# Five Years of Tinygrad  ## Metadata - Author: [[the singularity is nearer]] - Full Title: Five Years of Tinygrad - Category: #articles - Summary: The first commit to tinygrad was October 17, 2020. It’s been almost three years since we raised money. The company is 6 people now. The codebase is 18,935 lines not including tests. - URL: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/12/29/five-years-of-tinygrad.html ## Highlights - I think a lot of how software is thought about is wrong. All codebases have workarounds for issues in other parts of the codebase. Sometimes you are lucky and these workarounds are clear, but many times they are so deep and structural that you’ll never see them reading the code line by line. I think this is so bad that 98% of lines of software are basically this in some way shape or form. tinygrad is following the Elon process for software. > Make the requirements less dumb. The best part is no part. Most requirements in software exist to maintain compatibility with other abstractions. Let’s look at an LLM server. The real requirement is that it provide an OpenAI compatible API for quickly running LLMs on GPUs. But when you look at these codebases and what they depend on, they are collectively millions and millions of lines. tinygrad is 1000x smaller. It’s because each piece of code in that stack isn’t focused on the goal. It’s focused on the other pieces of code. I believe this is the same dysfunction that exists in organizations too. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kdx696ms3h4yh27dzp03v4pc))