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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”

#201

Post by baq »

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.

This gets repeated all the time, but it’s total nonsense. The output of an LLM is fixed just as the output of a human is.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #191
merlincorey wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The $200/month plan doesn't have limits either... once you've expended your rate limited token allowance... pay for the extra tokens out of an additional cash reserve you've set up You're absolutely right! Limited token allowance for $200/month is actually unlimited tokens when paying for extra from a cash reserve which is also unlimited, of course.

I think you may have misunderstood something here. When paying for Claude Max even at $200/month there are limits - you have a limit to the number of tokens you can use per five hour period, and if you run out of that you may have to wait an hour for the reset. You COULD instead use an API key and avoid that limit and reset, but that would end up costing you significantly more since the $200/month plan represents suc…

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by CamperBob2 »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #155

Countdown to his youtube course explaining it all for beginners commences...

His "youtube course" already exists, and it's absolutely transformational.

He's working on a more formal educational framework/service of some kind, which will presumably not be free, but what he's already posted is some of the most effective CS pedagogy I've ever encountered (and personally benefited from.)

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

#204

Post by baq »

coldpie wrote: post #127
jsk2600 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gardening and plumbing. Driving buses will be solved.

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

#205

Post by georgeburdell »

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.

Not sure what you mean by blindly prompting models

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

#206

Post by tyre »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #140
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 t…

> 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.

Cryptoboys did it first, please recognize their innovation ty

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

#207

Post by layer8 »

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.

The point is that all that research mostly doesn’t help in mastering the tool. Unlike traditional tools, it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It’s like an alien tool just handed to us in exactly that sense.

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

#208

Post by simonw »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #160
simonw wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tautolog…

I'm not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction.

I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed.

It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment.

If the code and tests take a few minutes those calculations can look very different.

Making these decisions effectively and responsibly is one of the key characteristics of a senior engineer, which is why it's so interesting that all of those years of intuition are being disrupted.

The code we are producing remains the same. The difference is that a senior developer may have written that function + tests in several hours, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Now that same senior developer can produce exactly the same code at a time cost of less than $100.

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

#209

Post by senordevnyc »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #181
qudat wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell as a heavy coding agent user: you don’t need to know any of this and that’s a testament to how good code agent TUIs have become. All I do to be productive with a coding agent is tell it to break a problem down into tasks, store it inside beads, and then make sure each step is approved by me. I also add in a TDD requirement where it needs to build tests that fail then eventually pass. Everything e…

This sounds like my complete and utter nightmare. No art or finesse in building the thing - only an exercise in torturing language to someone who at a fundamental level doesn't understand a thing.

Not really at all like this, more like being a tech lead for a team of savants who simultaneously are great at parts of software engineering, and limited at others. Though that latter category is slimmer than a year ago…

The point is, you can get lots of quality work out of this team if you learn to manage them well.

If that sounds like a “complete and utter nightmare”, then don’t use AI. Hopefully you can keep up without it in the long run.

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

#210

Post by baq »

dandanua wrote: post #190
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…

Don't forget you are expected to deliver x10 for the same pay, "because you have the AI now".

The system is designed to do exactly that. This is called ‘productivity increase’ and is deflationary in large dosages. Deflation sounds good until you understand where it’s coming from.
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