1/4 of startups in YC current cohort have almost entirely AI-generated codebases

I'm not surprised. There is a complete meltdown in the Cursor subreddit because some update made code generation worse in "agent" mode. It seems that there are many people completely relying on prompting without reviewing any code at all.

It would have been great if they had disclosed which products. I've been building tons of projects with AI lately, and while this is a massive productivity boost, the code itself doesn't scale. The acceleration when you start with zero is massive, but with a growing code base, AI hits a wall at some point. You better understand what you've built going from there.

> During the discussion, Hu said that even if product builders rely heavily on AI, one skill they would have to be good at is reading the code and finding bugs.

Naturally, that brings to mind the classic:

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

-- Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

And also:

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

-- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Well AI is best at greenfield projects, so it makes sense. What would be interesting to track is the amount of code still written by AI after 1 year or more if the company still exists.

I think our initial reactions as SWEs may be to dismiss this, but if non technical folks (who might be closer to a real customer need) can spin something up to get traction, that’s a win. What is important is delivering value to end users. I wonder how many genuinely good business ideas never happened in the past because a technical cofounder wasn’t available.

This says a lot more about YC than it does about AI based programming.

> In a video titled “Vibe Coding Is the Future,” Friedman, along with YC CEO Garry Tan, managing partner Harj Taggar, and general partner Diana Hu, discussed the trend of using natural language and instincts to create code.

how many YC-backed startups (in general, not just the current batch) have products based in some way on LLM code-generation?

it seems like there's a significant chance for a conflict of interest here, where YC has an incentive to build up hype about LLM-generated codebases in order to benefit their overall portfolio.

will we see a follow-up story several months or a year from now, comparing how these startups have fared relative to the other 3/4ths of the batch? if one of them is a success, probably. if all of them fizzle out...maybe not.

I recently started using cursor for my side business and it's been amazing so far. I found that it works best for simple questions where I would normally go to stack overflow and for "drudge work".

One example of "drudge work" is that I'm currently refactoring all strings in the app. Before cursor, it would take me upwards of an hour to refactor the strings in a complex component but now I can just shove all that into cursor and have it do it for me.

For simple questions it sometimes works great and other times just falls apart. In one scenario I asked it why my sequelize query didn't return the data I expected and it immediately gave me a fix. But in another scenario I asked it how to refactor out a "forwardRef" in a component and it just kept recommending that I leave the code as is.

I feel like this is not a very insightful take - you can have an AI generated codebase where every function is generated by prompting from humans - such a codebase could be pretty good indeed.

However, in my experience using these reasoning models to generate giant chunks of code usually has disastrous results and barely even works even when working from a clean sheet.

"This isn’t a fad. This isn’t going away. This is the dominant way to code. And if you are not doing it, you might just be left behind"

To which I say: a race to the bottom is still a race, yes, but not one you want to win

Prediction: soon we will see the first vibes based billionaire. They'll have no idea what they did, what their product does, how it works, or any possible ethical implications of having developed it.

But they'll be fucking rich.

I use AI every day while coding. I love it.

And hey, I get both Techcrunch and YC need clickbaity, hyperbolic PR, but guys, don't jump the shark on this.

95%? I wish! Either they have access to some seriously next NeXt NEXT gen stuff, or this is pure nonsense, exaggerated by at least half an order of magnitude.