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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”

#471

Post by enraged_camel »

data-ottawa wrote: post #379
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hell of a time just getting any LLM to write SQL queries that have things like window functions, aggregates and lateral left joins - even when shoving the entire database schema DDL into the context. It's so frustrating, it regularly makes me want to just quit the profession. Which is why I still just write most code by hand.

I write a lot of SQL and I haven't had these issues for months, even with smaller models. Opus can one shot most of my queries faster than I could type them. Instead of stuffing the context with DDL I suggest: 1. Reorganize your data warehouse. It needs to be easy to find the correct data. Make sure you use ELT clear layers, meaningful schemas, and have per-model documentation. This is a ton of work, but if done righ…

>> I write a lot of SQL and I haven't had these issues for months, even with smaller models. Opus can one shot most of my queries faster than I could type them.

Same. SOTA models crush every SQL question I give them.

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

#472

Post by robotresearcher »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #273
robotresearcher wrote: post #245

Andrej is 39 years old, according to Wikipedia. Douglas Adams on age and relating to technology: "1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-fi…

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.

> Is that really what he's saying here?

No it’s absolutely not. But I thought it’d be fun to offer Adams’ brilliant hyperbole for an affectionate ribbing of Karpathy. Both of them are great communicators of ideas.

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

#473

Post by bryanrasmussen »

layer8 wrote: post #182
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild that management would be willing to accept it. I think that for some people it is harder to reason about determinism because it is similar to correctness, and correctness can, in many scenarios be something you trade off - for example in relation to scaling and speed you will often trade off correctness. If you do not think clearly about the difference with determinism and other similar properties like (rea…

Management is used to nondeterminism, because that’s what their employees always have been.

hmm, OK good point. But programs that are not deterministic would seem to have a bug that needs fixing. And it can't be fixed, but I guess the employees can't be fixed either.

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

#474

Post by kiriakosv »

I may be extremely ignorant here but I think Karpathy is primary and foremost a great pitcher - salesman, not only for AI in general but on his personal branding as well.

He is also great at explaining AI related concepts to the masses.

However his takes on software engineering show someone that hasn’t spend a significant amount of time doing production grade software engineering, and that is perfectly fine and completely normal given his background.

But that also means that we should not take his software engineering opinions as gospel.

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

#475

Post by IshKebab »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #157
brandonmenc wrote: post #98

I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers. Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks. Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. Th…

Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later. Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.

Yeah that's my view too. It's definitely fine to wait a couple of years (at least), and see what emerged as most effective and then just learn that, instead of dumping a ton of time now into keeping up with the hamster wheel.

Unless you're in web dev because it seems like that's one of the few domains where AI actually works pretty well today.

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

#476

Post by jacquesm »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #157
brandonmenc wrote: post #98

I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers. Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks. Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. Th…

Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later. Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.

> Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.

???

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

#477

Post by jacquesm »

senordevnyc wrote: post #222
brandonmenc wrote: post #98

I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers. Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks. Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. Th…

Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code.…

You'll make more money than ever cleaning up AI generated messes.

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

#478

Post by reconnecting »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #442
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".

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.

There is common ground, as per my initial message. Only one AI company spends billions of dollars yearly on marketing their software to make it work. I work on open-source software development on a bootstrapped basis.

My input is: water, nutrition, a bit of electricity, and beliefs and the output is a fairly complex logical system like software. AI's input is billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of people's lives spent in screen time daily, gigawatts of electricity, and still produces very questionable results.

To answer your question in other words: if you spent the same amount of resources on human intelligence, it might bring much more impressive results in one year. However, taking into account the resources already paid into these AI technologies, humanity is unlikely to have a chance to buy out of this new 'dependency'.

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

#479

Post by quleap »

sshine wrote: post #144
simonw wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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…

Exactly. LLMs are a lot like human developers: they benefit from existing abstractions. Reinventing everything from scratch is a recipe for disaster—especially given an LLM’s limited context window.

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

#480

Post by zephen »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #448
zephen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 day…

> While they are frequently ignored

And this is the reason I spent most of the latter part of my career in chip companies.

Because tapeouts are _expensive_, both in dollar cost, and in lost opportunity cost if the chip comes back broken.

So any successful chip company knows to pay attention to potential problems. And the messenger never gets shot.

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