Paul Graham: I met a founder who writes 10k lines of code a day thanks to AI

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

@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

1,313

508

12,096

2,852,705

@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.

131

82

3,440

293,543

@shivatalwar_

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

This post is so out of touch I don’t even know what to say

16

5

1,771

135,845

@paulg

7 Aug 2025

So you've solved that problem by saying nothing.

24

2

1,117

108,970

@CtrlAltDwayne

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

paul. buddy. this is the opposite of a success story. 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. 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.

37

18

1,013

77,253

@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.

43

2

246

47,751

@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?

31

7

881

99,968

@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.)

36

6

309

91,323

@faizan10114

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

can you imagine, not hiring an Editor to review your book?

5

1

96

60,433

@paulg

7 Aug 2025

Yes. In fact I can't imagine letting an editor mangle my writing.

9

6

304

55,734

more replies

@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?

2

90

23,743

@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.

3

28

21,042

more replies

@IceSolst

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

I’m on line 702,244 today, keep up

11

9

630

26,637

@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.

15

4

332

36,400

@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.

10

9

491

16,304

@WarrenInTheBuff

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

your mom is 10,000 lines a day

1

3

163

16,020

@XorDev

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

Why measure code in lines?

8

103

12,551

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?

4

267

6,635

@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!!!!!!!

4

48

4,645

@chhopsky

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

yeah, AI guys say a lot of things

but lying keeps working for them so why would they stop

1

41

2,818

@0x3b33

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

I work in cybersecurity and there are my favorite devs!

They bring so many bugs that we would need to do multiple reviews just to make sure it has some normal level of security.

2

34

3,063

@boneGPT

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

PG met Yacine?

1

31

9,454

@DeeperThrill

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

Deep Thrill

@DeeperThrill

10 Jun 2020

As a general rule of thumb, I tend to believe the fewer lines of code to achieve a given result, the better the coder.

25

5,917

@Philo01

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

Lines of code written per day is a bad metric to measure productivity 😅 I can guarantee there will be bugs, if he says that’s not the case, I’m 99.99% sure he’s lying.

2

23

6,060

@tibo_maker

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

i cannot comprehend how you could have so many things to build

3

22

10,008

@jjenzz

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

PER DAY? 😳 love the empowerment but code is such a liability. scaling chaos is an interesting strategy. less is usually more in the long run.

2

22

2,889

@HodlMagoo

7 Aug 2025

Replying to @paulg

I can write 100,000 lines of code with AI that will compile in 8 hours.

That being said I can write 800 lines with the help of AI that has 10x the value of those 100,000 lines.

1

21

2,428

Load more