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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”

#221

Post by tyre »

simonw wrote: post #106
tyre wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For moment you an use `date-fns` and tree shake. I'd rather have LLMs build on top of proven, battle-tested production libraries than keep writing their own from scratch. You're going to fill up context with all of its re-invented wheels when it already knows how to use common options. Not to mention that testing things like this is hard . And why waste time (and context and complexity) for humans and LLMs trying to…

Every dependency carries a cost. You are effectively outsourcing part of the future maintenance of your project to an external team. This can often be a very solid bet, but it can also occasionally backfire if the library you chose falls out of date and is no longer maintained. For this reason I lean towards fewer dependencies, and have a high bar for when a dependency is worth adding to a project. I prefer a dozen w…

For smol things like left-pad, sure but the two examples given (moment and react) solve really hard problems. If I were reviewing a PR where someone tried to re-implement time zone handling in JS, that’s not making it through review.

In JS, the DOM and time zones are some of the most messed up foundations you’re building on top of ime. (The DOM is amazing for documents but not designed for web apps.)

I think we really need to be careful about adding dependencies that we’re maintaining ourselves, especially when you factor in employee churn and existing options. Unless it’s the differentiator for the business you’re building, my advice to engineers is to strongly consider other options and have a case for why they don’t fit.

AI can play into the engineering blind spot of building it ourselves because it’s fun. But engineering as a discipline requires restraint.

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

#222

Post by senordevnyc »

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…

Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code. Now it feels increasingly like you can’t be an IC in that way anymore. You’re now coding through others, either humans or AI.

Sure, I can write code manually, but in my case I’m working full time on my own SaaS and I am absolutely faster and more effective with AI. It’s not even close. And the gains are so extreme that I can’t justify writing beautiful hand-crafted artisanal code anymore. It turns out that code that’s “good enough” will do, and that’s all I can afford right now.

But long-term, I don’t know that I want to do that work, especially for some corporation. It feels like the difference between being a master furniture craftsman, and then going work in an IKEA factory.

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

#223

Post by bdangubic »

threeducks wrote: post #186
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.

> This is from the man who has no finished open source projects To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean? The only projects that I can truly call "finished" are those that I have laid to rest because they have been superseded by newer technologies, not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do.

> To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean?

https://github.com/left-pad

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

#224

Post by reconnecting »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #199
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.

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. In that year, AI will get better. Will you?

AI is only getting better at consuming energy and wasting people's time communicating with this T9. However, if talented engineers continue to use it, it might eventually provide more accurate replies as a result.

Answering your question, no matter how much I personally degrade or improve, I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days.

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

#225

Post by bdangubic »

threeducks wrote: post #186
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.

> This is from the man who has no finished open source projects To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean? The only projects that I can truly call "finished" are those that I have laid to rest because they have been superseded by newer technologies, not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do.

> not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do.

this is because SWEs love bloat and any good idea eventually needs to balloon into some ever-growing monstrosity :)

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

#226

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

johnfn wrote: post #195
techblueberry wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How is saying the author has “slopbrain” is “addressing the idea on its own merits”? It’s just name calling.

They aren't addressing my comment (which is obviously an overreaction to the tweet), he's asking you why we should appeal to authority rather than evaluate whether Karpathy is completely overreacting and in way too deep.

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

#227

Post by whstl »

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…

> 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.

Hyperbole. It's also very often a "world of pain" with a lot of senior code.

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

#228

Post by bgwalter »

threeducks wrote: post #186
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.

> This is from the man who has no finished open source projects To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean? The only projects that I can truly call "finished" are those that I have laid to rest because they have been superseded by newer technologies, not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do.

Then replace "finished" with "production software".

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

#229

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

baq wrote: post #217
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not viewing AI tooling as an extinction of the art of programming, only illuminating how telling an AI how to create programs isn't in the same universe as programming, where the technical skill to do such a thing is on par with punching in how long my microwave should nuke my popcorn.
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