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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”

#511

Post by nl »

reconnecting wrote: post #79

> OpenAI's sales and marketing expenses increased to _$2 billion_ in the first half of 2025. Looks like AI companies spend enough on marketing budgets to create the illusion that AI makes development better. Let's wait one more year, and perhaps everyone who didn't fall victim to these " slimming pills ” for developers' brains will be glad about the choice they made.

> OpenAI's sales and marketing expenses increased to _$2 billion_ in the first half of 2025.

I believe they include the costs of free ChatGPT user's in that $2B. Worth it considering the conversion rate they are getting (5-6% in Oct 2024[1]).

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/openai-cfo-p...

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

#512

Post by antupis »

IshKebab wrote: post #475
yoyohello13 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or if you like learning new stuff. Personally that has been best part of being programmer.

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

#513

Post by [deleted] »

koolba wrote: post #482
enraged_camel wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

What is SOTA?

[deleted]

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

#514

Post by nl »

godelski wrote: post #501
mkozlows wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the models keep getting better! What you could do with GPT-4 was more impressive than what you could do with GPT 3.5. What you could do with Sonnet 3.5 was more impressive yet, and Sonnet 4, and Sonnet 4.5. Some of these improvements have been minor, some of them have been big enough to feel like step changes. Sonnet 3.7 + Claude Code (they came out at the same time) was a big step change; Opus 4.5 simil…

Models keep getting better but the argument I'm critiquing stays the same. So does the comment I critiqued in the sibling comment to yours. I don't know why it's so hard to believe we just haven't tried. I have a Claude subscription. I'm an ML researcher myself. Trust me, I do try. But that last part also makes me keenly aware of their limitations and failures. Frankly I don't trust experts who aren't critiquing thei…

I don't understand what your argument is.

It seems to be "people keep saying the models are good"?

That's true. They are.

And the reason people keep saying it is because the frontier of what they do keeps getting pushed back.

Actual, working, useful code completion in the GPT 4 days? Amazing! It could automatically write entire functions for me!

The ability to write whole classes and utility programs in the Claude 3.5 days? Amazing! This is like having a junior programmer!

And now, with Opus 4.5 or Codex Max or Gemini 3 Pro we can write substantial programs one-shot from a single prompt and they work. Amazing!

But now we are beginning to see that programming in 6 months time might look very different to now because these AI system code very differently to us. That's exactly the point.

So what is it you are arguing against?

I think you said you didn't like that people are saying the same thing, but in this post it seems more complicated?

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

#515

Post by [deleted] »

superze wrote: post #40

As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails. I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significan…

[deleted]

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

#516

Post by nl »

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…

> meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agreed upon task prior? Is this how you operate?

This doesn't mean this at all

In an AI heavy project it's not unusual to have many speculative refactors kicked off and then you come back to see what it is like.

Wonder you can do a Rust SIMD optimized version of that Numpy code you have? Try it! You don't even need to waste review time on it because you have heavy test coverage and can see if it is worth looking at.

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

#517

Post by neoromantique »

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…

When I need 1% of library's functionality, I can use AI to generate me a good enough replacement that does not require shipping any vendor code.

Will it be potentially more fragile and less featured? Sure, but it also will not bring in a thousand packages of dependencies.

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

#518

Post by krior »

nowittyusername wrote: post #268
superze wrote: post #40

As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails. I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significan…

Most people have not fully grasped how LLM's work and how to properly utilize agentic coding solutions. That is the reason for issues when it comes to vibe coders having low quality code. But that is not the limitation of technology but the user (at this stage). Basically think of it this way everyone is the grandma that has been handed a palm pilot to use to get things done. Grandma needs an iPhone not a palm pilot…

All of the applications you mention could be scoped as beginner projects. I don't think they represent good proofs of capability.

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

#519

Post by nl »

nkrisc wrote: post #317
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…

If LLMs are that capable, then why are AI companies selling access to them instead of using them to conquer markets?

Because the LLMs have only got this good 3 months ago, and market dynamics mean they can't hold them in house without their competitors getting ahead.

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

#520

Post by aebtebeten »

gsf_emergency_6 wrote: post #326
PaulHoule wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

the french on the good hunter^W vibe coder vs the bad vibe coder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuGcoOJKXT8

given that the 3 hares seem to currently lack a signification, I'd be up for squatting? Or would Paul prefer 3 fennecs? Should anyone wish to oppose us, as Bigwig said: "silflay hraka, u embleer rah"

a slightly more pragmatic story for shunya as better mousetrap: just as we now routinely have our calculations done for us in binary, but record results in decimal (in PDF invoices, say), ancient romans (among other cultures) would have someone do their calculations on a counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_board board, but recorded (only the non-zero) results in roman numerals.

(these days we can spot the algebraists via a sibboleth: they start their papers and books with section/chapter 0)

> « Les hommes sont comme les chiffres : ils n'acquièrent de valeur que par leur position. » —NB

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