so... I audited Garry's website after he bragged about 37K LOC/day and a 72-day shipping streak.
here's what 78,400 lines of AI slop code actually looks like in production.
a single homepage load of garryslist.org downloads 6.42 MB across 169 requests.
for a newsletter-blog-thingy.
1/9
Garry Tan@garrytan
Mar 30
View on Twitter
Absolutely insane week for agentic engineering
37K LOC per day across 5 projects
Still speeding up
the homepage ships 28 TEST FILES to every visitor.
not test results - actual test harnesses.
membership_form_controller.test (89 KB), media_grid_controller.test (31 KB), story_composer_controller.test (19 KB)
...
300 KB of test code. All returning HTTP 200. All actively downloaded. HAR file doesn't lie.
2/9
it also downloads 78 Stimulus controller, including...
AI image generation
voice extraction
video generation
radar charts
draft review
lab evaluation
and the literal Rails "Hello World" scaffold (`hello_controller.js`, 157 bytes).
154 KB transferred. None of these are used on the homepage. The browser fetches all of them anyway.
3/9
the logo situation is my favorite 
the same bear gets downloaded... 8 times per page load: 3 png copies, 2 WebP variants, 2 AVIF variants, and a 512x512 favicon.
one of the AVIF files is 0 bytes. an empty file. a failed image conversion that got deployed and served to production.
total logo bandwidth: 654kb for two logos.
4/9
the same bear gets downloaded... 8 times per page load: 3 png copies, 2 WebP variants, 2 AVIF variants, and a 512x512 favicon.
one of the AVIF files is 0 bytes. an empty file. a failed image conversion that got deployed and served to production.
total logo bandwidth: 654kb for two logos.
4/9
but the real bandwidth killer are article images served from CloudFront as raw, uncompressed PNGs:
- Image 1: 2.07mb png
- Image 2: 1.99mb png
...
the browser sends
> Accept: image/avif, image/webp
explicitly asking for modern formats
the server ignores it and sends 4mb of raw PNG.
with WebP these would be 200-400kb combined. That's 4mb of waste from two images alone.
5/9
more highlights from the audit
- 520 KB Trix rich text editor (120kb transferred) loaded on a read-only homepage (a spillover from a backend?)
- 47 images with empty `alt=""`... on a "civic engagement" site
- the entire page content rendered TWICE in the DOM (mobile + desktop)
- duplicate <title> tags in the <head>
- an empty CSS file (just a manifest comment, content-hashed and served)
- PostHog analytics proxied through `/s/` to... bypass ad blockers, as his own source code comment says so
6/9
The source code literally contains this comment:
```
// Load SDK from our proxy (bypasses ad blockers)
```
A 501(c)(4) nonprofit "civic engagement organization" actively circumventing its readers' privacy tools to track them harder.
while shipping test files, a 0-byte broken image, and 4 MB of raw PNGs to production.
7/9
for context: the Hacker News homepage, run by Y Combinator, Garry's own org, makes 7 requests and transfers 12kb
Garry's page makes 169 requests and transfers 6.42mb
562x heavier
even discounting images, 73% of the bandwidth is waste.
one could say it's a HAR truth.
8/9
AI & llms are an incredible tool, i use them every day... even burned over 3 billion tokens last year (2.5 in cursor alone)
but AI amplifies whatever process you feed it - including no process at all. Garry's site is what happens when you replace code review with a shipping streak counter.
A Duolingo streak for `git push` 
the automatons did exactly what they were told. nobody told them to stop.
---
this is a client-side audit only, of what the browser downloads. i didn't read a single line of the source slop. idc, qed
the automatons did exactly what they were told. nobody told them to stop.
---
this is a client-side audit only, of what the browser downloads. i didn't read a single line of the source slop. idc, qed 
for added context: when a 17yo developer (@𝒙𝒊𝒂 🪼) politely pointed out that bragging about LOC is silly, Garry's response was to publicly call them a "clout farmer."
the "clout farming" teen... wrote a browser engine in Rust at 17. HTML tokenizer, CSS cascade, box model layout, GPU renderer via wgpu, and published a technical breakdown showing deeper understanding of how the web works than most senior engineers I've worked with (including me, cos I've never dug that low-level).
vs
the "shipping" guy, the president of Y Combinator, a multi-billion dollar startup kingmaker, who mass-generates code with 113 Claude sessions a week, counts lines like a Duolingo streak, and ships test files, 0-byte AVIFs, and 4 MB uncompressed PNGs to production.
right, punch down at a teenager. on main @.
x.com/xiaonweb/statu
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