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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”

#161

Post by Capricorn2481 »

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.

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

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

#162

Post by casey2 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #111
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…

Every technical person has been complaining about this for the entire history of computer programming Unless you’re writing literal memory instructions then you’re operating on between 4 and 10 levels of abstraction already as an engineer It has never been tractable for humans to program a series of switches without incredible number of abstractions The vast majority of programmers never understood how computers work…

This is true, though the people that actually push the field forward do know enough about every level of abstraction to get the job done. Making something (very important) horrible just to rush to market can be a pretty big progress blocker.

Jensen is someone I trust to understand the business side and some of those lower technical layers, so I'm not too concerned.

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

#163

Post by simonw »

jefffoster wrote: post #52
falcor84 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At a guess an Enterprise API account. Pay per token but no limits. It’s very easy to spend $100s per dev per day.

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.

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

#164

Post by leshow »

johnfn wrote: post #151
wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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”.

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.

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

#165

Post by misiti3780 »

paxys wrote: post #129

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.

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

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

#166

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

johnfn wrote: post #142
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...

I feel Karpathy is smart enough to deserve a less dismissive response than this.

A mix of "too clever by half" and "never meet your heroes".

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

#167

Post by rideontime »

johnfn wrote: post #142
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...

I feel Karpathy is smart enough to deserve a less dismissive response than this.

Why do you feel that way?

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

#168

Post by jennyholzer3 »

nextworddev wrote: post #32
design2203 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We just both feel this sense of possibility, and the fact that we can't make AI help us more is frustrating” The mirage is alluring.

The real mirage is the utility of median developers

give them better incentives

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

#169

Post by johnfn »

leshow wrote: post #164
johnfn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

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.

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?

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

#170

Post by techblueberry »

johnfn wrote: post #142
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...

I feel Karpathy is smart enough to deserve a less dismissive response than this.

You think we should appeal to authority rather than address the ideas on their own merits?
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