After 540,000 Lines of Code, Garry Tan Realizes the Old Game of AI Programming Is Over
YC President Garry Tan's project "Garry's List" involved over 540,000 lines of Rails code, but he concluded this approach is outdated. He argues the software industry is stuck in a "Foxconn factory" mindset: building excessive tests, validators, and control logic to constrain LLMs, which have become cheap and capable enough to work autonomously.
The old paradigm treated LLM calls as expensive and code as cheap, leading to complex systems to "manage" the AI. This has now reversed. The future lies in "just-in-time software"—using natural language instructions (Markdown-based "skill packs") and minimal code, letting the AI handle the work.
Tan advocates for "skillifying" workflows: after an agent completes a task, it packages the process into a reusable, tested skill pack. This shifts value from writing code to designing capabilities. For example, his agent reviewed 85 hackathon submissions in 30 minutes, a task that previously took days.
He emphasizes "tokenmaxxing"—willingly spending on LLM tokens to gain a years-long competitive advantage, as costs are plummeting. The core shift is from measuring output in lines of code to focusing on clarity, taste, and judgment. The best future engineers won't write the most code, but will know what to build and how to unlock the most intelligence with the least code.
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