖍️@BORISDAYMAClaude/Codex have helped me update codebases very fast, but for new repos/scripts/logic, not completely sure of the positives.
1/ it can often one-shot a working solution, but it’s often over-designed, lots of abstractions, tests, security paranoia where not needed, etc
2/ I used to develop everything through Jupyter notebooks, explore, test, etc. It was actually quite fast, great for exploring deeply my workflow, edge cases, etc
3/ now, maybe because of laziness, maybe thinking it will be faster/better/more efficient, I resort to Claude/Codex. It’s likely ok for quick or non-important features (personal admin dashboard/monitoring), but I’m not convinced of the long term value
4/ "but what about karpathy auto-research loop workflow"? I think it has its use cases, but you cannot prompt forever "make it better, here is the target" on every type of problem. Also on any specialized project, I don’t think LLM can reach the insight/creativity of humans, and those are better triggered through step-by-step development / visualization of the full pipeline vs just a top level overview
#1569Harry Stebbings@HARRYSTEBBINGSToken Maxing vs. The 100x Engineer
"We don’t need as many tokens as we think.
People are running Claude Code and Codex 8 to 10 hours a day, but it’s not necessary, you’re producing too much code that never gets committed to production.
The folks that need this many Claude coding hours are the mediocre web developers that don’t know what they’re doing." @jasonlk
Love to hear your thoughts @sundeep @0xDevShah @levie @mcannonbrookes
Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbingsWTF is going on? Anthropic and Elon. Cerebras IPO. Ramp at $40BN. I sat down with @jasonlk & @rodriscoll to discuss the deal, along with the biggest news in tech this week: - Anthropic Buys Compute From Elon & Commits $200BN to Google - Cerebras IPO: The Breakdown - Ramp's $40BN Latest Valuation - Hubspot Tanks, Monday Rockets: WTF is Happening in Public Markets? My notes below: 1. Foundation Made the Investment of the Decade with Cerebras Jason argues that Foundation’s success with Cerebras is a masterclass in “actual venture capital” because they did not just muscle into a hot round. They incubated the company in 2016, when the category did not even make sense. By playing the long game, finding a brilliant founder, seeding the idea, and holding roughly 9% ownership through a $40B+ IPO, they proved that the biggest returns still come from doing the hard work before a deal becomes obvious. 2. What Founders Have to Understand Is That to Win, You Have to Mentally Be Changed Forever There is a fundamental breakpoint around the four-to-five-year mark when a founder’s brain is permanently rewired by the intensity of the journey. Jason notes that winning at a high level requires a commitment to becoming a different person. The happy-go-lucky version of yourself from the early days is gone, replaced by someone who can often only relate to other founders who have survived similar maelstroms. 3. The Enemy of My Enemy Infrastructure Play Anthropic’s partnership to use SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center highlights a massive consolidation where the strongest players are hoovering up all available capacity on the planet. For Elon Musk, this move transitions xAI from a buyer of CapEx to a net seller of capacity, turning a potential money pit into a $3 to $5 billion annual revenue stream because Grok is not currently growing at the same pace as leading-edge models. 4. The Crackdown on Shadow Cap Tables Anthropic is enforcing board approval for all secondary sales to reclaim cap table control and call out "bad actors". Rory warns that side contracts for "economic rights" are legally fragile; because the company has no obligation to honor unapproved transfers, many investors face "messy" losses at the IPO. 5. Model vs. Application: The Vertical SaaS Death Zone The industry is debating if horizontal models will consume the application layer or if vertical workflows will remain independent. Jason predicts a "terminal state of decay" for legacy marketing tools because agents have no need for manual templates. Once a model can perform an application’s core function directly within a prompt, that software becomes obsolete. 6. Token Maxing vs. The 100x Engineer Despite massive growth forecasts, a "micro backlash" is growing against "token trash" generated by mediocre developers. Jason predicts a clampdown on wasteful agentic spend, where companies prioritize unlimited resources for elite "100x engineers" while restricting "web heads" who burn compute for minimal productivity gains. (links below)