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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”

#521

Post by encyclopedism »

davesque wrote: post #230

Honestly surprised at this take by him. For one, feels like exaggeration. For two, are these tools really that hard to use?

> are these tools really that hard to use?

Exactly! If people have 'never felt this far behind' and the LLM's are that good. Ask the LLM to teach you.

Like so many articles on 'prompt engineers' this (never felt this behind) take too is laughable. Programmers having learnt how to program (writing algorithms, understanding data structures, reading source code and API docs) are now completely incapable of using a text box to input prompts? Nor can they learn how to quickly enough! And it's somehow more difficult than what they have routinely been doing? LOL

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

#523

Post by jacquesm »

varjag wrote: post #507
jacquesm wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I greatly respect your opinions here but I really doubt that would ever happen.

It's already happening. My buddies are in the 'late bloom' phase of their careers and they are doing quite well as of late.

AI supported coding is like four wheel drive: it will get you stuck but in harder places. The people that use these tools to reach above the level of their actual understanding are creating some very expensive problems. If you're an expert level coder and you use AI to speed up the drudgework you can get good mileage out of them, but if you're a junior pretending to be a senior you're about to cost your employer a lot of $ hiring an actual senior.

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

#524

Post by inimino »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #348

He should join the Ardour project. Or go to work for Ableton or Bitwig or Presonus or Digidesign or MOTU or any other DAW manufacturer. Or any video or image editing application. Or get involved with more or less any complex, "creative" native desktop application. All of the stuff he feels he is falling behind on? Almost completely irrelevant in our domain.

Not for long.

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

#525

Post by jacquesm »

kashyapc wrote: post #485
jacquesm wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The person you're quoting has a point. Everyone is losing their minds about this. Not everyone needs to be on top of AI developmemts all the time. I don't mean you ignore LLMs, just don't chase every fad. The classic line (which I've quoted a few times here) by Charles Mackay from 1841 comes to mind: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their…

Thank you for the subtitles, it's not like I didn't understand the lingo, I just couldn't make sense of the implied meaning.

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

#526

Post by latexr »

nl wrote: post #509
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.

He's a pretty decent programmer. It's interesting that some months ago when his nanochat project came out the HN Anti-AI crowd celebrated him saying "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution" But now it is working for him he's suddenly not an expert... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

What you’re calling the “crowd” was not the same people. Every time someone makes a claim like yours, I go and check and don’t see the same usernames in the conversation. “Different people have different opinions and different ways to express them” isn’t really an insight; it tells us nothing nor does it make anyone worthy of criticism.

You can’t, in an honest argument, lump different strangers into a group you invented to accuse them of duplicity or hypocrisy.

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

#527

Post by anthk »

BonoboIO wrote: post #415
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…

This is pretty much the thinking across all German-speaking countries. It especially applies to anything related to energy (combustion engines, coal, gas, oil) and IT. Case in point: fax machines are still an important part of business communication in Germany, and many IT projects are genuinely amateurish garbage — because the underlying mindset is "everything should stay exactly as it is." This is particularly visi…

Spain the same with Java, and that language it's full of bureaucratic bullshit to make mid managers feel better. Ditto with Power Points and the like. They need to dissapear for the good.

Something lke the PDF's produced from sent(1) under Unix or MagicPont presentations are many times less fancier and they allow to produce effective no-bullshit ACTUAL product based presentations. But then half of the commercials and managers would actually useless (as they are) and they would be kicked out fast. And don't let me start on nepotism...

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

#528

Post by iLoveOncall »

nl wrote: post #509
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.

He's a pretty decent programmer. It's interesting that some months ago when his nanochat project came out the HN Anti-AI crowd celebrated him saying "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution" But now it is working for him he's suddenly not an expert... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

> But now it is working for him he's suddenly not an expert...

Or maybe he didn't lie then but is lying now?

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

#529

Post by flumpcakes »

zarzavat wrote: post #447
wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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 fo…

> 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.

Can you share what exactly this was? Perhaps I don't do anything exciting or challenging, but personally this hasn't happened to me so I find it hard to imagine what this could be.

Instead of AI companies talking about their products, I think the thing to really sell it for me would be an 8 hour long video of an extremely proficient programmer using AI to build something that would have taken them a very long time if they were unassisted.

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

#530

Post by iLoveOncall »

johnfn wrote: post #151
wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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.

I am a professional engineer with around 10 years of experience and I use AI to work about 5x faster on a site I personally maintain (~100 DAU, so not huge, but also not nothing). I don’t work in AI so I get no financial benefit by “reinforcing this meme”.

> either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme

Then figure out which one of the two you are. Years of experience have never equated competence.

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