Performance Audit of Y Combinator CEO's Website: 6.42 MB on the Homepage
The homepage of garryslist.org generates 169 HTTP requests and transfers 6.42 MB of data. This is a newsletter blog, but the traffic volume exceeds expectations for simple content. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan stated 37 thousand lines of code per day for 72 days, totaling 78.4 thousand lines generated by AI. A client-side audit revealed systemic issues in production.
The browser loads 28 test files: membership_form_controller.test (89 KB), media_grid_controller.test (31 KB), story_composer_controller.test (19 KB), and others. Total volume — 300 KB. All files return a 200 status and are downloaded for no reason.
Redundant Stimulus Controllers
The page requests 78 Stimulus controllers, totaling 154 KB. The list includes:
- AI image generation;
- Voice extraction;
- Video generation;
- Petal charts;
- Draft validation;
- Voice Lab calculations;
- Hello World template (
hello_controller.js, 157 bytes).
None are used on the homepage, but the code loads in full.
The bear logo is duplicated 8 times: 3 PNGs, 2 WebPs, 2 AVIFs, and a 512x512 favicon. One AVIF is 0 bytes, a conversion error. Total 654 KB on logos.
Image Issues
Article images are served as uncompressed PNGs from CloudFront:
- 2.07 MB PNG;
- 1.99 MB PNG.
The browser requests AVIF/WebP (Accept: image/avif, image/webp), the server ignores it, sending 4 MB of PNGs. In WebP, the volume would be reduced to 200–400 KB.
Additional Inefficiencies
- Trix editor (520 KB, transfers 120 KB) on a read-only page.
- 47 images without alt text.
- DOM renders twice (mobile + desktop).
- Duplicate
<title>in<head>. - Empty CSS file (only a comment).
- PostHog analytics proxied via
/s/to bypass blockers (// Load SDK from our proxy (bypasses ad blockers)).
Comparison with Hacker News
Hacker News: 7 requests, 12 KB. Garry's List: 169 requests, 6.42 MB — 562 times heavier. Without images, 73% of traffic is junk.
| Metric | Hacker News | Garry's List |
|---------|-------------|--------------|
| Requests | 7 | 169 |
| Volume | 12 KB | 6.42 MB |
| Ratio | 1x | 562x |
Key Takeaways
- 78.4 thousand lines of AI-generated code in production lead to loading tests and unused modules.
- 4 MB of uncompressed PNGs instead of WebP/AVIF — the main traffic load.
- Duplicate resources (logos, DOM) increase load time.
- Lack of optimization costs more than code review.
- AI scales the input process, including its defects.
The audit covers only the client side. For comparison: 17-year-old developer @xiaonweb created a browser engine in Rust (HTML tokenizer, CSS cascade, box model, wgpu renderer), showing deep web understanding.
— Editorial Team
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