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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”

#261

Post by yacthing »

globular-toast wrote: post #85

I don't usually post something like this, but this is so fucking stupid. I'm prepared to stand by that. Let's see in a few years if I'm right. "AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent. That's it. It's like the ultimate "algorithm" or addiction machine. It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical.

'"AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent.'

What's the difference? I try to make people think I'm intelligent all the time.

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

#262

Post by lukev »

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…

That's NOT AI psychosis, which is real, and which I've seen close-up.

AI psychosis is getting lost in the sauce and becoming too intimate with your ChatGPT instance, or believing it's something it's not.

Skepticism, or a fear of being outside the core loop is the exact opposite, and that's what Karpathy is talking about here. If anything, this kind of post is an indicator that you're absolutely NOT in AI psychosis.

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

#263

Post by kakapo5672 »

flumpcakes wrote: post #146
dnw wrote: post #92

I have been using Copilot, Cursor, then CC for a little more than a year now. I have written code with teams using these tools and I am writing mostly for myself now. My observations have been the following: 1) These tools obviously improved significantly over the past 12 months. They can churn out code that makes sense in the context of the codebase, meaning there is more grounding to the codebase they are working o…

> Despite your own experiences with these tools it is imperative that they be in your toolbox. Why is it imperative? Whenever I read comments like this I just think the author is cynically drumming up hype because of the looming AI bubble collapse.

There's a financial AI bubble for sure - that's pretty much a mainstream opinion nowadays. But that's an entirely different thing from AI itself bubble-collapsing.

If you truly believe AI is simply going to collapse and disappear, you are deep in some serious cope and are going to be unpleasantly surprised.

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

#264

Post by CharlieDigital »

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…

My test for FE is to write a floating menu in JSFiddle with only JS, CSS, and HTML. Bonus if no JS.

If you can do that, then you can probably understand how everything else works.

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

#265

Post by dnw »

flumpcakes wrote: post #146
dnw wrote: post #92

I have been using Copilot, Cursor, then CC for a little more than a year now. I have written code with teams using these tools and I am writing mostly for myself now. My observations have been the following: 1) These tools obviously improved significantly over the past 12 months. They can churn out code that makes sense in the context of the codebase, meaning there is more grounding to the codebase they are working o…

> Despite your own experiences with these tools it is imperative that they be in your toolbox. Why is it imperative? Whenever I read comments like this I just think the author is cynically drumming up hype because of the looming AI bubble collapse.

Fair question. It is "imperative" for two reasons. The first, despite having rough edges now, I find these tools be actually useful so they are here to stay. The second, I think most developers will use them and make them part of their toolchain. So, if one wants to be in parity with their peers then it stands to reason they adopt these tools as well.

In terms of bubbles: Bubbles are economic concepts and they will burst but the underlying technology find its market. There are plenty of good open source models and open source projects like OpenCode/Toad that support them. We can use those without contributing (too much) to the bubble.

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

#266

Post by falcor84 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #256
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…

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.

But history shows that it is inevitable. Can you give me an example of a single useful technology that humans ever stopped developing because of its negative externalities?

> "We didn't have a choice! It was INEVITABLE!"

There is no "we". You can call it the tragedy of the commons, or Moloch, or whatever you want, but I don't see how you can convince every single developer and financial sponsor on the planet to stop using and developing this (clearly very useful) tech. And as long as you can't, it's socially inevitable.

If you want a practice run, see if you can stop everyone in the world from smoking tobacco, which is so much more clearly detrimental. If you manage that, you might have a small chance at stopping implementation of AI.

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

#267

Post by JDye »

nen-nomad wrote: post #246

Claude Code didn’t make me faster. It changed the calendar. What used to take me months now takes weeks. Work didn't vanished, the friction did. Two years ago I was a human USB cable: copy, paste, pray. IDE chat window, piece by piece. Now the loop is tighter. The distance is shorter. There’s still hand-holding. Still judgment. Still cleanup. But the shift is real. We’ve come a long way. And we’re not done.

Can't even write a comment without an LLM...

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

#268

Post by nowittyusername »

superze wrote: post #40

As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails. I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significan…

Most people have not fully grasped how LLM's work and how to properly utilize agentic coding solutions. That is the reason for issues when it comes to vibe coders having low quality code. But that is not the limitation of technology but the user (at this stage). Basically think of it this way everyone is the grandma that has been handed a palm pilot to use to get things done. Grandma needs an iPhone not a palm pilot but the problem is that we are not in that territory yet. So now consider the people who were able to use the palm pilot very successfully and well, they were few and they were the exception, but they existed. Same here. I have been using coding agent for over 7 months now and have written zero lines of code, in fact I don't know how to code at all. But i have been able to architect very complex software projects from scratch. Text to speech , automated llm benchmarking systems for testing all possible llama.cpp sampling parameters and more, and now im building my own agentic framework from scratch. All of these things are possible and more without writing one line of code yourself. But it does require understanding how to use the technology well to get this done.

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

#269

Post by aoeusnth1 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #112
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?

I'm working on a solution [0] for this. My current approach is: 1. Create a new Git worktree 2. Create a Docker container w/ bind mount 3. Provide an interface for easily switching between your active worktrees/containers. For credentials, I have an HTTP/HTTPS mitm [1] that runs on the host with creds, so there are zero secrets in the container. The end goal is to be able to manage, say, 5-10 Claude instances at a ti…

This is also what I did. Actually, Claude did it.

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

#270

Post by falcor84 »

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.

Oh, I wasn't arguing that it isn't "easy to spend $100s per dev per day". I was just asking what the use-case for that is.
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