Let me tell you something about Garry Tan. This absolute unit of delusion recently hopped on social media to brag about shipping 37,000 lines of AI-generated code per day across five projects. Thirty-seven thousand. Per. Day. Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here writing maybe 200 lines of actual, functioning, test-covered code and having nervous breakdowns about whether our variable names make sense, and this clown is out here treating his terminal like a bidet for AI slop.
But wait — it gets better. He’s running a 72-day “shipping streak.” Seventy-two consecutive days of vomiting code into production like some kind of deranged code printer. Imagine being that guy’s on-call engineer. Imagine being the poor bastard whose job it is to maintain whatever flaming wreckage he’s left behind. I genuinely want to shake hands with whoever is handling incidents at whatever company has to deal with this man’s contributions. They deserve medals. Or therapy. Probably both.
And here’s the kicker that really gets me — this is the motherfucker running Y Combinator. The same YC that dangles money in front of naive founders and tells them to “build something people want.” The same YC that pretends to be the gatekeeper of actual engineering excellence. Meanwhile, their CEO is out here LARPing as an “agentic engineering god” on Twitter, flexing lines of code like it’s a goddamn dick-measuring contest. Congratulations, Garry. You’ve turned what used to be a legitimate metric into the software equivalent of flexing about how many hotdogs you can shove in your mouth. Except hotdogs have nutritional value. Your code has all the nutritional value of a McDonald’s salad dressing — technically food, technically garbage.
Now, here’s where it gets hilarious. Some poor soul actually bothered to audit one of his precious AI-slop websites. You know what they found? The homepage requires 169 server requests. One hundred sixty-nine. To load a single goddamn landing page. That’s not a website — that’s a DDoS attack against your own infrastructure. And the payload? 6.42 megabytes. For a website. In 2026. When we’re supposed to be talking about efficient computing and carbon footprints and all that jazz. But sure, let’s keep flooding the internet with 6MB hompages like it’s 2005 and we’re still downloading MP3s on LimeWire.
But wait, there’s more! The audit also found test files left in production. Not hidden test files, not carefully excluded — just sitting there in the wild like some embarrassing visible underwear waistband. And eight different logo formats for the same goddamn bear. Eight. I cannot even begin to fathom the thought process that leads to “you know what this project needs? eight different bear logos. Let’s make sure each one is slightly different and definitely not optimized.” This is the kind of decision-making that makes me want to set my keyboard on fire and retire to a cave.
And this is the guy telling startups how to build software. This is the guy whose “wisdom” gets amplified across every tech newsletter and VC podcast on the planet. “Move fast and break things” was already a dangerous enough motto, but Garry has evolved it into “move fast and ship broken slop that your future self will have to explain to incident responders at 3 AM.”
The worst part isn’t even the code quality — it’s the attitude. The absolute unmitigated gall to stand there and call yourself a 10x developer when what you’re actually doing is multiplying the amount of technical debt by ten. The sheer fucking nerve to frame quantity as quality. “I shipped 37,000 lines today” isn’t impressive, you absolute walnut — it’s a cry for help. It’s the digital equivalent of someone bragging about how much food they can vomit in a single sitting. Fast? Sure. Voluminous? Absolutely. Worthwhile? Not even goddamn close.
Real developers — the ones who actually give a shit about maintainability, about tests, about writing code that doesn’t make the next person want to jump out a window — are laughing at this. We’re all laughing. We log into our terminals, we see 500 lines of actual production-quality code, we write tests for it, we review it thoroughly, we feel exhausted. Then we log into Twitter and see Garry out here treating his AI like a firehose aimed at a git repository, flooding the world with abstractions on abstractions on abstractions, redundant layers that make a wedding cake look like a single sheet of paper, and “clever” solutions that will confuse the shit out of everyone who has to touch this code for the next five years.
Here’s what actual engineering looks like, Garry: it’s saying “no” to features that don’t need to exist. It’s deleting code instead of adding more. It’s writing tests that matter. It’s caring about the poor bastard who has to debug this at 2 AM on a Tuesday. It’s understanding that the best code is often the code you never write. But that doesn’t trend on Twitter, does it? “I deleted 200 lines today and made the system simpler” doesn’t get you 50,000 likes. “I SHIPPED 37K LINES OF CODE AND I’M BASICALLY GOD” does. And that’s the tragedy here — we’ve elevated volume to a virtue and called it productivity. We’ve confused motion with progress. We’ve rewarded the loudest shouter in the room and called them a visionary.
The cruelest irony of all? Y Combinator used to stand for something. It used to be the place where actual engineers built actual companies and shipping meant something real. Now it’s led by a guy who thinks he’s discovered the cheat code to software development by essentially hiring an infinite monkey army and pointing them at a keyboard. And the worst part? He’s probably going to get away with it. He’s going to get more funding, more podcast appearances, more think-pieces about how AI is “democratizing” development. Meanwhile, his codebases will quietly rot in production, maintained by people who are too polite to say “this is garbage” out loud.
But I’ll say it. This is garbage. Thirty-seven thousand lines per day of the most bloated, inefficient, over-engineered slop the world has ever seen, and it’s being celebrated as genius. Congratulations, Garry. You’ve successfully marketed diarrhea as a feature. You’ve convinced an entire generation of founders that quantity is the only metric that matters. You’ve made “move fast and break things” look like a goddamn manifesto for responsible engineering.
If you ever meet this man, buy him a copy of “The Pragmatic Programmer” and a gift card to a mental health professional. He’s going to need both.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write approximately 200 lines of code that actually work, with tests, and I’ll feel like a goddamn artisan in comparison. And that’s the most depressing part of all — being a mediocre, thoughtful developer feels like a downgrade now. What a time to be alive.