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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”

#281

Post by pca006132 »

cloudflare728 wrote: post #64
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…

Sometimes I have a similar file or related files. I copy their names and say use them as reference. Code quality improves by 10 times if you do so. Even providing a a example from framework's getting started works great too for new project. Yeah the pain of cleaning up small mess is great too. I had some tests failing and type failing issues, I thought I will fix it later by only using AI prompt. As the size was grow…

Question: How many LoC do you let the AI write for each iteration? And do you review that? It sounds like you are letting it run off leash.

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

#282

Post by throwatdem12311 »

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…

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.

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

#283

Post by strange_quark »

saulpw wrote: post #251
baq wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing stopping you from hand sculpting software like we did in the before times. Mass production however won’t stop, it’s barely started literally a couple months ago and it’s the slowest and worst it’ll ever be.

I keep hearing "it's the slowest and worst it'll ever be" as though software ability and performance only ever increase and yet mass produced software is slower and enshittier than it was 10-15 years ago and we're all complaining about it. And you can't say "but it does so much more" because I never asked for 90% of the "more" and just want to turn most of it off.

I’m also not convinced that any of these models are going to stick around at the same level once the financial house of cards they’re built on comes tumbling down. I wonder what the true cost of running something like Claude opus is, it’s probably unjustifiably expensive. If that happens, I don’t think this stuff is going to completely disappear but at some point companies are going to have to decide which parts are valuable and jettison the rest.

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

#284

Post by BearOso »

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.

This guy is one of the top names in AI. This is pure propaganda written to instill "fear of missing out" and encouraging people to buy into his platform, lest they become "obsolete."

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

#285

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

johnfn wrote: post #242
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't addressing my comment (which is obviously an overreaction to the tweet), he's asking you why we should appeal to authority rather than evaluate whether Karpathy is completely overreacting and in way too deep.

The intent of my comment was to state that you should write something more substantive than dismissing Karpathy as “slopbrain”. I wasn’t appealing to authority by saying that he was correct — just that he deserves more than name calling in a response.

Evidently by "LLM/AI psychosis" coming into the mainstream zeitgeist, "slopbrain" isn't too far off.

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

#286

Post by pca006132 »

neoromantique wrote: post #196
roadside_picnic wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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've had plenty of junior devs justify massive code bases of random scripts and 100+ line functions with the same logic. There's a reason senior devs almost always push back on this when it's encountered. Everything hinges on that "if". But you're baking a tautolog…

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 time until something breaks.

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

#287

Post by akoboldfrying »

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…

> and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly

Are you able to efficiently verify that the test suite is testing what it should be testing? (I would not count "manually reviewing all the test code" as efficient if you have a similar amount of test code to actual code.)

Sometimes a change to the code under test means that a (perhaps unavoidably brittle) test needs to be changed. In this case, the LLM should change the test to match the behaviour of the code under test. Other times, a change to the code under test represents a bug that a failing test should catch -- in this case, the LLM should fix the code under test, and leave the test unchanged. How do you have confidence that the LLM chooses the right path in each case?

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

#288

Post by ewoodrich »

globnomulous wrote: post #213
flumpcakes wrote: post #130

> 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…

> This sounds unbearable. I can't see the original post because my browser settings break Twitter (I also haven't liked much of Karpathy's output), but I agree. I call this style of software development 'meeting-based programming,' because that seems to be the mental model that the designers of the tools are pursuing. This probably explains, in part, why c-suite/MBA types are so excited about the tools: meetings are…

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2004607146781278521

(FYI: you can easily bypass the awful logged out view by replacing x.com with xcancel.com, I use a URL Autoredirector rule to do it automatically in Chromium browsers)

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

#289

Post by simonw »

oulipo2 wrote: post #259
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…

That's a fundamental misunderstanding The role of abstractions *IS* to prevent (eg "compress") the need for a test suite, because you have an easy model to understand and reason about

One of my personal rules for automated test suites is that my tests should fail if one of the libraries I'm using changes in a way that breaks my features.

Makes upgrading dependencies so much less painful!

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

#290

Post by PaulHoule »

bspinner wrote: post #232
baq wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "LLM as abstraction" might be a possible future, but it assumes LLMs are significantly more capable than a junior dev at managing a growing mess of complex code. Ignoring for a second they actually already are indeed, it doesn’t matter because the cost of rewriting the mess drops by an order of magnitude with each frontier model release. You won’t need good code because you’ll be throwing everything away all the ti…

I've yet to understand this argument. If you replace a brown turd with a yellowish turd, it'll still be a turd.

In everyday life I am a plodding and practical programmer who has learned the hard way that any working code base has numerous “fences” in the Chesterton sense.

I think, though, that for small systems and small parts of systems LLMs do move the repair-replace line in the replace direction, especially if the tests are good.

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