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

Post by joquarky » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:36 AM UTC

pca006132 wrote: post #286

neoromantique wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree. Current dependency hell that is modern development, just how wide the openings are for supply chain attacks and seemingly every other week we get a new RCE. I'd rather 100 loosely coupled scripts peer reviewed by a half a dozen of LLM agents.

But this doesn't solve dependency hell. If the functionalities were loosely coupled, you can already vendor the code in and manually review them. If they are not, say it is a db, you still have to depend on that? Or maybe you can use AI to vendor dependencies, review existing dependencies and updates. Never tried that, maybe that is better than the current approach, which is just trusting the upstream most of the tim…

Post by simonw » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

DrammBA wrote: post #332

simonw wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Simon, you're starting to sound super disconnected from reality, this "I hit everything that looks like a nail with my LLM hammer" vibe is new.

Post by joquarky » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:43 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #149

sshine wrote: post #144

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> I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. I'm incentivised to use abstractions that are harder to learn, but execute faster or more safely once compiled. E.g. more Rust, Lean. > 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. LLMs benefit from abstractions the same way as we do. LLMs currently copy our appr…

> For example, writing more vanilla JS instead of React, you're just reinventing the necessary abstractions more verbosely and with a higher risk of duplicate code or mismatching abstractions. Right, but I'm also getting pages that load faster and don't require a build step, making them more convenient to hack on. I'm enjoying that trade-off a lot.

Post by i_am_a_peasant » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:45 AM UTC

Trasmatta wrote: post #309

lopatin wrote: post #279

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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.

Post by cyberax » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:50 AM UTC

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…