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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”

#431

Post by viraptor »

leshow wrote: post #388
viraptor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not something that suddenly changed. "I'll generate some code" is as nondeterministic as "I'll look for a library that does it", "I'll assign John to code this feature", or "I'll outsource this code to a consulting company". Even if you write yourself, you're pretty nondeterministic in your results - you're not going to write exactly the same code to solve a problem, even if you explicitly try.

It's not the same, LLM's are qualitatively different due to the stochastic and non-reproducible nature of their output. From the LLM's point of view, non-functional or incorrect code is exactly the same as correct code because it doesn't understand anything that it's generating. When a human does it, you can say they did a bad or good job, but there is a thought process and actual "intelligence" and reasoning that we…

I'm not sure who generates random code without a goal or checking if it works afterwards. Smells like a straw man. Normally you set the rules, you know how to validate if the result works, and you may even generate tests that keep that state. If I got completely random results rather than what I expect, I wouldn't be using that system - but it's correct and helpful almost every time. What you describe is just not how people work with LLMs in practice.

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

#432

Post by cloudflare728 »

pca006132 wrote: post #281
cloudflare728 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I have a similar file or related files. I copy their names and say use them as reference. Code quality improves by 10 times if you do so. Even providing a a example from framework's getting started works great too for new project. Yeah the pain of cleaning up small mess is great too. I had some tests failing and type failing issues, I thought I will fix it later by only using AI prompt. As the size was grow…

Question: How many LoC do you let the AI write for each iteration? And do you review that? It sounds like you are letting it run off leash.

I had no idea how it would end up. It was first time using AI IDE. I had only used chatgpt.com and claude.ai for small changes before. I continued it for the experiment. I thought AI write too many tests, I will judge based on test passing. I agree, it was bad expectation + no experience with AI IDE + bad software engineering.

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

#433

Post by ActionHank »

hamstergene wrote: post #376

I feel like many people in the comments aren't aware that Karpathy is an ML scientist for whom programming is a complementary skill, not a profession. The only reason he came up with "vibe coding" is because maximum complexity of his hobby projects made it seem believable. Maybe take his opinions about fate of programming with a grain of salt. He is brilliant no doubt, but not in that field.

This is such a great way to frame all his comments.

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

#434

Post by zeroonetwothree »

pertymcpert wrote: post #420
zdragnar wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And everyone else's work has to be completely put on hold or thrown away because you did the whole thing all at once on your own. That's definitely not something that goes over well on anything other than an incredibly trivial project.

Why did you jump to the assumption that this: > The new normal isn't like that. Rewrite an existing cleanly implemented Vanilla JavaScript project (with tests) in React the kind of rote task you can throw at a coding agent like Claude Code and come back the next morning and expect most (and occasionally all) of the work to be done. ... meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agre…

If you have 100s of devs working on the project it’s not possible to do a full rewrite in one go. So its to about clandestine but rather that there’s just no way to get it done regardless of how much AI superpowers you bring to bear.

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

#435

Post by zeroonetwothree »

wanderlust123 wrote: post #384
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…

Not all UIs converge to a React like requirement. For a lot of use cases React is over-engineering but the profession just lacks the balls to use something simpler, like htmx for example.

Core react is fairly simple, I would have no problem using it for almost everything. The overengineering usually comes at a layer on top.

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

#436

Post by kshri24 »

> Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind

This confirms AI bubble for me and it now being entirely FUD driven. "Not fall behind" should only apply to technologies where you have to put active effort to learn as it requires years to hone and master the craft. AI is supposed to remove this "active effort" part so as to get you upto speed with the latest and bridge the gap between those "who know" and those "who do not". The fact you need to say "roll up your sleeves to not fall behind" confirms we are not in that situation yet.

In other words, it is the same old learning curve that everyone has to cross EXCEPT this time it is probabilistic instead of linear/exponential. It is quite literally a slightly better than coin toss situation when it comes to you learning the right way or not.

For me personally, we are truly in that zone of zero active effort and total replacement when AI can hit a 100% on ALL METRICS consistently, every single time, even on fresh datasets with challenging questions NOT SEEN/TRAINED by the model. Even better if it can come up with novel discoveries to remove any doubts. Chances of achieving that with current tech is 0%.

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

#437

Post by zdragnar »

pertymcpert wrote: post #420
zdragnar wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And everyone else's work has to be completely put on hold or thrown away because you did the whole thing all at once on your own. That's definitely not something that goes over well on anything other than an incredibly trivial project.

Why did you jump to the assumption that this: > The new normal isn't like that. Rewrite an existing cleanly implemented Vanilla JavaScript project (with tests) in React the kind of rote task you can throw at a coding agent like Claude Code and come back the next morning and expect most (and occasionally all) of the work to be done. ... meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agre…

My very first sentence:

> And everyone else's work has to be completely put on hold

On a big enough team, getting everyone to a stopping point where they can wait for you to do your big bang refactor to the entire code base- even if it is only a day later- is still really disruptive.

The last time I went through something like this, we did it really carefully, migrating a page at a time from a multi page application to a SPA. Even that required ensuring that whichever page transitioned didn't have other people working on it, let alone the whole code base.

Again, I simply don't buy that you're going to be able to AI your way through such a radical transition on anything other than a trivial application with a small or tiny team.

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

#439

Post by Teever »

simonw wrote: post #336
zdragnar wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As it should, normally, because "we'll rewrite it in React later" used to represent weeks if not months of massively disruptive work. I've seen migration projects like that push on for more than a year! The new normal isn't like that. Rewrite an existing cleanly implemented Vanilla JavaScript project (with tests) in React the kind of rote task you can throw at a coding agent like Claude Code and come back the next mo…

Let's say I'm mildly convinced by your argument. I've read your blog post that was popular on HN a week or so ago and I've made similar little toy programs with AI that scratch a particular niche.

Do you care to make any concrete predictions on when most developers will embrace this new normal as part of their day to day routine? One year? Five?

And how much of this is just another iteration in the wheel of recarnation[0]? Maybe we're looking at a future where we see return to the monoculture library dense supply chain that we use today but the libraries are made by swarms of AI agents instead and the programmer/user is responsible for guiding other AI agents to create business logic?

[0] https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

ewoodrich wrote: post #272
kakapo5672 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this logical pairing a lot. 1) AI is basically useless, a mere semi-random word generator. 2) And it is so powerful that it is going to hurt (or even destroy) humanity. This is this is called "having your cake, and letting it eat you too".

That's a dishonest framing of their argument. There's nothing logically inconsistent in believing wide adoption of AI tools causes developers' skills to atrophy and that the tools also fail to deliver on the hype/promises. You're inserting "destroy humanity" when OP is suggesting the problem is offloading all thinking to an unreliable tool (I don't entirely agree with their position but it's defensible and not as you…

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