The only time I've felt this much behind was in high school when everyone was talking about how much sex they were having. AI code is the Canadian girlfriend of programming.
Touché! That's a good one.
Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
441–450 of 630 posts
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI is only getting better at consuming energy and wasting people's time communicating with this T9. However, if talented engineers continue to use it, it might eventually provide more accurate replies as a result. Answering your question, no matter how much I personally degrade or improve, I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days…
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".
There's no point arguing with someone who's not only wrong, but who doesn't care if they're wrong. ("I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days.")
There are basically no conditions under which one party can or will reach a legitimate common ground with the other. Sucks, but that's HN nowadays.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's concerning to many of us is that you've (and others) have said this same thing s/Opus 4.5/some other model/ That feels more like chasing than a clear line of improvement. It's interrupted very different from something like "my habits have changed quite a bit since reading The Art of Computer Programming". They're categorically different.
Opus 4.5 is categorically a much better model from benchmarks and personal experience than Opus 4.1 & Sonnet models. The reason you're seeing a lot of people wax about O4.5 is that it was a real step change in reliable performance. It crossed for me a critical threshold in being able to solve problems by approaching things in systematic ways. Why do you use the word "chasing" to describe this? I don't understand. May…
> Why do you use the word "chasing" to describe this?
Btw, I have tried it. It's annoying that people think the problem is not trying. It was getting old when GPT 3.5 came out. Let's update the argument...
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#444If there was more substance behind the hype this might actually be true. But unless you’re in some very specific niches, it’s bollocks.
You’re not doing it wrong, the tools just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. They are annoying good enough to get you to waste a load of time trying to get them to do what it looks like they should be able to do.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#445Earlier 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…
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…
"React is hundreds of thousands of lines of code".
Most of which are irrelevant to my project. It's easier to maintain a few hundred lines of self written code than to carry the react-kitchen-sink around for all eternity.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#446Oh. This is a pretty stereotypical character among data scientists. This character thinks software development is all about generating text, and because they know how to generate text, they're automatically considered an expert. But they know nothing about the software lifecycle. Working with them is a real pain, especially when they shift responsibility for their "software" to your engineers.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#447> 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…
> ... or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better. It doesn't. The only people I've seen claim such speedups are either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme.
The speedup from AI is in the exponent.
Just the other day ChatGPT implemented something that would have taken me a week of research to figure out: in 10 minutes. What do you call that speedup? It's a lot more than 10x.
On other days I barely touch AI because I can write easy code faster than I can write prompts for easy code, though the autocomplete definitely helps me type faster.
The "10x" is just a placeholder for averaging over a series of stochastic exponents. It's a way of saying "somewhere between 1 and infinity"
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.
There has always been a laissez-faire subset of programmers who thrive on living in the debugger, getting occasional dopamine hits every time they remove any footgun they previously placed. I cannot count the times that I've had essentially this conversation: "If x happens, then y, and z, it will crash here." "What are the odds of that happening?" "If you can even ask that question, the probability that it will occur…
I've recently had a lot of fun teaching junior devs the basics of defensive programming.
The phrasing that usually make it click for them is: "Yes, this is an unlikely bug, but if this bug where to happen how long would it take you to figure out this is the problem and fix it?"
In most cases these are extremely subtle issues that the juniors immediately realize would be nightmares to debug and could easily eat up days of hair-pulling work while someone non-technical above them waiting for the solution is rapidly losing their patience.
The best senior devs I've worked with over my career all have shared an uncanny knack for seeing a problem months before it impacts production. While they are frequently ignored, in those cases more often then not they get an apology a few months down the line when exactly what they predict would happen, happens.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#449> and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue.
And a failure to clarify the project you're currently working on and the actual results feels decidedly like a propaganda issue.
Take all the digs at my skills you want. I'd rather not be a bald faced liar.
Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 recarnati…
It's really hard to predict how other developers are going to work, especially given how resistant a lot of developers are to fully exploring the new tools.
I do think there's been a bit of a shift in the last two months, with GPT 5.1 and 5.2 Codex and Opus 4.5.
We have models that can reliably follow complex instructions over multiple hour projects now - that's completely new. Those of us at the cutting edge are still coming to terms with the consequences of this (as illustrated by this Karpathy tweet).
I don't trust my predictions myself, but I think the next few months are going to see some big changes in terms of what mainstream developers understand these tools as being capable of.