Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” • Hacker News Board

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

#541

Post by fweimer » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 12:39 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #100

rambojohnson wrote: post #58

What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…

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 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.

I'm worried that there is a tendency in LLM-generated code to avoid even local abstractions, such as putting common code into separate (local functions), and even use records/structures. You end up with code that is best maintained with an LLM, which is good for the LLM provider and their future revenue. But we humans as reviewers and ultimate long-term maintainers benefit from those minor abstractions.

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

#542

Post by karmakurtisaani » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 12:42 PM UTC

pzo wrote: post #510

jacquesm wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had few projects like that this year and I can say it how messy and demotivating its to cleaning up mess. And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt. I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at leas…

Would you be able to share any more details on the clean up projects you had to do? Like, wasn't front or back end, which tech stack, where were the LLM code issues etc.

I'm just very curious where we are at the moment with in this profession.

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

#543

Post by karmakurtisaani » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 12:49 PM UTC

noosphr wrote: post #508

symbogra wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to shell out the $200 my friend.

You need a lot more money than $200 if your code base is more than 100,000 lines. If only more people understood what quadratic attention means in the real world.

Are you saying the LLM costs grow quadratically in the size of the code base? The prompts are already highly subsidized, can't wait to see what happens when they charge the actual price to the consumer.

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

#544

Post by causal » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

reidrac wrote: post #486

causal wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything I'd expect all these tools to be easier for new engineers to adopt, unburdened by how things were before.

> unburdened by how things were before. What burden are you talking about? Using LLMs isn't that hard, we have done harder things before. Sure, there will be people that refuses to "let go" and want to keep doing things the way the like them, but hey! I've been productive with vim (now neovim) for 25 years and I work with engineers that haven't mastered their IDEs at the same level. Not even close! Sure, they have ha…

Not sure how to address this without just restating TFA. Not all change builds on existing knowledge, and sometimes it is so rapid that keeping up is difficult.

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

#545

Post by zarzavat » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:22 PM UTC

flumpcakes wrote: post #529

zarzavat wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Sure. I needed to draw some parametric and smooth Bézier curves. LLMs are beasts at figuring out the appropriate equations. It would have taken me forever to work out where all the control points should go.

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

#546

Post by simonw » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

fweimer wrote: post #541

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 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. I'm worried that there is a tendency in LLM-generated code to avoid even local abstractions, such as putting common code into separate (local functions), and even use records/structures. You end up with code that is best maintained with an LLM, which is good for th…

Yeah, I find myself needing to watch out for that. I'll frequently say "refactor that to reduce duplicated code" - which is generally very safe once the LLM has added test coverage for the new feature.

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

#547

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #543

noosphr wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a lot more money than $200 if your code base is more than 100,000 lines. If only more people understood what quadratic attention means in the real world.

Are you saying the LLM costs grow quadratically in the size of the code base? The prompts are already highly subsidized, can't wait to see what happens when they charge the actual price to the consumer.

[deleted]

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

#548

Post by nowittyusername » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

krior wrote: post #518

nowittyusername wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well why don't you look at it for yourself and tell me if this looks like a beginner project https://youtu.be/EyE5BrUut2o

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

#549

Post by nowittyusername » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

mirsadm wrote: post #497

nowittyusername wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you don't know how to code then you are not able to judge what your producing accurately.

here you go I open sourced one of the projects https://youtu.be/EyE5BrUut2o

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

#550

Post by timr » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #514

godelski wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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!

People have been doing this parlor trick with various "substantial" programs [1] since GPT 3. And no, the models aren't better today, unless you're talking about being better at the same kinds of programs.

[1] If I have to see one more half-baked demo of a running game or a flight sim...