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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”

#151

Post by johnfn »

wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141
flumpcakes wrote: post #130

> 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…

> ... 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.

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”.

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

#152

Post by llmslave2 »

tehlike wrote: post #135
llmslave2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#154

Post by llmslave2 »

anthonypasq wrote: post #138
llmslave2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might be genuinely useful in 5 years, my issue is how it's being marketed now. We're 6 months into "AI will be writing 90% of code in three months" among other ridiculous statements.

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

#157

Post by yoyohello13 »

brandonmenc wrote: post #98

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. Th…

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.

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

#158

Post by 9dev »

reconnecting wrote: post #79

> 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.

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.

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

#159

Post by alexjplant »

wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141
flumpcakes wrote: post #130

> 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…

> ... 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.

For every conspicuous vibecoding influencer there are a bunch of experienced software engineers using them to get things done. The newest generation of models are actually pretty decent at following instructions and using existing code as a template. Building line-of-business apps is much quicker with Claude Code because once you've nicely scaffolded everything you can just tell it to build stuff and it'll do so the same way you would have in a fraction of the time. You can also use it to research alternatives to architectural approaches and tooling that you come up with so that you don't paint yourself into a corner by having not heard about some semi-niche tool that fits your use case perfectly.

Of course I wouldn't use an LLM to #yolo some Next.js monstrosity with a flavor-of-the-week ORM and random Tailwind. I have, however, had it build numerous parts of my apps after telling it all about the mise targets and tests and architecture of the code that I came up with up front. In a way it vindicates my approach to software engineering because it's able to use the tools available to it to (reasonably) ensure correctness before it says it's done.

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

#160

Post by roadside_picnic »

simonw wrote: post #100
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…

I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me. I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software…

> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

I've had plenty of junior devs justify massive code bases of random scripts and 100+ line functions with the same logic. There's a reason senior devs almost always push back on this when it's encountered.

Everything hinges on that "if". But you're baking a tautology into your reasoning: "if LLMs can do everything we need them to, we can use LLMs for everything we need".

The reason we stop junior devs from going down this path is because experience teaches us that things will break and when they do, it will incur a world of pain.

So "LLM as abstraction" might be a possible future, but it assumes LLMs are significantly more capable than a junior dev at managing a growing mess of complex code.

This is clearly not the case with simplistic LLM usage today. "Ah! But you need agents and memory and context management, etc!" But all of these are abstractions. This is what I believe the parent comment is really pointing out.

If AI could do what we originally hoped it could: follow simple instructions to solve complex tasks. We'd be great, and I would agree with your argument. But we are very clearly not in that world. Especially since Karpathy can't even keep up with the sophisticated machinery necessary to properly orchestrate these tools. All of the people decrying "you're not doing it right!" are emphatically proving that LLMs cannot perform these tasks at the level we need them to.

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