Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 630 posts

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

#251

Post by saulpw »

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 keep hearing "it's the slowest and worst it'll ever be" as though software ability and performance only ever increase and yet mass produced software is slower and enshittier than it was 10-15 years ago and we're all complaining about it. And you can't say "but it does so much more" because I never asked for 90% of the "more" and just want to turn most of it off.

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

#252

Post by lazystar »

doug_durham wrote: post #237
lazystar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delving a bit deeper... I've been wondering if the problem's related to the rise in H1B workers and contractors. These programmers have an extra incentive to avoid pushing back on c-suite/skip level decisions - staying out of in-office politics reduces the risk of deportation. I think companies with a higher % of engineers working with that incentive have a higher risk of losing market share in the long-term.

I’ll answer that with a simple “No”. My H1B colleges are every bit as rigorous and innovative as any engineer. It is in no one’s long term interest to generate shoddy code.

I'm not stating the code is shoddy - I agree the quality's fine. I'm referring to the IC engineer's role in pushing back against unrealistic demands/design decisions that are passed down by the PM's and c-suite teams. Doing this can increase internal tension, but it makes the product and customer experience better in the long run. In my career, I've felt safe pushing back because I don't have to worry about moving if my pushback is poorly received.

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

#253

Post by azangru »

whstl wrote: post #238
simonw wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I share all of those questions. My cynical answer is that most web developers who learned their craftsin the last decade learned frontend React-first, and a lot of them genuinely don't have experience working without it. Which means hiring for a React team is easier. Which means learning React makes you more employable.

> most web developers who learned their craftsin the last decade learned frontend React-first, and a lot of them genuinely don't have experience working without it That's not cynical, that's the reality. I do a lot of interviews and mentor juniors, and I can 100% confirm that. And funny enough, React-only devs was a bigger problem 5 years ago. Today the problem is developers who can *only* use Next.js. A lot can't us…

>> a lot of them genuinely don't have experience working without [react]

> Today the problem is developers who can only use Next.js. A lot can't use Vite+React or plain React, or whatever.

Do you want to hire such developers?

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

#254

Post by PaulHoule »

I don't have a lot of patience for this sort of take because my north star is project management and in my normal moving forward model I work in milestones where I stack up my tools and get something specific done and screwing around with tools is heavily timeboxed. If A.I. tools help me make progress great, if they don't, I will fall back to manual methods, get that phase of work done or (rarely) give up on the subproject. After I get some distance from it I can consolidate my learnings, try a different approach.

It's death though to be excessively reading tweets and blogs about this stuff, this will have you exhausted before you even try a real project and comparing yourself to other people's claims which are sometimes lies, often delusional, ungrounded and almost always self-serving. In sofar someone is getting things done with any consistency they are practicing basic PM, treating feelings of exhaustion, ungroundedness and especially going in circles as a sign to regroup, slow down and focus on the end you have in mind.

If the point really is to research tools than what you do is break down that work into attainable chunks, the way you break down any other kind of work.

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

#255

Post by rambojohnson »

rgreeko42 wrote: post #108
torben-friis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our industry wants disruption, speed, delivery! Automatic code generation does that wonderfully. If we wanted safety, stability, performance, and polish, the impact of LLMs would be more limited. They have a tendency to pile up code on top of code. I think the new tech is just accelerating an already existing problem. Most tech products are already rotting, take a look at windows or iOS. I wonder what will it take fo…

disruption is a code word for deregulation, and deregulation is bad for everyone except execs and investors

it's sadly telling how this comment got greyed out to oblivion.

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

#256

Post by lo_zamoyski »

falcor84 wrote: post #48
ldng wrote: post #37

Yeah. OR. You just ignore the bullshit until the bubble burst. Then we'll see what's left and it will not be what the majority think.

The "bubble" is in the financial investment, not in the technology. AI won't disappear after the bubble bursts, just like the web didn't disappear after 2000. If anything, bursting the financial bubble will most likely encourage researchers to experiment more, trying a larger range of cheaper approaches, and do more fundamental engineering rather than just scaling. AI is here to stay, and the only thing that can stop…

Borg logic consists of framing matters of choice as "inevitable". As long as those with power convince everyone that technological implementation is "inevitable", people will passively accept their self-serving and destructive technological mastery of the world.

The framing allows the rest of us to get ourselves off the hook. "We didn't have a choice! It was INEVITABLE!"

And so, we have chosen.

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

#257

Post by lo_zamoyski »

wiseowise wrote: post #126
falcor84 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "bubble" is in the financial investment, not in the technology. AI won't disappear after the bubble bursts, just like the web didn't disappear after 2000. If anything, bursting the financial bubble will most likely encourage researchers to experiment more, trying a larger range of cheaper approaches, and do more fundamental engineering rather than just scaling. AI is here to stay, and the only thing that can stop…

Not even Butlerian Jihad will stop the current progress at this point.

Resistance if futile, eh?

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

#258

Post by whstl »

azangru wrote: post #253
whstl wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most web developers who learned their craftsin the last decade learned frontend React-first, and a lot of them genuinely don't have experience working without it That's not cynical, that's the reality. I do a lot of interviews and mentor juniors, and I can 100% confirm that. And funny enough, React-only devs was a bigger problem 5 years ago. Today the problem is developers who can *only* use Next.js. A lot can't us…

>> a lot of them genuinely don't have experience working without [react] > Today the problem is developers who can only use Next.js. A lot can't use Vite+React or plain React, or whatever. Do you want to hire such developers?

No, that's why I said "problem".

My job during the hiring process is to filter them.

But that's me. Other companies might be interested.

I often choose to work on non-cookie-cutter products, so it's better to have developers with more curiosity to ask questions, like yourself asked above.

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

#259

Post by oulipo2 »

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…

That's a fundamental misunderstanding

The role of abstractions *IS* to prevent (eg "compress") the need for a test suite, because you have an easy model to understand and reason about

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

#260

Post by tehnub »

qudat wrote: post #177
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…

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…

Beads?
Post reply on HN