Comment by samrolken

Wow, thanks everyone. First HN post ever and it’s this intentionally terrible experiment that I thought was the dumbest weekend project I ever did, and it hit the front page. Perfect.

I’ve been reading through all the comments and the range of responses is really great and I'm so thankful for everyone to take the time to comment... from from “this is completely impractical” to “but what if we cached the generated code?” to “why would anyone want non-deterministic behavior?” All valid! Though I think some folks are critiquing this as if I was trying to build something production-ready, when really I was trying to build something that would break in instructive ways.

Like, the whole point was to eliminate ALL the normal architectural layers... routes, controllers, business logic, everything, and see what happens. What happens is: it’s slow, expensive, and inconsistent. But it also works, which is the weird part. The LLM designed reasonable database schemas on first request, generated working forms from nothing but URL paths, returned proper JSON from API endpoints. It just took forever to do it. I kept the implementation pure on purpose because I wanted to see the raw capabilities and limitations without any optimizations hiding the problems.

And honestly? I came away thinking this is closer to viable than it should be. Not viable TODAY. Today it’s ridiculous. But the trajectory is interesting. I think we’re going to look back at this moment and realize we were closer to a real shift than we thought. Or maybe not! Maybe code wins forever. Either way, it was a fun weekend. If anyone wants to discuss this or work on projects that respond faster than 30 seconds per request, I’m available for full stack staff engineer or tech co-founder work: sam@samrolken.org or x.com/samrolken