Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 630 posts

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

#121

Post by mrkeen »

grim_io wrote: post #30
breve wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being honest about self-driving AI gets you sued by the richest guy on earth.

Honesty is not the same thing as justified dishonesty.

If you can paint him as a rational agent for lying, you can still be a rational agent and ignore his lies.

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

#122

Post by bgwalter »

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.

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

#123

Post by chasd00 »

viraptor wrote: post #101
globular-toast wrote: post #85

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.

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.

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.

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

#124

Post by SkyPuncher »

superze wrote: post #40

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 significan…

My trick is to explicitly roll play that we’re doing a spike. This gets all of the models to ignore all of the details they normally get hung up on. Once I have the basics in place, I can tell it to fix details.

It’s _always_ easier to add more code than it is to fix broken code.

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

#125

Post by dvrp »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #78

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...

Twitter folks call this LLM or AI Psychosis.

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

#126

Post by wiseowise »

falcor84 wrote: post #48
ldng wrote: post #37

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.

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…

Not even Butlerian Jihad will stop the current progress at this point.

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

#127

Post by coldpie »

jsk2600 wrote: post #62
rambojohnson wrote: post #58

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 hard…

What are you pivoting to?

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.

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

#128

Post by billywhizz »

TeodorDyakov wrote: post #10
dude250711 wrote: post #9

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.

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.

> We are just dumber than them.

you are, for sure.

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

#129

Post by paxys »

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.

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

#130

Post by flumpcakes »

> 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.

Post reply on HN