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

Post by jakeydus » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #542

pzo wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had few projects like that this year and I can say it how messy and demotivating its to cleaning up mess. And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt. I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at leas…

Would you be able to share any more details on the clean up projects you had to do? Like, wasn't front or back end, which tech stack, where were the LLM code issues etc. I'm just very curious where we are at the moment with in this profession.

Post by kyyt » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #477

senordevnyc wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code.…

You'll make more money than ever cleaning up AI generated messes.

Post by johnfn » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

leshow wrote: post #404

johnfn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don’t really think it’s “simple”. The code uses React, nodejs, realtime events pushed via SSE, infra pushed via Terraform, postgres, blob store on S3, emails send with SES… sure, it’s not the next Google, but it’s a bit above, like, a personal blog. And in any case, you are moving goalposts. OP said he had never seen anyone serious claim that they got productivity gains from AI. When I claim that, you say “we…

If you want my opinion, I think LLMs can be pretty good at generating simple code for things you can find on stackoverflow and require minor adjustments. Even then, if you don't really understand the code you can have major issues. Your site is case in point of why LLMs demo well but kind of fall apart in the real world. It's pretty good at fitting lego blocks together based on a ton of work other people have put int…

Post by cheevly » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC

flumpcakes wrote: post #532

qingcharles wrote: post #464

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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 m…

Post by fallat » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

deadbabe wrote: post #361

I think this is mostly a frontend sentiment. In the backend, we're mostly just pushing data around from one place to another. Not much changes, there's only a few ways to really do that. Your data structures change, but ultimately the work is the same. You don't even really need an LLM at all, or super complex frameworks and ORMs, etc.