451–460 of 630 posts
Over 20 years professional experience here. LLM tools feel great. A single person can now accomplish what used to require many teams.
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> Why do we code with React? ...is a loaded question, with a complex and nuanced answer. Especially when you continue: > it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax All right; then why do we code in React when a smaller alternative, such as Preact, exists, which solves the same problem, but for a much lower page-weight tax? Why do we code in React when a mechanism to synchronize data with tiny UI fragments…
Yeah, I share all of those questions. My cynical answer is that most web developers who learned their craftsin the last decade learned frontend React-first, and a lot of them genuinely don't have experience working without it. Which means hiring for a React team is easier. Which means learning React makes you more employable.
Let me help you with a context where LLMs actually shine and is a blessing. I think it is also same with Karpathy who comes from research.
In any research, replicating paper is wildy difficult task. It takes 6-24 months of dedicated work across an entire team to replicate a good research paper.
Now, there is a reason why we want to do it. Sometimes the solution actually lies in the research. Most of research is experimental and garbage code anyway.
For each of us working in research, LLM is blessing because of rapid prototyping it provides.
Then there are research engineers whose role is to apply research to production code. We as research engineers really don't care about the popular library. As long as something does the job, we will just roll with it.
The reason is simple because there is nothing out there that solved the problem.
As we move further from research, the tools we build will find all sort of issues and we improve on them.
Idk about what people think about webdev, but this has been my perspective in SWE in general.
Most of the webdevs here who are coping with the fact that their react skill matters are quite delusional because they have never traversed the stack down to foundation. It doesn't matter how you render the document as long as you render it.
Every abstraction originates from research and some small proof of concept. You might reinvent abstraction, but when the cost of reinventing it is essentially zero then you are stilfing your own learning because you are choosing to exploit vs choosing to explore.
There is a balance and good engineers know it. Perhaps all of the people who ganged up on you never approached their work this way.
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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?
Wow - can we coin "Slopbrain" for people who are so far gone into AI eventualism that they can no longer function? Liked "cooked" but "slopped" or something. Good grief lol. Talk about getting lost in the sauce...
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.
Recently I needed to summarize about a thousand lengthy documents, and then translate those summaries into Mandarin. I spent about a minute composing the prompt for this task, and then went for a cup of coffee. When I got back the task was done. I spot-checked the summaries and they were excellent. I thought this was amazing and magical at the time. Am I wrong? Or is it simply the AI making me think this result was a…
You just spot checked it, so how can you be sure how accurate it is. Was it 80% accurate? 90%? 99%? And how does the domain influence the accuracy requirements?
Claude Code didn’t make me faster. It changed the calendar. What used to take me months now takes weeks. Work didn't vanished, the friction did. Two years ago I was a human USB cable: copy, paste, pray. IDE chat window, piece by piece. Now the loop is tighter. The distance is shorter. There’s still hand-holding. Still judgment. Still cleanup. But the shift is real. We’ve come a long way. And we’re not done.
Can't even write a comment without an LLM...
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My habits have changed quite a bit with Opus 4.5 in the past month. I need to write about it..
What's concerning to many of us is that you've (and others) have said this same thing s/Opus 4.5/some other model/ That feels more like chasing than a clear line of improvement. It's interrupted very different from something like "my habits have changed quite a bit since reading The Art of Computer Programming". They're categorically different.
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 similarly feels like a big step change.
(If you don't trust vibes, METR's task completion benchmark shows huge improvements, too.)
If you're sincerely trying these models out with the intention of seeing if you can make them work for you, and doing all the things you should do in those cases, then even if you're getting negative results somehow, you need to keep trying, because there will come a point where the negative turns positive for you.
If you're someone who's been using them productively for a while now, you need to keep changing how you use them, because what used to work is no longer optimal.
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As it should, normally, because "we'll rewrite it in React later" used to represent weeks if not months of massively disruptive work. I've seen migration projects like that push on for more than a year! 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 mo…
Let's say I'm mildly convinced by your argument. I've read your blog post that was popular on HN a week or so ago and I've made similar little toy programs with AI that scratch a particular niche. Do you care to make any concrete predictions on when most developers will embrace this new normal as part of their day to day routine? One year? Five? And how much of this is just another iteration in the wheel of recarnati…
At some companies, most developers already are using it in their day to day. IME, the more senior the developer is, the more likely they are to be heavily using LLMs to write all/most of their code these days. Talking to friends and former coworkers at startups and Big Tech (and my own coworkers, and of course my own experience), this isn't a "someday" thing.
People who work at more conservative companies, the kind that don't already have enterprise Cursor/Anthropic/OpenAI agreements, and are maybe still cautiously evaluating Copilot... maybe not so much.
Claude Code didn’t make me faster. It changed the calendar. What used to take me months now takes weeks. Work didn't vanished, the friction did. Two years ago I was a human USB cable: copy, paste, pray. IDE chat window, piece by piece. Now the loop is tighter. The distance is shorter. There’s still hand-holding. Still judgment. Still cleanup. But the shift is real. We’ve come a long way. And we’re not done.
Can't even write a comment without an LLM...
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.