I love that Agile and Scrum is still unmentioned. Can we stick a fork in it yet?
Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
61–70 of 630 posts
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#62What 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 hard…
What are you pivoting to?
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#63What 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 hard…
It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#64As 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 significan…
Sometimes I have a similar file or related files. I copy their names and say use them as reference.
Code quality improves by 10 times if you do so. Even providing a a example from framework's getting started works great too for new project.
Yeah the pain of cleaning up small mess is great too. I had some tests failing and type failing issues, I thought I will fix it later by only using AI prompt. As the size was growing, failing Typescript issues was growing too. At some point it was 5000+ type issues and countless number of failing unit tests. Then more and more. I tried to fix with AI, since it was not possible fixing old way. Then I discarded the whole project when it was around 500k lines of code.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#65What 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 hard…
It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.
The good ones don't accept. Sadly there's just many more idiots out there trying to make a quick buck
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#66For 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.
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.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#67If 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.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#68Man, 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.
I feel exactly like Karpathy here. I have some work to do, and I know exactly what I need to do, and I'm able to explain it to AI, and the AI seems to understand me (I'm lately using Opus 4.5). I wrote down a roadmap, it should take me a few weeks of coding. It feels like with a proper workflow with AI agents, this work should be doable in one or two days. Yet, I know by now that it's not going to be nearly that fast…
I think you articulated perfectly why it's a bubble and why execs are so eager to push it everywhere. It's so alluring, it constantly feels like we're on the verge of something great. No wonder so many people have their brains fried by it.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#69The 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?
If they cannot be trusted, why would you use them in the first place?
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#70My 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.