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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”

#321

Post by nineteen999 »

I'm actually having more fun than I've had in years with this, since I've mainly focussed on my personal projects while getting the hang of what's achievable. And it turns out to be quite a lot if you're a creative thinker.

At first it kind of depressed me, but now I realised that actually writing code is only part of my day job, the rest is integrating infrastructure and managing people and enabling them to do their job as well, and if I can do the coding/integration part faster and give them better tools more quickly, that's a huge win.

This means I can spend more time at the beach and on my physical and mental well being as well. I was stubborn and skeptical a year ago, but now I'm just really enjoying the process of learning new things.

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

#322

Post by 6thbit »

Sounds to me like Karapathy is in the "valley of despair" of the Dunning-Kruger effect of AI tools.

He knows the tools, he's efficient with them and yet he just now understands how much he's unable to harness at this point that makes him feel left behind.

Looking forward to see what comes out of him climbing that slope.

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

#323

Post by zdragnar »

simonw wrote: post #319
all_factz wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is hundreds of thousands of lines of code (or millions - I haven’t looked in awhile). Sure, you can start by having the LLM create a simple way to sync state across components, but in a serious project you’re going to run into edge-cases that cause the complexity of your LLM-built library to keep growing. There may come a point at which the complexity grows to such a point that the LLM itself can’t maintain the…

If the complexity grows beyond what it makes sense to do without React I'll have the LLM rewrite it all in React! I did that with an HTML generation project to switch from Python strings to Jinja templates just the other day: https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts/pull/2

That would go over on any decently sized team like a lead balloon.

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

#324

Post by clejack »

For the folks who have more positive outlooks how often do you change your code after it's been generated?

I haven't used agents much for coding, but I noticed that when I do have something created with the slightest complexity, it's never perfect and I have to go back and change it. This is mostly fine, but when large chunks of code are created, I don't have much context for editing things manually.

It's like waking up in a new house that you've never seen before. Sure I recognize the type of rooms, the furniture, the outlets, appliances, plumbing, and so on when I see them; but my sense of orientation is strained.

This is my main issue at the moment.

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

#325

Post by rdhatt »

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…

I find it interesting for your example you chose Moment.js -- a time library instead of something utilitarian like Lodash. For years I've following Jon Skeet's blog about implementing his time library NodaTime (a port of JodaTime). There are a crazy number of edge cases and many unintuitive things about modeling time within a computer.

If I just wanted the equivalent of Lodash's _.intersection() method, I get it. The requirements are pretty straightforward and I can verify the LLM code & tests myself. One less dependency is great. But with time, I know I don't know enough to verify the LLM's output.

Similar to encryption libraries, it's a common recommendation to leave time-based code to developers who live and breathe those black boxes. I trust the community verify the correctness of those concepts, something I can't do myself with LLM output.

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

#326

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #305
BearOso wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

vive vibe live or it doesnt matter?

Maybe Devs should handle copilots as Swiss prana-bindu their shots

(Therefore gun laws at a longer timescale)

Of course we have to ask aeb if he has ever run into someone who trips (only, of course) while hunting ;) have you?

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

#327

Post by fragsworth »

clejack wrote: post #324

For the folks who have more positive outlooks how often do you change your code after it's been generated? I haven't used agents much for coding, but I noticed that when I do have something created with the slightest complexity, it's never perfect and I have to go back and change it. This is mostly fine, but when large chunks of code are created, I don't have much context for editing things manually. It's like waking…

> For the folks who have more positive outlooks how often do you change your code after it's been generated?

Every time, unless my initial request was perfectly outlined in unambiguous pseudocode. It's just too easy to write ambiguous requests.

Unambiguous but human-readable pseudocode is what I strive for now, though I will often ask AI to help edit the pseudocode to remove ambiguities prior to generating code.

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

#328

Post by joquarky »

squigz wrote: post #310
simonw wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't forget to include supply chain attacks in your risk assessment.

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

#329

Post by akulbe »

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…

What are you pivoting to?

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

#330

Post by skylurk »

simonw wrote: post #241
jayd16 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I want to maintain in perpetuity random snippets when a library exists? How is that an improvement?

It's an improvement if that library stops being actively maintained in the future. ... or decides to redesign the API you were using.

Are you referring to httpx? ;)
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