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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”

#461

Post by robotresearcher »

ilaksh wrote: post #416
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…

You didn't really read what he wrote or think about it and just took it as an opportunity to dismiss him as old. He was just being humble. It's relatively new to everyone. At least you are honest about your ageism. I am sure Karparthy can and does everage AI as well or better than you. Probably I do also and I am 48.

I’m older than both of you.

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

#462

Post by qingcharles »

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…

LLMs also have encyclopedic knowledge. Several times LLMs have found some huge block of code I wrote and reduced it down to a few lines. The other day they removed several thousand lines of brittle code I wrote previously for some API calls with a well-tested package I didn't know about. Literally thousands down to dozens.

My code is constantly shrinking, becoming better quality, more performant, more best-practice on a daily basis. And I'm learning like crazy. I'm constantly looking up changes it recommends to see why and what the reasons are behind them.

It can be a big damned dummy too, though. Just today it was proposing a massive server-side script to workaround an issue with my app I was deploying, when the actual solution was to just make a simple one-line change to the app. ("You're absolutely right!")

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

#463

Post by ex-aws-dude »

budududuroiu wrote: post #430

Idk why people take everything that Karpathy says as canon. I find his takes post inventing the "vibe coding" term deeply unserious and vapid

Yeah I don’t get it, there are certain people where even just their tweets are front page headlines on HN

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

#464

Post by qingcharles »

wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141
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…

> ... 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.

Practically every post on HN that mentions AI now ends up with a thread that is "I get 100X speed-up using LLMs" vs. "It made me slower and I've never met a single person in real life who has worked faster with AI."

I'm a half-decent developer with 40 years experience. AI regularly gives me somewhere in the range of 10-100X speed-up of development. I don't benefit from a meme, I do benefit from better code delivered faster.

Sometimes AI is a piece of crap and I work at 0.5X for an hour flogging a dead horse. But those are rarer these days.

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

#465

Post by MarcelOlsz »

weregiraffe wrote: post #453
gsf_emergency_6 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you grok, or having a stroke?

I understood perfectly what he's saying, but then again schizo is a language I speak fluently. Are you having a stroke?

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

#467

Post by qingcharles »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #229
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'm not viewing AI tooling as an extinction of the art of programming, only illuminating how telling an AI how to create programs isn't in the same universe as programming, where the technical skill to do such a thing is on par with punching in how long my microwave should nuke my popcorn.

This isn't my experience. It's more like discussing with another skilled developer on my team how we should code the solution, what APIs we should use, what techniques, what algorithms. Firing ideas back and forth until we settle on a reasonable plan of attack. That plan usually consists of a mix of high level ideas and chunks of example code.

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

#468

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#469

Post by qingcharles »

strange_quark wrote: post #283
saulpw wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It definitely feels like we're living in the golden time when all the LLMs are getting massively subsidized. You could just tab between all the free accounts all day right now and still get some amazing code results without paying a dime.

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

#470

Post by qingcharles »

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.

I used to pay a fortune for a full Visual Studio + full MSDN experience every year until I eventually earned a free ride.

Wild how much you can get for free now. Amazing free IDEs. Every LLM offers excellent free plans if you are on a zero budget.

$10/mo GitHub Copilot is an absurd deal that has to be a loss in terms of pure compute cost.

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