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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”

#301

Post by ctmnt »

globnomulous wrote: post #213
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…

Use a Nitter mirror [1]. I find xcancel.com the easiest to get to:

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2004607146781278521

[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

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

#302

Post by teleforce »

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…

This whole things of AI assisted and vibe coding phenomena including the other comments remind me of this very popular post on HN that keep appearing almost every year on HN [1],[2].

[1] Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

[2] Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095775

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

#303

Post by BhavdeepSethi »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #104
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…

I hardly ever open an IDE anymore. I use Claude Code and Cursor. What I do: - use statically typed languages: TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python w/ types - Setup linters. For TS I have a bunch of custom lint rules (authored by AI) for common feedback that I've given. ( https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package... ) - For Cursor, lots of feedback on my desired style. https://github.com/shepherdjerred/scou…

Cursor is an IDE.

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

#304

Post by calf »

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...

Slopbrain is interesting because Karpathy's fallacious argumentation mirrors the glib argument of an LLM/AI, it's like cognitively recursive, one feeding the other in a self-selecting manner.

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

#305

Post by PaulHoule »

BearOso wrote: post #284
aoeusnth1 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really what he's saying here? He's not against the technology, I think he's just feeling like there's a lot of potential that he's not quite grasping yet.

This guy is one of the top names in AI. This is pure propaganda written to instill "fear of missing out" and encouraging people to buy into his platform, lest they become "obsolete."

It’s a little shocking to me that this sentiment hasn’t floated higher in the discussion. Regardless of how he feels, this is the way he wants you to feel.

Big picture it’s about emotional intelligence and if you are losing your shit you’re going to flail around. I think you should pick up some near-frontier tools and use them to improve your usual process, always keeping your feet on the ground. “Vibe coding” was always about getting you and keeping you over your head. Resist it!

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

#306

Post by _zagj »

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.

> FSD to Tesla, which he also did not finish.

That's why I've never understood HN's continuing infatuation with him. He failed to deliver FSD to Tesla, and arguably even sent them down a R&D dead end, and he doesn't seem to have played a significant role in the generative AI revolution, only joining OpenAI after they developed ChatGPT. Yet when his talks or blog posts get posted here, they're met with almost uniformly positive comments, often many.

He reminds me of Sam Altman, where for a while, pointing out that pg's emperor was naked, that his first big "success" was a startup, Loopt, that devolved into a seedy, gaunt gay hookup app, slowly wasting away, that only got acquired thanks to face-saving VC string-pulling, and that that "success" was the springboard of all that followed (YC presidency, feeling out a gubernatorial campaign, OpenAI CEO)--that would get you swiftly flagged.

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

#307

Post by BhavdeepSethi »

Most of the folks that are talking about this are the ones who work independently and work on greenfield projects (especially tooling related). The cost of making a mistake there is so low. I've used it similarly and it's absolutely amazing. Though I still use a mix of agents and code myself in my regular 9-5 job.

I've yet to see examples of folks using this in a team of 4+ folks working together in a production env with users, and just using AI for their regular development.

Claude code creator only using claude code doesn't count. That's more like dog-fooding.

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

#308

Post by whstl »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #264
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…

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.

Yep, that's a good test. And it's good even if it's for a React only position.

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

#309

Post by Trasmatta »

lopatin wrote: post #279
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.

It's not that wild. I like building things. I like programming too, but less than building things.

To me, fighting with an LLM doesn't feel like building things, it feels like having my teeth pulled.

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

#310

Post by squigz »

simonw wrote: post #208
roadside_picnic wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

They're not being disrupted. This is exactly why some people don't trust LLMs to re-invent wheels. It doesn't matter if it can one-shot some code and tests - what matters is that some problems require experience to know what exactly is needed to solve that problem. Libraries enable this experience and knowledge to centralize.

When considering whether inventing something in-house is a good idea vs using a library, "up front dev cost" factors relatively little to me.

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