16 ms·

Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

• rishabhaiover 10mo ago
  For the longest time, the joy of creation in programming came from solving hard problems. The pursuit of a challenge meant something. Now, that pursuit seems to be short-circuited by an animated being racing ahead under a different set of incentives. I see a tsunami at the beach, and I’m not sure whether I can run fast enough.
  • skybrian 10mo ago
    I see it more like a playing a text adventure game. You give it commands and sometimes it works, and sometimes the results are unexpected.
    • zephen 10mo ago
      Personally, I've never been interested in being a character in someone else's story. But now you've got me thinking. Has anyone studied whether the programmers who are more enamored of AI are also into RPGs?
  • condensedcrab 10mo ago
    Not to mention many companies speedrunning systems of strange and/or perverse incentives with AI adoption. That being said, Welch’s grape juice hasn’t put Napa valley out of business. Human taste is still the subjective filter that LLMs can only imitate, not replace. I view LLM assisted coding (on the sliding scale from vibe coding to fancy auto complete) similar to how Ableton and other DAW software have empowered good musicians that might not have made it otherwise due to lack of connections or money, but the music industry hasn’t collapsed completely.
    • tjr 10mo ago
      In the music world, I would say that, rather than DAWs, LLM-assisted coding is more like LLM-assisted music creation.
      • design2203 10mo ago
        Yep DAW’s aren’t the comparison. People are not thinking deeply about what is going on - there is a big war on-going in order to eradicate taste and make it systematic to immensely benefit the few.
  • nextworddev 10mo ago
    (Inception scene) here a minute is seven hours
  • m463 10mo ago
    > I can run fast enough. Can you do some code reviews while you're running?
• tjr 10mo ago
  Being a nondeterministic tool, the output for a given input can vary. Rather than having a solid plan of, "if I provide this input, then that will happen", it's more like, "if I do something like this, I can expect something like that, probably, and if not, then try again until it works, I suppose". What are the productivity gains? Obviously, it must vary. The quality of the tool output varies based on numerous criteria, including what programming language is being used and what problem is trying to be solved. The fact that person A gets a 10x productivity increase on their project does not mean that person B will also get a 10x productivity increase on their project, no matter how well they use the tool. But again, tool usage itself is variable. Person A themselves might get a 10x boost one time, and 8x another time, and 4x another time, and 2x another time.
  • general1465 10mo ago
    Non determinism of AI feels like a compiler which will on same input code spit out different executable on every run. Fixing bugs will become more like a ritual to satisfy whims of the machine spirit.
    • fragmede 10mo ago
      But how different? Compilers do, in fact, spit out different binaries with each run. There are timestamps and other subtle details embedded in them (esp compiler version and linking) that make the same source result in a different binary. "That's different"; "that's not the same thing!" I see you thinking. As long as the AI prompt "make me a login screen" results in a login screen appropriate for the rest of the code, and not "rm -rf ~/", does it matter if the indeterminism produces a login page with a Google login page before the email login button or after?
  • grim_io 10mo ago
    Non determinism does not imply non correctness. You can have the LLM do 10 different outputs, but maybe all 10 are valid solutions. Some might be more optimal in certain situations, and some might appeal to different people aesthetically.
• breve 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • fooblaster 10mo ago
    Its clear from listening to podcasts/interviews, he does not want to say anything to get on elons bad side. Interviewers appear to also not be eager to broach the subject.
    • breve 10mo ago
      If indeed he doesn't have the heart for basic honesty then why should anyone listen to him about anything? This is not a high bar. This is not some impossible moral standard to be held to. This really is an easy one.
      • grim_io 10mo ago
        Being honest about self-driving AI gets you sued by the richest guy on earth.
        • breve 10mo ago
          Everything has a cost. Fear of doing the right thing isn't worth it.
          • grim_io 10mo ago
            That's a very cute power rangers way of saying it, but c'mon, it's easy to say when it's not you who is the target of a limitless revenge machine.
            • breve 10mo ago
              You can embrace a nihilistic weakness or you can do the right thing. It's not complex. If Karpathy is genuinely compromised to the point where he can no longer do the right thing then no one should listen to him.
• dude250711 10mo ago
  Man, this is giving me a cognitive dissonance compared to my experiences. Actually, even the post itself reads like a cognitive dissonance with a dash of the usual "if it's not working for you then you are using it wrong" defence.
  • TeodorDyakov 10mo ago
    I think of it this way. If you dropped Einstein with a time machine two thousand year ago, people would think he is some crazy guy doing scribbles in the sand. No one would ever know how smart he is. The same is with people and advanced AGI like Gemini 3 Pro or Chatgpt 5.2 Pro. We are just dumber than them.
    • csto12 10mo ago
      You think they have “advanced AGI” and are worried about keeping up with the software industry? There would be be nothing to keep up with at that point. To use an analogy, it would be like spending all your time before a battle making sure your knife is sharp when your opponent has a tank.
    • clayhacks 10mo ago
      You are certainly dumber than them if you think they are AGI. These models are smart and getting smarter, but they are not AGI.
    • sponnath 10mo ago
      Why do you think the models are AGI? I also like to think that Einstein would be smart enough to explain things from a common point of understanding if you did drop him 2000 years in the past (assuming he also possesses the scientific knowledge humanity accrued in that 2000 year gap). So, your analogy doesn't really make a lot of sense here. I also doubt he'd be able to prove his theories with the technology of the past but that's a different matter. If we did have AGI models, they would be able to solve our hardest problems (assuming a generous definition of AGI) even if we didn't immediately understand exactly how they got there. We already have a lot of complex systems that most people don't fully understand but can certainly verify the quality of. The whole "too smart for people to understand that they're too smart" is just a tired trope.
• oakpond 10mo ago
  > There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Slop-oriented programming
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• design2203 10mo ago
  I’m convinced much of this is all noise - people seem to be focusing on the wrong unit of analysis. Producing software and lots of it has never been a problem - coming up with the right projects and producing a vertically differentiated product to what already exists is.
  • rishabhaiover 10mo ago
    That's true. The noise is being generated by people who are directly or indirectly incentivized to talk about it. > coming up with the right projects and producing a vertically differentiated product to what already exists is. Agreed but not all engineers are involved with this aspect of the business and the concern applies to them.
• gaigalas 10mo ago
  > Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual Using tools before their manual exists is the oldest human trick, not the newest.
• xzkll 10mo ago
  Does any of you bother the fact that now you have to pay money in order to do your job? I mean AI model subscriptions. Somehow it feels wrong for me to pay for tools that are trying to replace me.
  • mptest 10mo ago
    paying to train* and fund the research for the tools to replace us
  • threetonesun 10mo ago
    Between subscription software and subscription AI and the rising prices of computer hardware, the idea of a "personal computer" is quickly dying.
    • Aldipower 10mo ago
      Not for me.
  • 2sk21 10mo ago
    IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.
    • abeyer 10mo ago
      Visual Studio has never been open source, though some of the underlying build tools and compilers are. Visual Studio Code is a different thing... and claims to be open source, but by intent and approach really is closer to source available.
    • aeonik 10mo ago
      Compilers and programming languages themselves used to be hideously expensive as well.
    • qingcharles 10mo ago
• alexcos 10mo ago
  "I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind."
• ldng 10mo ago
  Yeah. OR. You just ignore the bullshit until the bubble burst. Then we'll see what's left and it will not be what the majority think.
  • falcor84 10mo ago
    The "bubble" is in the financial investment, not in the technology. AI won't disappear after the bubble bursts, just like the web didn't disappear after 2000. If anything, bursting the financial bubble will most likely encourage researchers to experiment more, trying a larger range of cheaper approaches, and do more fundamental engineering rather than just scaling. AI is here to stay, and the only thing that can stop it at this stage is a Butlerian jihad.
    • ldng 10mo ago
      I maintain, the web today is not what people though it would be in 1998. The tech has it's uses, it's just not what snake oil sellers are making it to be. And talking about Butlerian jihad is borderline snake oil selling.
      • falcor84 10mo ago
        Interesting. What particular 1998 claims do you have in mind that were not (at least approximately) fulfilled?
    • design2203 10mo ago
      AI has been here long before LLM’s… also I dislike the people seemingly tying the two terms together as one.
    • wiseowise 10mo ago
      Not even Butlerian Jihad will stop the current progress at this point.
      • lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
        Resistance if futile, eh?
• leecommamichael 10mo ago
  Mind you he is in the industry, and founding a company whose success depends on this stuff.
  • overtone1000 10mo ago
    He meant to post that from his alt account 'regularcoderguy'
• wordsaboutcode 10mo ago
  i know how he feels :/
  • halfmatthalfcat 10mo ago
    Let go of your AI gods and embrace the abyss. We've survived for decades without them and will survive in spite of them.
• superze 10mo ago
  As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails. I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significant manual rewrites just to make them work. At that point, the gains are questionable. My biggest success is having the model take over the first Design in my app and I take it from there, but those hundred lines if not thousand lines of code it generates are so Messi, it's insanely painful to refactor the mess afterwards
  • christophilus 10mo ago
    I’ve had decent results from it. What programming language are you using?
  • falcor84 10mo ago
    Why would you spend $200 a day on Opus if you can pay that for a month via the highest tier Claude Max subscription? Are you using the API in some special way?
    • jefffoster 10mo ago
      At a guess an Enterprise API account. Pay per token but no limits. It’s very easy to spend $100s per dev per day.
      • simonw 10mo ago
        The $200/month plan doesn't have limits either - they have an overage fee you can pay now in Claude Code so once you've expended your rate limited token allowance you can keep on working and pay for the extra tokens out of an additional cash reserve you've set up.
        • merlincorey 10mo ago
          > The $200/month plan doesn't have limits either... once you've expended your rate limited token allowance... pay for the extra tokens out of an additional cash reserve you've set up You're absolutely right! Limited token allowance for $200/month is actually unlimited tokens when paying for extra from a cash reserve which is also unlimited, of course.
• thomasfromcdnjs 10mo ago
  I have been telling everybody I know over the Christmas break that I have been coding from around 10-36 years of age, as a career and always in my spare time as a hobby. I have a lacklustre computer science knowledge and never worked at the scale of FANG etc but am still rather confident in my understanding of code and the tech scene in general. I've been telling people I haven't "coded" for almost 6 months now, I only interface with agentic setups and only open my IDE to make copy and config changes. I understand we are all in different camps for a multitude of reasons; - The jouissance of rote coding and abstraction - The tree of knowledge specifically in programming, and which branches and nodes we each currently sit at in our understanding - Technical paradigms that humans may have argued about have now shifted to obvious answers for agentic harnesses (think something like TDD, I for one barely used that as a style because I've mostly worked in startups building apps and found the cost of my labour not worth it, but agentic harnesse loops absolutely excel at it) - The geography and size of the markets we work in - The complexity of the subject matter / domain expertise - The cost prohibitive nature of token based programming (not everyone can afford it, and the big fish seemingly have quite the advantage going fourth) - Agentic coding has proven it can build UI's very easily, and depending on experience, it can build a very very many things easily. it excels in having feedback loops such as linting or simple javascript errors, which are observability problems in my opinion. Once it can do full stack observability (APM, system, network), it's ability to reason and correct problems on the fly for any complex system seems overly easy from my purvue. - At the human nature level, some individuals prefer to think in 0's and 1's, some in words, some inbetween, and so on, what type of communication do agentic setups prefer? With some of that above intuition that is easily up for debate, I've decided to lean 100% into agentic coding, I think it will be absolutely everywhere and obviously with humans in the loop but I don't think humans will need to review the pull requests. I am personally treating it as an existential threat to my career after having seen enough of what it's capable of. (with some imagination and a bit of a gambling spirit, as us mere mortals surely can't predict the future) With my gambit, I'm not choosing to exit the tech scene and instead optimistically investing my mental prowess into figuring out where "humans in the loop" will be positioned. Currently I'm looking into CI level tooling, the known being code quality, and all the various forms of software testing paradigms. The emerging evals in my mind will keep evolving and beyond testing our ideas of model intelligence and chat bot responses will do a lot more. --- A more practical rant: If you are building a recommendation engine for A and B, the engine could have X amount of modules that return a score which when all combined make up the final decision between A and B. Forgive me but let's just use dating as an example. A product manager would say we need a new module to calculate relevance between A and B based off their food preferences. An agentic harness can easily code that module and create the tests for it. The product manager could ask an LLM to make a list of 1000 reasons why two people might be suitable for dating. The agent could easily go away and code and test all those modules and probably maintain technical consistency but drift from the companies philosophical business model. I am looking into building "semantic linting" for codebases, how can the agent maintain the code so it aligns with the company's business model. And if for whatever reason those 1000 modules need to be refactored, how can the agent maintain the code so it aligns with the company's business model. Essentially trying to make a feedback loop between the companies needs and the code itself. To stop the agent and the business from drifting in either directions, and allowing for automatic feedback loops for the agent to fix them. In short, I think there will be new tools invented that us human's will be mastering as to Karpathy's point.
• cherry_tree 10mo ago
  Behind who? Is there someone already mastering “agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering” ? And do they have a blog?
  • lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
    > Behind who[m]? Why, the other rats in front of you in the race, of course! As the pithy, if cheese expression goes, read not the times; read the eternities. People who spend so much time frantically chasing superficial ephemera like this are people without any sense of life's purpose. They're cogs in some hellish consumerist machine.
• alphazard 10mo ago
  The thing that always trips me up is the lack of isolation/sandboxing that all of the AI programming tools provide. I want to orchestrate a workforce of agents, but they can't be trusted not to run amok. Does anyone have a better way to do this other than spinning up a cloud VM to run goose or claude or whatever poorly isolated agent tool?
  • ashishb 10mo ago
    I run them inside a sandbox https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox
  • dnw 10mo ago
    I have seen Claude disable its sandbox. Here is the most recent example from a couple of weeks ago while debugging Rust: "The panic is due to sandbox restrictions, not code errors. Let me try again with the sandbox disabled:" I have since added a sandbox around my ~/dev/ folder using sandbox-exec in macOS. It is a pain to configure properly but at least I know where sandbox is controlled.
    • _23sd 10mo ago
      That refers to the sandbox "escape hatch" [1], running a command without a sandbox is a separate approval so you get another prompt even if that command has been pre-approved. Their system prompt [2] is too vague about what kinds of failures the sandbox can cause, in my experience the agent always jumps straight to disabling the sandbox if a command fails. Probably best to disable the escape hatch and deal with failures manually. [1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sandboxing#configure-sandboxing https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sandboxing#configure-sandbox... [2] https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts/blob/main/system-prompts/tool-description-bash-sandbox-note.md https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts/blo...
  • ciconia 10mo ago
    If they cannot be trusted, why would you use them in the first place?
• rambojohnson 10mo ago
  What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and harddrives, and responded by wrapping it in managers, sub-agents, memories, tools, permissions, workflows, and orchestration layers so we don’t have to look directly at the fact that it still doesn’t understand anything. Now we’re expected to maintain a mental model not just of our system, but of a swarm of half-reliable interns talking to each other in a language that isn’t executable, reproducible, or stable. Work now feels duller than dishwater, enough to have forced me to career pivot for 2026.
  • jsk2600 10mo ago
    What are you pivoting to?
    • coldpie 10mo ago
      I'm also interested in hearing this. For me, I'm planning to ride out this industry for another couple years building cash until I can't stand it, then pivot to driving a city bus.
      • layer8 10mo ago
        > then pivot to driving a city bus. You seem to be counting on Waymo not obsoleting that occupation. ;)
      • baq 10mo ago
        Gardening and plumbing. Driving buses will be solved.
        • Buttons840 10mo ago
          Plumbing seems like a relatively popular AI-proof pivot. If AI really does start taking jobs en masse, then plumbers are going to be plentiful and cheap. What we really need is a lot more housing. So construction work is a safer pivot. But, construction work is difficult and dangerous and not something everyone can do. Also, society will collapse (apparently) if we ever make housing affordable, so maybe the powers-that-be wont allow an increase in construction work, even if there are plenty of construction workers. Who knows... interesting times.
• 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  I love that Agile and Scrum is still unmentioned. Can we stick a fork in it yet?
  • zephen 10mo ago
    No, no, no. We need to have a scrum with 3 agents each from the top 4 AI vendors, with each agent adhering to instructions given by a different programmer. It's kind of like Robot Wars, except the damage is less physical and more costly.
  • layer8 10mo ago
    Don’t you do retrospectives with your coding agents?
• lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
  If you want to chase the mob off the cliff, go ahead. Insanity and stupidity aren't sound life strategies, though. They're a sign you have lost the plot.
• gghffguhvc 10mo ago
  My company takes between Christmas and New Years off. I took a week before that off too. I have not used AI in that time. The slower pace of life is amazing. But when I get back to coding it will be back to running at 180%. It’s the new norm. However I’ve decided to take longer “no computer” breaks in my day. I have to adapt but I need to defend my “take it slow” times and find some analogue hobbies. The shift is real and you can’t wind it back.
  • sshine 10mo ago
    I’ve been taking my son for stroller walks more often over Christmas. I bring a headset for listening to music, podcasts, audiobooks, tech talks. “Be effective.” But I end up just walking and thinking, realising this is “free time”. It sounds ridiculous and easy to say spending time walking and thinking will improve your decisions and priorities that no productivity hack will. I only actually did slow down for a while because I had to for the well-being of my family. Sure feels important to not always be on top of everyone else’s business.
• ciconia 10mo ago
  I for one am not using AI, will not touch that steaming pile of manure with a 10 yard stick, and I couldn't care less about the so called magnitude 9 earthquake. When this bubble finally bursts into nothingness, I'll be still here practicing my craft and providing real value for my clients.
  • llmslave2 10mo ago
    I'm using it less and less now, since the sheen has worn off and I've been able to more accurately judge its capabilities. It's like an intern at everything it does and unfortunately I'm expected to produce better code than that.
    • tehlike 10mo ago
      When was the last time you used it?
      • llmslave2 10mo ago
        An agent like Claude code? Maybe a few weeks ago. I use ai autocomplete and ask Claude to explain basic stuff outside my wheelhouse, generate throwaway bash scripts, etc. And I have Claude review code I'm unsure of / rubber ducky debugging, but that's about it.
    • Capricorn2481 10mo ago
      I'm very confused, are you or are you not an LLM run account? A couple weeks ago, under a freshly made account "llmslave", you said it's already replacing devs and the field is cooked, and anyone who doesn't see that lacks the skills to adopt AI [1] I pointed out that given your name and low quality comments, you were likely an LLM run account. As SOON as I made that comment, you abandoned the account and have now made a duplicate llmslave2 account, with a different opinion Are you doing an experiment or something? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291504#46292968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291504#46292968
      • 10mo ago
• Aldipower 10mo ago
  I am a software developer and mainly a programmer for decades now. I love programming. I love to be "once" with the computer. I will never give this joy up. If I need to sell shoes at daytime, I will program real computer programs in the evenings. If it won't be possible with modern machinery anymore, I will take my Commodore 64. I am a free man. Edit: Corrected since/for. :-)
  • NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
    (for decades) ('since' takes time_point - 'for' takes time_duration)
  • computersuck 10mo ago
    you mean "one" not "once" right?
    • PessimalDecimal 10mo ago
      Just once. Just for a night.
    • baobun 10mo ago
      If you have never experienced becoming once, try DMT or a large amount of acid on a quiet day.
• halfmatthalfcat 10mo ago
  Wow - can we coin "Slopbrain" for people who are so far gone into AI eventualism that they can no longer function? Liked "cooked" but "slopped" or something. Good grief lol. Talk about getting lost in the sauce...
  • llmslave2 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • Neywiny 10mo ago
      This is what I keep hearing. "You just need something more agentic" "if you had the context length you could've fixed that" etc etc. yeah sure. I'll believe it when I see it. For me it's parsing 3000 page manuals for relevant data. I can do it fairly competently from experience, but I see a lot of people not familiar with them struggle to extract the info they need, and AIs just cannot hold all that context in my experience
  • dvrp 10mo ago
    Twitter folks call this LLM or AI Psychosis.
  • roadside_picnic 10mo ago
    WSJ has been writing increasingly about "AI Psychosis" (here's their most recent piece [0]). I'm increasingly seeing that this is the real threat of AI. I've personally known people who have started to strain relationships with friends and family because they sincerely believe they are evolving into something new. While not as dramatic, the normalization of the use of "AI as therapist" is equally concerning. I know tons of people that rely on LLMs to guide them in difficult family decisions, career decisions, etc on an almost daily basis. If I'm honest, I myself have had times where I've leaned into this too much. I've also had times where AI starts telling me how clever I am, but thankfully a lifetime of low self worth signals warning flags in my brain when I hear this stuff! For most people, there is real temptation to buy into the praise. Seeing Karpathy claim he can't keep up was shocking. It also immediately raises the question to anyone with a clear head: "Wait, if even Karpathy cannot use these tools effectively... just what is so useful about AI?" Isn't the entire point of AI that I can merely describe my problem and have a solution in a fraction of the time. The fact that so many true believers in AI seem to forever be just a few more tricks away from really unleashing this power, starts to make it feel very much like magical thinking on a huge scale. The real danger of AI is that we're entering into an era of mass hallucination across multiple fields and areas of human activity. 0. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-chatbot-psychosis-link-1abf9d57 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-chatbot-psychosis-link-1abf9d...
• reconnecting 10mo ago
  > OpenAI's sales and marketing expenses increased to _$2 billion_ in the first half of 2025. Looks like AI companies spend enough on marketing budgets to create the illusion that AI makes development better. Let's wait one more year, and perhaps everyone who didn't fall victim to these "slimming pills” for developers' brains will be glad about the choice they made.
  • 9dev 10mo ago
    Well. I was a sceptic for a long time, but a friend recently convinced me to try Claude Code and showed me around. I revived an open source project I regularly get back to, code for a bit, have to wrestle with toil and dependency updates, and loose the joy before I really get a lot done, so I stop again. With Claude, all it took to fix all of that drudge was a single sentence. In the last two weeks, I implemented several big features, fixed long standing issues and did migrations to new major versions of library dependencies that I wouldn’t have tackled at all on my own—I do this for fun after all, and updating Zod isn’t fun. Claude just does it for me, while I focus on high-level feature descriptions. I’m still validating and tweaking my workflow, but if I can keep up that pace and transfer it to other projects, I just got several times more effective.
    • reconnecting 10mo ago
      This sounds to me like a lack of resource management, as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring. As a creator of an open-source platform myself, I find trusting a semi-random word generator in front of users unreliable. Moreover, I believe it creates a bad habit. I've seen developers forget how to read documentation and instead trust AI, and of course, as a result AI makes mistakes that are hard to debug or provokes security issues that are easy to overlook. I know this sounds like a luddite talking, but I'm still not convinced that AI in its current state can be reliable in any way. However, because of engineers like you, AI is learning to make better choices, and that might change in the future.
      • 9dev 10mo ago
• globular-toast 10mo ago
  I don't usually post something like this, but this is so fucking stupid. I'm prepared to stand by that. Let's see in a few years if I'm right. "AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent. That's it. It's like the ultimate "algorithm" or addiction machine. It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical.
  • leecommamichael 10mo ago
    It’s trained to (lossy) compress large amounts of data. The system prompts have leaked and it’s just instructed to be helpful, right? I don’t entirely disagree with your sentiment, though. It’s brute force.
  • viraptor 10mo ago
    This could apply if we looked at questions in vacuum - someone had a conversation and was judging the models based on that. But some of us just use it for work and get good results daily. "Intelligent" is irrelevant; it's "useful". It doesn't matter what feelings I have about it if it saves me 2h of typing from time to time.
    • chasd00 10mo ago
      To me, as just another kinda old (I’m 49) swe, the biggest benefit of using an LLM tool is it saves a shit ton of typing. I know what I want and I know when it’s right, just saving me from typing it all out is worth $20 bucks a month.
  • jennyholzer3 10mo ago
    The system prompt may vary but: "It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical." is the dark pattern underlying the entire LLM hype cycle IMO.
  • yacthing 10mo ago
    '"AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent.' What's the difference? I try to make people think I'm intelligent all the time.
• sureglymop 10mo ago
  > strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering Sounds fever dreamish. Thank you sincerely (not) for creating it!
• dnw 10mo ago
  I have been using Copilot, Cursor, then CC for a little more than a year now. I have written code with teams using these tools and I am writing mostly for myself now. My observations have been the following: 1) These tools obviously improved significantly over the past 12 months. They can churn out code that makes sense in the context of the codebase, meaning there is more grounding to the codebase they are working on as opposed to codebases they have been trained on. 2) On the surface they are pretty good at solving known problems. You are not going to make them write well-optimized renderer or an RL algorithm but they can write run-of-the-mill business logic better _and_ faster than I can-- if you optimize for both speed of production and quality. 3) Out of the box, their personality is to just solve the problem in front of them as quickly as possible and move on. This leads them to make suboptimal decisions (e.g. solving a deadlock by sleeping for 2 seconds, CC Opus 4.5 just last night). This personality can be altered with appropriate guidance. For example, a shortcut I use is to append "idiomatic" to my request-- "come up with an idiomatic solution" or "is that the most idiomatic solution we can think of." Similarly when writing tests or reviewing tests I use "intent of the function under test" which makes the model output better solution or code. 4) These models, esp. Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2, are remarkable bug hunters. I can point at a symptom and they come away with the bug. I then ask them to explain me why the bug happens and I follow the code to see if it's true. I have not come across a bad bug, yet. They can find deadlocks and starvations, you then have to guide them to a good fix (see #3). 5) Code quality is not sufficient to create product quality, but it is often necessary to sustain it. Sustainability window is shorter nowadays. Therefore, more than ever, quality of the code matters. I can see Claude Code slowly degrading in quality every single day--and I use it every single day for many hours. As much as it pains me to say this, compared to Opencode, Amp, and Toad I can feel the "slop" in Claude Code. I would love to study the codebases of these tools overtime to measure their quality--I know it's possible for all but Claude Code. 6) I used to worry I don't have a good mental model of the software I build. Much like journaling, I think there is something to be said about the process of writing/making actually gives you a very precise mental model. However, I have been trying to let that go and use the model as a tool to query and develop the mental model post facto. It's not the same but I think it is going to be the new norm. We need tooling in this space. 7) Despite your own experiences with these tools it is imperative that they be in your toolbox. If you have abstained from them thus far, perhaps best way to get them incorporated is by starting to use them for attending to your toil. 8) You can still handcraft code. There is so much fun, beauty and pleasure it in to deny doing it. Don't expect this to be your job. This is your passion.
• brandonmenc 10mo ago
  I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers. Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks. Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. The only thing you'll sacrifice is an AI funding lottery ticket.
  • yoyohello13 10mo ago
    Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later. Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.
    • IshKebab 10mo ago
      Yeah that's my view too. It's definitely fine to wait a couple of years (at least), and see what emerged as most effective and then just learn that, instead of dumping a ton of time now into keeping up with the hamster wheel. Unless you're in web dev because it seems like that's one of the few domains where AI actually works pretty well today.
      • antupis 10mo ago
        Or if you like learning new stuff. Personally that has been best part of being programmer.
        • IshKebab 10mo ago
          I like learning new stuff, but not if it's going to be completely obsolete in 6 months.
        • yoyohello13 10mo ago
          I love learning new stuff, but for whatever reason the AI stuff doesn’t interest me. So I learn other stuff, only so much time in the day.
• bgwalter 10mo ago
  This is from the man who has no finished open source projects and who recommended camera-only FSD to Tesla, which he also did not finish. The actually productive programmers, who wrote the stack that powers the economy before and after 2023 need not listen to these cheap commercials.
  • threeducks 10mo ago
    > This is from the man who has no finished open source projects To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean? The only projects that I can truly call "finished" are those that I have laid to rest because they have been superseded by newer technologies, not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do.
    • bdangubic 10mo ago
      > To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean? https://github.com/left-pad https://github.com/left-pad
    • bdangubic 10mo ago
      > not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do. this is because SWEs love bloat and any good idea eventually needs to balloon into some ever-growing monstrosity :)
    • bgwalter 10mo ago
      Then replace "finished" with "production software".
  • CamperBob2 10mo ago
    who recommended camera-only FSD to Tesla That's a bummer if true. Is there a reliable source that lays that decision at Karpathy's feet?
    • bgwalter 10mo ago
• paxys 10mo ago
  I have never felt this much ahead as a programmer. So many developers I see, including at my workplace, are blindly prompting models hoping to solve their problem and failing every step of the way. The people who truly understand what is happening are still in the ruling class, and their skills are not going to be irrelevant anytime soon.
  • misiti3780 10mo ago
    100% - I cant believe there are smart people in this conversation that dont see this. If you dont understand AWS you can't vibe code a terraform codebase that creates a complex infrastructure .. etc
  • georgeburdell 10mo ago
    Not sure what you mean by blindly prompting models
  • sod22 10mo ago
    Yep when all this blows over, those who were least exposed to LLMs will be the winners. Patience is important and not to be drowned out by the noise.
• flumpcakes 10mo ago
  > There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and ... This sounds unbearable. It doesn't sound like software development, it sounds like spending a thousand hours tinkering with your vim config. It reminds me of the insane patchwork of sprawl you often get in DevOps - but now brought to your local machine. I honestly don't see the upside, or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better.
  • wakeywakeywakey 10mo ago
    > ... or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better. It doesn't. The only people I've seen claim such speedups are either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme.
    • johnfn 10mo ago
      I am a professional engineer with around 10 years of experience and I use AI to work about 5x faster on a site I personally maintain (~100 DAU, so not huge, but also not nothing). I don’t work in AI so I get no financial benefit by “reinforcing this meme”.
      • leshow 10mo ago
        Oh, well if it can generate some simple code for your personal website, surely it can also be the "next level of abstraction" for the entirety of software engineering.
        • johnfn 10mo ago
          Well, I don’t really think it’s “simple”. The code uses React, nodejs, realtime events pushed via SSE, infra pushed via Terraform, postgres, blob store on S3, emails send with SES… sure, it’s not the next Google, but it’s a bit above, like, a personal blog. And in any case, you are moving goalposts. OP said he had never seen anyone serious claim that they got productivity gains from AI. When I claim that, you say “well it’s not the next level of abstraction for all SWE”. Obviously - I never claimed that?
• xg15 10mo ago
  And there it is again, the "powerful alien tool" that was just "handed to us". No decades of research and massive allocation of resources over the last few years as well as very intentional decision making by tech leadership to develop this specific technology. Nope, it just mysteriously dropped from the sky one day.
  • Kuinox 10mo ago
    Do you know who is the author ?
    • xg15 10mo ago
      Yes, and I'm disappointed he seems to have joined the AI mysticism crowd.
    • techblueberry 10mo ago
      It’s written in the title of the post “Andrew Karpathy” he’s fairly well known in AI circles, he was head of autopilot at Tesla, and co-founded OpenAI. If you’re curious to learn more about him, the Wikipedia page has a short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrej_Karpathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrej_Karpathy
    • jeltz 10mo ago
      It is even worse coming from him.
  • layer8 10mo ago
    The point is that all that research mostly doesn’t help in mastering the tool. Unlike traditional tools, it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It’s like an alien tool just handed to us in exactly that sense.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• LogicFailsMe 10mo ago
  Countdown to his youtube course explaining it all for beginners commences...
  • CamperBob2 10mo ago
    His "youtube course" already exists, and it's absolutely transformational. He's working on a more formal educational framework/service of some kind, which will presumably not be free, but what he's already posted is some of the most effective CS pedagogy I've ever encountered (and personally benefited from.)
    • LogicFailsMe 10mo ago
      If he publishes something in this space he can just TAKE MY MONEY!
• deleted 10mo ago
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• ekropotin 10mo ago
  If Karpathy feels behind, imaging how we, regular folks feel
  • furyofantares 10mo ago
    I've worked really hard over the last year at working out how to use these things, and it has more than paid off. But I think if I had started learning today instead of a year ago, I'd get up to speed in more like 6 months instead of a year. A lot of stuff I learned a year ago is not really necessary anymore, but furthermore, there's just a lot more information out there about how to use these from people who have been learning it on their own. I just don't think people who have ignored it up until now are really that far behind.
    • d675 9mo ago
      how has it paid off for you?
• deleted 10mo ago
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• tehjoker 10mo ago
  The person saying this has a financial interest in saying so.
• bmitch3020 10mo ago
  https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2004607146781278521 https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2004607146781278521
• davesque 10mo ago
  Honestly surprised at this take by him. For one, feels like exaggeration. For two, are these tools really that hard to use?
  • krackers 10mo ago
    I'm surprised too, considering that in https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977758204139331904 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977758204139331904 he mentioned regarding his NanoChat repo >Good question, it's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete). I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution. And a lot of the tooling he mentioned in OP seems like self-imposed unnecessarily complexity/churn. For the longest time you could say the same about frontend, that you're so behind if you're not adopting {tailwind, react, nodejs, angular, svelte, vue}. At the end of the day, for the things that an LLM does well, you can achieve roughly the same quality of results by "manually" pasting in relevant code context and asking your question. In cases where this doesn't work, I'm not convinced that wrapping it in an agentic harness will give you that much better results. Most bespoke agent harnesses are obsoleted by the time of the next model release anyway, the two paradigms that seem to reliably work are "manual" LLM invocation and LLM with access to CLI.
  • moduspol 10mo ago
    I think the evidence is that even amongst evangelists, they all seem to have different sets of key techniques that change every few months.
  • encyclopedism 10mo ago
    > are these tools really that hard to use? Exactly! If people have 'never felt this far behind' and the LLM's are that good. Ask the LLM to teach you. Like so many articles on 'prompt engineers' this (never felt this behind) take too is laughable. Programmers having learnt how to program (writing algorithms, understanding data structures, reading source code and API docs) are now completely incapable of using a text box to input prompts? Nor can they learn how to quickly enough! And it's somehow more difficult than what they have routinely been doing? LOL
• robotresearcher 10mo ago
  Andrej is 39 years old, according to Wikipedia. Douglas Adams on age and relating to technology: "1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things." From 'The Salmon of Doubt' (2002)
  • aoeusnth1 10mo ago
    Is that really what he's saying here? He's not against the technology, I think he's just feeling like there's a lot of potential that he's not quite grasping yet.
    • BearOso 10mo ago
      This guy is one of the top names in AI. This is pure propaganda written to instill "fear of missing out" and encouraging people to buy into his platform, lest they become "obsolete."
      • PaulHoule 10mo ago
        It’s a little shocking to me that this sentiment hasn’t floated higher in the discussion. Regardless of how he feels, this is the way he wants you to feel. Big picture it’s about emotional intelligence and if you are losing your shit you’re going to flail around. I think you should pick up some near-frontier tools and use them to improve your usual process, always keeping your feet on the ground. “Vibe coding” was always about getting you and keeping you over your head. Resist it!
        • gsf_emergency_6 10mo ago
          vive vibe live or it doesnt matter? Maybe Devs should handle copilots as Swiss prana-bindu their shots (Therefore gun laws at a longer timescale) Of course we have to ask aeb if he has ever run into someone who trips (only, of course) while hunting ;) have you?
• nen-nomad 10mo ago
  Claude Code didn’t make me faster. It changed the calendar. What used to take me months now takes weeks. Work didn't vanished, the friction did. Two years ago I was a human USB cable: copy, paste, pray. IDE <-> chat window, piece by piece. Now the loop is tighter. The distance is shorter. There’s still hand-holding. Still judgment. Still cleanup. But the shift is real. We’ve come a long way. And we’re not done.
  • JDye 10mo ago
    Can't even write a comment without an LLM...
    • llmslave2 10mo ago
      It's satire, the models are more subtle in their mannerisms.
    • nen-nomad 10mo ago
      Huh? Good eyes!! I forgot an /s at the end.
• PaulHoule 10mo ago
  I don't have a lot of patience for this sort of take because my north star is project management and in my normal moving forward model I work in milestones where I stack up my tools and get something specific done and screwing around with tools is heavily timeboxed. If A.I. tools help me make progress great, if they don't, I will fall back to manual methods, get that phase of work done or (rarely) give up on the subproject. After I get some distance from it I can consolidate my learnings, try a different approach. It's death though to be excessively reading tweets and blogs about this stuff, this will have you exhausted before you even try a real project and comparing yourself to other people's claims which are sometimes lies, often delusional, ungrounded and almost always self-serving. In sofar someone is getting things done with any consistency they are practicing basic PM, treating feelings of exhaustion, ungroundedness and especially going in circles as a sign to regroup, slow down and focus on the end you have in mind. If the point really is to research tools than what you do is break down that work into attainable chunks, the way you break down any other kind of work.
• presentation 10mo ago
  Anything sufficiently useful will be productized and packaged up by somebody out there so that the masses can use it, the rest will be niche and only relevant for the most hardcore enthusiasts, so I’m not so worried.
• albert_e 10mo ago
  I can attest to one thing that has grown 10x for sure -- FOMO.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• BhavdeepSethi 10mo ago
  Most of the folks that are talking about this are the ones who work independently and work on greenfield projects (especially tooling related). The cost of making a mistake there is so low. I've used it similarly and it's absolutely amazing. Though I still use a mix of agents and code myself in my regular 9-5 job. I've yet to see examples of folks using this in a team of 4+ folks working together in a production env with users, and just using AI for their regular development. Claude code creator only using claude code doesn't count. That's more like dog-fooding.
  • William_BB 10mo ago
    Yeah. It's pretty telling to look at profiles of people who replied to his tweet.
  • yeasku 10mo ago
    I have seen it. And it is a mess. Is not only that the.code quality is bad, to be fair in most projects is. The biggest problem is every single component of the stack uses different conventions and names for everything. When nobody looks at the code naming things becomes harder until everything is <generic name>
• nineteen999 10mo ago
  I'm actually having more fun than I've had in years with this, since I've mainly focussed on my personal projects while getting the hang of what's achievable. And it turns out to be quite a lot if you're a creative thinker. At first it kind of depressed me, but now I realised that actually writing code is only part of my day job, the rest is integrating infrastructure and managing people and enabling them to do their job as well, and if I can do the coding/integration part faster and give them better tools more quickly, that's a huge win. This means I can spend more time at the beach and on my physical and mental well being as well. I was stubborn and skeptical a year ago, but now I'm just really enjoying the process of learning new things.
• 6thbit 10mo ago
  Sounds to me like Karapathy is in the "valley of despair" of the Dunning-Kruger effect of AI tools. He knows the tools, he's efficient with them and yet he just now understands how much he's unable to harness at this point that makes him feel left behind. Looking forward to see what comes out of him climbing that slope.
• clejack 10mo ago
  For the folks who have more positive outlooks how often do you change your code after it's been generated? I haven't used agents much for coding, but I noticed that when I do have something created with the slightest complexity, it's never perfect and I have to go back and change it. This is mostly fine, but when large chunks of code are created, I don't have much context for editing things manually. It's like waking up in a new house that you've never seen before. Sure I recognize the type of rooms, the furniture, the outlets, appliances, plumbing, and so on when I see them; but my sense of orientation is strained. This is my main issue at the moment.
  • fragsworth 10mo ago
    > For the folks who have more positive outlooks how often do you change your code after it's been generated? Every time, unless my initial request was perfectly outlined in unambiguous pseudocode. It's just too easy to write ambiguous requests. Unambiguous but human-readable pseudocode is what I strive for now, though I will often ask AI to help edit the pseudocode to remove ambiguities prior to generating code.
• sora2video 10mo ago
  [dead]
• timcobb 10mo ago
  whaaaat and this is the guy who coined "vibe-coding"? I am honestly pretty shocked reading this. I must be a fool or an idiot or both because I, for one, feel like suddenly I went from being a 1x developer to a 10x developer. Maybe 10x folks like Karpathy have it the opposite way?
• PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
  He should join the Ardour project. Or go to work for Ableton or Bitwig or Presonus or Digidesign or MOTU or any other DAW manufacturer. Or any video or image editing application. Or get involved with more or less any complex, "creative" native desktop application. All of the stuff he feels he is falling behind on? Almost completely irrelevant in our domain.
  • senordevnyc 10mo ago
    That’s interesting. I wonder if the models will improve on these kinds of tiny niches?
  • inimino 10mo ago
    Not for long.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
      I'll bet the next 8 years of my career on it.
• finolex1 10mo ago
  Is there anything substantial in his list ("agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations") that Claude Code or Cursor don't already incorporate? I empathize with his sense that if we could just provide the right context and development harness to an AI model, we could be *that* much more productive, but it might just be misplaced hope. Claude Code and Cursor are probably not that far from the current frontier for LLM development environments.
• justatdotin 10mo ago
  I think it's mistaken to think in terms of 'falling behind' or 'catching up' I've seen that these tools have different uses for different devs. I know on my current team, each of us devs works very differently to one another, and we make significant allowances to accommodate for one another's different styles. Certain tasks always go to certain devs; one dev is like a steel trap, another is the chaos explorer, another's a beginner, another has great big-picture perspective, etc. (not sure why but there's even space for myself ;) In the same way, different devs use these powerful tools in very different ways. So don't imagine you're falling behind, because the only useful benchmark is yourself. And don't imagine you can wait for consensus: you'll still need to identify your personal relationship to the tools. Most of all, don't be discouraged. Even if you never embrace these tools, there will remain space for your skills and your style of approaching our shared work. Give it another 10 years and I'm sure this will all become clearer...
  • ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
    I’ve become comfortable with using LLMs as “trusted advisors.” I am not [yet] ready to just let an agent write a whole app or server for me, but I am increasingly letting them write a whole function for me. They are also great “bug finders.” I can just feed some code, describe the symptoms, and ask for an observation. I often get great suggestions, including things like finding typos and copy/pasta problems. I find that just this limited application has significantly increased my development velocity, and, I believe, the quality of my work.
    • wmoxam 10mo ago
      IMO LLMs make for a great rubber duck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
• deadbabe 10mo ago
  I think this is mostly a frontend sentiment. In the backend, we're mostly just pushing data around from one place to another. Not much changes, there's only a few ways to really do that. Your data structures change, but ultimately the work is the same. You don't even really need an LLM at all, or super complex frameworks and ORMs, etc.
  • fallat 10mo ago
    Sounds like you'd use an LLM exactly for that. We don't need you.
    • deadbabe 10mo ago
      Why pay for LLM when you can just do it easily for free? The end goal is to get rid of all frontends anyway, just have apps that you interact with through LLM prompts. A more advanced command line.
• zmmmmm 10mo ago
  Definitely don't hang out on Hacker News then. It's absolutely the worst place for imposter syndrome or people with any kind of skill inferiority anxiety or confidence issue. Half the reason I read HN is because the anxiety it induces is moderately constructive in motivating me to ensure I keep learning and stay up to date. But I definitely come away every day with a distinct impression I'm below baseline in skill and knowledge for my field, even though within my own circles I'm considered expert by all my peers.
  • kubb 10mo ago
    Really? It’s the opposite for me. The number of people being confident about things they have no clue about just makes me more arrogant.
    • zmmmmm 10mo ago
      I guess I get both effects. Every now and then there is a post about something I'm actually expert in and the standard of the comments sometimes shocks me. It's hard to connect the two experiences.
• Animats 10mo ago
  I feel that way, too. "Vibe programming" is less than a year old. What is programming going to look like in a few years?
• hamstergene 10mo ago
  I feel like many people in the comments aren't aware that Karpathy is an ML scientist for whom programming is a complementary skill, not a profession. The only reason he came up with "vibe coding" is because maximum complexity of his hobby projects made it seem believable. Maybe take his opinions about fate of programming with a grain of salt. He is brilliant no doubt, but not in that field.
  • ActionHank 10mo ago
    This is such a great way to frame all his comments.
  • ex-aws-dude 10mo ago
    Exactly, I would put more weight on this if it were coming from someone who actually works as a regular programmer in the industry
  • viccis 10mo ago
    Maybe that's true, but I will say that one of the reasons I recommend his Python ML videos to people is not just the ML content but also his Python is good and idiomatic. So I would not agree; I think his programming is a well practiced skill. FWIW though I think his predicted worldview will render it very difficult to acquire this skill, as people grow reliant on gen AI for programming rudiments.
    • 59nadir 10mo ago
      As far as "programming skill" goes, writing "good and idiomatic" Python is pretty bottom of the barrel. I don't think the GP is all that off, most people who are famous for some programming-adjacent skill (or even programming) aren't good at programming.
      • viccis 9mo ago
        >As far as "programming skill" goes, writing "good and idiomatic" Python is pretty bottom of the barrel. Complete bullshit. Beginning programmers writing good and idiomatic Python isn't "bottom of the barrel", or did you think I was recommending his videos to 20 year seasoned pros to improve their coding? Some people on this site need to check their arrogance and humble themselves a bit before opening their mouths.
• _pdp_ 10mo ago
  Over 20 years professional experience here. LLM tools feel great. A single person can now accomplish what used to require many teams.
  • bopbopbop7 10mo ago
    Over 30 years code artisan here. AI has made me 100x more productive. No, I will not provide proof. Sam Altman is the best.
  • llmslave2 10mo ago
    Over 80 years professional experience here. LLM tools feel great. A single person can now do the work of ten Google and Meta's in a single afternoon.
• anonzzzies 10mo ago
  I wish I got out more. I used to go a lot to meetups and sit next to people 'closer to the hype' showing me the cutting edge stuff; often it was just a 'meh' experience vs the 'this is like seeing god' type of comments on hn/reddit and sometimes it is an eye opener (rarely). The 'meh' is usually when people claim it is 10000x more productive: I sit next to them and seeing them struggle to get even the basics done; after that, they struggle with the same issues I do when I try it while they are the 'experts' and I learn that people call things productive when they are kept 'busy' not actually producing results faster. Anyway: > agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, give me extreme Emacs 'setup' feelings: I was at a meetup in hk recently where there was someone advocating this and it was just depressing; spending hours on stuff that changes daily while just my vanilla claude code with playwright mcp runs circles around it, even after it has been set up. It is just not better at all and until someone can show that it is actually an improvement WITH the caveat that when it is an improvement on t(1), it doesn't need a complete overhaul at t(n) where n is a few days or weeks just because the hype machine says so. This measured against a vanilla CC without any added tooling except maybe playwright mcp. People just want to scam themselves in feeling useful: if the ai does the work, then you find some way of feeling busy by adding and finetuning stuff to feel useful.
• noosphr 10mo ago
  The only time I've felt this much behind was in high school when everyone was talking about how much sex they were having. AI code is the Canadian girlfriend of programming.
  • YouWhy 10mo ago
    Touché! That's a good one.
  • kqr 10mo ago
    Not being from the US, it took me a moment to realise that "she's in Canada" is a nice excuse for why nobody has met her.
  • symbogra 10mo ago
    Time to shell out the $200 my friend.
    • deleted 10mo ago
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    • noosphr 10mo ago
      You need a lot more money than $200 if your code base is more than 100,000 lines. If only more people understood what quadratic attention means in the real world.
      • karmakurtisaani 10mo ago
        Are you saying the LLM costs grow quadratically in the size of the code base? The prompts are already highly subsidized, can't wait to see what happens when they charge the actual price to the consumer.
        • deleted 10mo ago
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        • symbogra 10mo ago
• zmj 10mo ago
  Yes-ish. It's worth keeping up with the rising tide of model capabilities, but it's not worth stressing over eliciting every last drop. Many of the specific techniques that add value today will be wasted effort with smarter models in a month or two.
• kazinator 10mo ago
  Guy is a wacko.
• Gimpei 10mo ago
  I think people need to chill out on this thread. LLMs are neither pure slop nor the end of the programming profession. They are immensely useful tools, particularly for tedious tasks or for quickly getting up to speed on a new API or syntax. They’re great for catching bugs too. Every now and again I’ll give an LLM a prompt and it will knock it out of the park, but that’s exceedingly rare. Most of the time, though, it just allows me to focus on the more interesting parts of my job. In short, for now at least, it is a big productivity booster, not a career ender.
• budududuroiu 10mo ago
  Idk why people take everything that Karpathy says as canon. I find his takes post inventing the "vibe coding" term deeply unserious and vapid
  • ex-aws-dude 10mo ago
    Yeah I don’t get it, there are certain people where even just their tweets are front page headlines on HN
• kshri24 10mo ago
  > Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind This confirms AI bubble for me and it now being entirely FUD driven. "Not fall behind" should only apply to technologies where you have to put active effort to learn as it requires years to hone and master the craft. AI is supposed to remove this "active effort" part so as to get you upto speed with the latest and bridge the gap between those "who know" and those "who do not". The fact you need to say "roll up your sleeves to not fall behind" confirms we are not in that situation yet. In other words, it is the same old learning curve that everyone has to cross EXCEPT this time it is probabilistic instead of linear/exponential. It is quite literally a slightly better than coin toss situation when it comes to you learning the right way or not. For me personally, we are truly in that zone of zero active effort and total replacement when AI can hit a 100% on ALL METRICS consistently, every single time, even on fresh datasets with challenging questions NOT SEEN/TRAINED by the model. Even better if it can come up with novel discoveries to remove any doubts. Chances of achieving that with current tech is 0%.
• kusokurae 10mo ago
  This is sales propaganda that should not be endorsed by sharing or further publication.
• badgersnake 10mo ago
  If there was more substance behind the hype this might actually be true. But unless you’re in some very specific niches, it’s bollocks. You’re not doing it wrong, the tools just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. They are annoying good enough to get you to waste a load of time trying to get them to do what it looks like they should be able to do.
• optician_owl 10mo ago
  Oh. This is a pretty stereotypical character among data scientists. This character thinks software development is all about generating text, and because they know how to generate text, they're automatically considered an expert. But they know nothing about the software lifecycle. Working with them is a real pain, especially when they shift responsibility for their "software" to your engineers.
• themafia 10mo ago
  > and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. And a failure to clarify the project you're currently working on and the actual results feels decidedly like a propaganda issue. Take all the digs at my skills you want. I'd rather not be a bald faced liar.
• Uptrenda 10mo ago
  AI hype man in AI continues to hype AI. Who could have predicted this.
• kiriakosv 10mo ago
  I may be extremely ignorant here but I think Karpathy is primary and foremost a great pitcher - salesman, not only for AI in general but on his personal branding as well. He is also great at explaining AI related concepts to the masses. However his takes on software engineering show someone that hasn’t spend a significant amount of time doing production grade software engineering, and that is perfectly fine and completely normal given his background. But that also means that we should not take his software engineering opinions as gospel.
• culi 10mo ago
  Yeah the author of this tweet is > Building @EurekaLabsAI. Previously Director of AI @ Tesla, founding team @ OpenAI
• boesboes 10mo ago
  Bullshit
• endofreach 10mo ago
  i do use LLMs a lot for programming recently. i do not use „agents“ or any other new stuff. while i have always felt behind, i do not feel more behind now, not using agents, mcp etc. maybe i am too ignorant and don‘t see what i am missing. and i am still writing code and enjoying it. just the terminology of agents, vibe coding, prompt engineering etc is weirdly offputting to me.
• oulipo2 10mo ago
  "Guy who builds AI for a living is telling people to believe that AI is the single best thing invented since butter" how surprising
• arisAlexis 10mo ago
  Half of HN are in denial and other half in panic.
• netdevphoenix 10mo ago
  I used to hold Karpathy in high esteem. But the stream of posts coming from him since LLMs took over the "AI" word makes me wonder if he has lost the spark
• camillomiller 10mo ago
  Oh my God I’m so tired of this BS. No, you do not need all that to make a more than sustainable living as a programmer. This narrative is disgusting
• tired_and_awake 10mo ago
  Early adopters will early adopt. They will toil,feedback, improve, repeat. Tools will over optimize then dramatically shift based on learnings. This chaps will continue until something moderately productive and easily adoptable comes out. FOMO will strike all of us from time to time. Some of us will even try out the latest and greatest and see if it sticks. Some companies will mandate arbitrary code generation standards because "it's the basis of their success", it will polarize their talent pool. Later, it will be impossible to determine if they were (not) successful "inspite of" or "because of" such wild decisions.