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

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

#131

Post by tmaly »

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…

What does your software creation workflow look like? Do you have a design phase?

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

#132

Post by Neywiny »

llmslave2 wrote: post #84
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...

[flagged]

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

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

#133

Post by chasd00 »

zephen wrote: post #77
ciconia wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they cannot be trusted, why would you use them in the first place?

Obviously people perceive value there, but on the surface it does seem odd. "These things are more destructive than your average toddler, so you need to have a fence in place kind of like that one in Jurassic Park, except you need to make sure it absolutely positively cannot be shut off, but all this effort is worthwhile, because, kind of like civets, some of the artifacts they shit out while they are running amok ap…

It’s shocking the collective shrug I get from our security people at work. I attend pretty serious meetings about genAI implementations and when I ask about points of view around security given things as crazy as “adversarial poetry” is a real thing I just get shrugs. I get the feeling they don’t want to be the ones to say “no, don’t bring genai to our clients” but also won’t dare say “yes, our client’s data is safe with integrated genai”.

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

#134

Post by tmaly »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #63
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…

It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.

I think those that are most successful at creating maintainable code with AI are those that spend more time upfront limiting the nondeterminism aspect using design and context.

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

#135

Post by tehlike »

llmslave2 wrote: post #87
ciconia wrote: post #74

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.

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.

When was the last time you used it?

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

#136

Post by xg15 »

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.

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

#137

Post by kayo_20211030 »

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…

Could we all just agree to stop using the term "abstraction". It's meaningless and confusing. It's cover for a multitude of sins, because it really could mean anything at all. Don't lay all the blame on the c-suite; they are what they are, and have their own view. Don't moan about the latest egregious excess of some llm. If it works for you, use it; if it doesn't, don't. But, stop whinging.

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

#138

Post by anthonypasq »

llmslave2 wrote: post #68
credit_guy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

we're 10 months into agentic coding. Claude code came out in march. I dont understand how you are so unimaginative to think what this might look like in 5 years even with slow progress.

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

#139

Post by Kuinox »

xg15 wrote: post #136

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.

Do you know who is the author ?

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

#140

Post by roadside_picnic »

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...

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-1abf9d...

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