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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”

#211

Post by bdangubic »

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…

> 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.

the people are telling you “you are not doing it right!” - that’s it, there is nothing to interpret addition to this basic sentence

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

#212

Post by merlincorey »

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…

Thank you for the explanation, but I did fully understand that is what you were saying.

What I don't fully understand is how you can characterize that as "not limited" with a straight face; then again, I can't see your face so maybe you weren't straight faced as you wrote it in the first place.

Hopefully you could see my well meaning smile with the "absolutely right" opening, but apparently that's no longer common so I can understand your confusion as https://absolutelyright.lol/ indicates Opus 4.5 has had it RLHF'd away.

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

#213

Post by globnomulous »

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…

> This sounds unbearable.

I can't see the original post because my browser settings break Twitter (I also haven't liked much of Karpathy's output), but I agree. I call this style of software development 'meeting-based programming,' because that seems to be the mental model that the designers of the tools are pursuing. This probably explains, in part, why c-suite/MBA types are so excited about the tools: meetings are how they think and work.

In a way LLMs/chatbots and 'agents' are just the latest phase of a trend that the internet has been encouraging for decades: the elimination of mental privacy. I don't mean 'privacy' in an everyday sense -- i.e. things I keep to myself and don't share. I mean 'privacy' in a more basic sense: private experience -- sitting by oneself; having a mental space that doesn't include anybody else; simply spending time with one's own thoughts.

The internet encourages us to direct our thoughts and questions outward: look things up; find out what others have said; go to wikipedia; etc. This is, I think, horribly corrosive to the very essence of being a thinking, sentient being. It's also unsurprising, I guess. Humans are social animals. We're going to find ourselves easily seduced by anything that lets us replace private experience with social experience. I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone did this with programming tools, too.

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

#214

Post by 9dev »

reconnecting wrote: post #189
9dev wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sev…

This sounds to me like a lack of resource management, as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring. As a creator of an open-source platform myself, I find trusting a semi-random word generator in front of users unreliable. Moreover, I believe it creates a bad habit. I've seen developers forget how to read documentation and instead trust AI, and of course, as a result AI m…

That’s a totally fair take IMHO, and I’m very much conflicted on several ends on this topic—for example, would I want my juniors to use an agent? No; not even the mid levels, probably. As you say, it’s easy to form bad habits, and you need a good intuition for architecture and complexity, otherwise you end up with broken, unmaintainable messes. but if you have that, it’s like magic.

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

#217

Post by baq »

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.

Nothing stopping you from hand sculpting software like we did in the before times.

Mass production however won’t stop, it’s barely started literally a couple months ago and it’s the slowest and worst it’ll ever be.

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

#218

Post by CamperBob2 »

ciconia wrote: post #69
alphazard wrote: post #54

The thing that always trips me up is the lack of isolation/sandboxing that all of the AI programming tools provide. I want to orchestrate a workforce of agents, but they can't be trusted not to run amok. Does anyone have a better way to do this other than spinning up a cloud VM to run goose or claude or whatever poorly isolated agent tool?

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

For the same reason you'd build a fire.

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

#220

Post by CamperBob2 »

bgwalter wrote: post #122

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.

who recommended camera-only FSD to Tesla

That's a bummer if true. Is there a reliable source that lays that decision at Karpathy's feet?

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