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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”

#291

Post by johnfn »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #285
johnfn wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now you're just saying "AI psychosis exists" (true) and then saying Karpathy has it. That is, again, essentially name calling, like saying someone is insane rather than addressing their points.

If you really think Karpathy is psychotic you should explain why, but I don't think anything in the Tweet suggests that. My read of his tweet is that there is a lot of churn and new concepts in the software engineering industry, and that doesn't seem like a very psychotic thing to say.

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

#292

Post by heliumtera »

globular-toast wrote: post #85

I don't usually post something like this, but this is so fucking stupid. I'm prepared to stand by that. Let's see in a few years if I'm right. "AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent. That's it. It's like the ultimate "algorithm" or addiction machine. It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical.

Congratulations on that one!

Now that you have unlocked this secret, you're cursed forever. They look at the machine and say: hey, look, the machine is just like me! You're left confused for the best part of 3 years and then you start realizing it was true all along...they are..very much similar to the machine. For a moment we were not surprised by how capable the machine was at reasoning. And then it dawned on us, the machine had human level intelligence and cognition from the beginning, just from a slightly different perspective.

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

#293

Post by brians »

simonw wrote: post #208
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 not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction. I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed. It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment…

A major difference is when we have to read and understand it because of a bug. Perhaps the LLM can help us find it! But abstraction provides a mental scaffold

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

#294

Post by aeonik »

2sk21 wrote: post #107
xzkll wrote: post #34

Does any of you bother the fact that now you have to pay money in order to do your job? I mean AI model subscriptions. Somehow it feels wrong for me to pay for tools that are trying to replace me.

IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.

Compilers and programming languages themselves used to be hideously expensive as well.

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

#295

Post by reconnecting »

ewoodrich wrote: post #288
globnomulous wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Awesome hint!

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

#296

Post by all_factz »

simonw wrote: post #208
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 not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction. I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed. It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment…

React is hundreds of thousands of lines of code (or millions - I haven’t looked in awhile). Sure, you can start by having the LLM create a simple way to sync state across components, but in a serious project you’re going to run into edge-cases that cause the complexity of your LLM-built library to keep growing. There may come a point at which the complexity grows to such a point that the LLM itself can’t maintain the library effectively. I think the same rough argument applies to MomentJS.

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

#297

Post by exssss »

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…

Out of curiosity, what did you pivot to?

It sounds crazy to say this, but I've been thinking about this myself. Not for the immediate future (eg 2026), but somewhere later.

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

#298

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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…

> 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.

No profession collectively made such a decision. Programming was always very splitted into many, many subcultures, each with their own (mutually incompatible over the whole profession) ideas what makes a good program.

So, I guess rather some programmers inside some part of a Silicon Valley echo chamber in which you also live made such a decision.

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