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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”

#531

Post by sod22 »

pertymcpert wrote: post #424
sod22 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im waiting for people to realise that software products are much more than just lines of code. Getting sick and tired of people talk about their productivity gains when not much is actually happening out there in terms of real value creation.

Just because you don't see it or refuse to believe people doesn't make you right and them liars. Maybe you're just wrong.

Or maybe I’m just right and you’re just slow at seeing what other people can see.

I’m not a SWE either fyi. Therefore I have no vested interest.

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

#532

Post by flumpcakes »

qingcharles wrote: post #464
wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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…

I've posted this on another comment verbatim that was similar to yours, so apologies for the copy and paste:

Can you share what exactly this was (that got you the 10-100x speedup)? 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 think the thing to really sell it for me would be an 8 hour long video of an extremely proficient programmer using AI to build something that would have taken them a very long time if they were unassisted.

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

#533

Post by atonse »

zerr wrote: post #489
brandonmenc wrote: post #98

I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers. Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks. Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. Th…

And here I am partying (coding) like it's 90s (C++ desktop apps) and web never happened... :)

You’re the real unicorn!

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

#534

Post by atonse »

jacquesm wrote: post #523
varjag wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I greatly respect your opinions here but I really doubt that would ever happen.

It's already happening. My buddies are in the 'late bloom' phase of their careers and they are doing quite well as of late. AI supported coding is like four wheel drive: it will get you stuck but in harder places. The people that use these tools to reach above the level of their actual understanding are creating some very expensive problems. If you're an expert level coder and you use AI to speed up the drudgework yo…

But wouldn’t the models get better at fixing complicated code eventually?

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

#535

Post by sod22 »

jacquesm wrote: post #523
varjag wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I greatly respect your opinions here but I really doubt that would ever happen.

It's already happening. My buddies are in the 'late bloom' phase of their careers and they are doing quite well as of late. AI supported coding is like four wheel drive: it will get you stuck but in harder places. The people that use these tools to reach above the level of their actual understanding are creating some very expensive problems. If you're an expert level coder and you use AI to speed up the drudgework yo…

One thing I’ve noticed is that some folks are over-confident about the benefits of LLM’s and seemingly gloss over the implicit costs.

And for good reason - the ill disciplined human body optimises for short term benefits. The disciplined body recognises the flaw in this and thinks much broader.

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

#536

Post by Aozora7 »

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.

I'm not paying for an AI subscription to do my job in the same way I don't pay for the IDE I use. My employer does.

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

#537

Post by briandw »

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…

I've come to a similar conclusion. One example is how much easier it is to put an interface on top of sqlite. I've been burned badly with the hidden details of ORM s. ORMs are the sirens call of getting rid of all that boiler plate code when encoding and decoding objects into a db. However this abstraction breaks in many hidden ways. Lazy loading details, in-memory state vs db mismatch, cascading details, etc all have unexpected problems that can be hard to predict. Using an LLM to do the grunt work lets you easily see and reason about all the details. You don't have to guess about what's happening and you can make your own choices.

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

#538

Post by 59nadir »

viccis wrote: post #487
hamstergene wrote: post #376

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.

Maybe that's true, but I will say that one of the reasons I recommend his Python ML videos to people is not just the ML content but also his Python is good and idiomatic. So I would not agree; I think his programming is a well practiced skill. FWIW though I think his predicted worldview will render it very difficult to acquire this skill, as people grow reliant on gen AI for programming rudiments.

As far as "programming skill" goes, writing "good and idiomatic" Python is pretty bottom of the barrel. I don't think the GP is all that off, most people who are famous for some programming-adjacent skill (or even programming) aren't good at programming.

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

#539

Post by kloop »

atonse wrote: post #534
jacquesm wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already happening. My buddies are in the 'late bloom' phase of their careers and they are doing quite well as of late. AI supported coding is like four wheel drive: it will get you stuck but in harder places. The people that use these tools to reach above the level of their actual understanding are creating some very expensive problems. If you're an expert level coder and you use AI to speed up the drudgework yo…

But wouldn’t the models get better at fixing complicated code eventually?

We don't know. We seem to be hitting diminishing returns, but we don't exactly know where it will stop

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

#540

Post by latexr »

kakapo5672 wrote: post #247
reconnecting wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is only getting better at consuming energy and wasting people's time communicating with this T9. However, if talented engineers continue to use it, it might eventually provide more accurate replies as a result. Answering your question, no matter how much I personally degrade or improve, I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days…

I see this logical pairing a lot. 1) AI is basically useless, a mere semi-random word generator. 2) And it is so powerful that it is going to hurt (or even destroy) humanity. This is this is called "having your cake, and letting it eat you too".

There’s nothing incongruent about that pairing (though I also think you’re not being entirely fair in describing what your parent comment said). Atom bombs also fit: They are basically useless and they are so powerful that they can destroy humanity.

With LLMs, the destruction is less immediate and overt, but chatbots do provable harm to people, and can be manipulated to warp our sense of reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

People are having romantic relationships with their chatbots and committing suicide because of them. That is harm.

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