Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by simonw » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #568

simonw wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And no, the models aren't better today" Can you expand on that? It doesn't match my experience at all.

It’s a vague statement that I obviously cannot defend in all interpretations, but what I mean is: the performance of models at making non-trivial applications end-to-end, today, is not practically better than it was a few years ago. They’re (probably) better at making toys or one-shotting simple stuff, and they can definitely (sometimes) crank out shitty code for bigger apps that “works”, but they’re just as terrible…

Have you spent much time with Codex 5.1 or 5.2 in OpenAI Codex or a Claude Opus 4".5 in Claude code over the last ~6 weeks?

I think they represent a meaningful step change in what models can build. For me they are the moment we went from building relatively trivial things unassisted to building quite large and complex system that take multiple hours, often still triggered by a single prompt.

Some personal examples from the past few weeks.

- A spec-compliant HTML5 parsing library by Codex 5.2: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

- A CLI-based transcript export and publishing tool by Opus 4.5: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/25/claude-code-transcript...

- A full JavaScript interpreter in dependency/free Python (!) https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript - and here's that transcript published using the above-mentioned tool: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/claude-code-mic...

- A WebAssembly runtime in Python which I haven't yet published

The above projects all took multiple prompts, but were still mostly built by prompting Claude Code for web on my iPhone in between Christmas family things.

I have a single-prompt one:

- A Datasette plugin that integrates Cloudflare's CAPTCHA system: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-turnstile - transcript: https://gistpreview.github.io/?2d9190335938762f170b0c0eb6060...

I'm not confident any of these projects would have worked with the coding agents and models we had had four months ago. There is no chance they would've worked with the January 2025 available models.

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

#582

Post by Izkata » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 8:09 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #577

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To be fair I did have just a touch of thought disorder which led me to write "vive" instead of "vibe" and I did correct it when it was pointed out without explaining it which made that comment seem even weirder than it originally was.

I actually read their comment as "vibe vibe live" which combined with the unknown terms in the next line (a reference to Dune combined with something else, I guess?) made GGP's question fit quite well.

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

#583

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 8:39 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #524

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #348

He should join the Ardour project. Or go to work for Ableton or Bitwig or Presonus or Digidesign or MOTU or any other DAW manufacturer. Or any video or image editing application. Or get involved with more or less any complex, "creative" native desktop application. All of the stuff he feels he is falling behind on? Almost completely irrelevant in our domain.

Not for long.

I'll bet the next 8 years of my career on it.

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

#584

Post by constantcrying » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

This argument only makes any sense at all because the demand for software developers continually grew.

As long as more software developers are needed your logic obviously holds, it is irrelevant whether you are a master. There are enough jobs for "good enough". But what if "good enough" is no longer a viable economic niche? Since that niche is now entirely occupied by LLMs.

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

#585

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #552

jacquesm wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

First, I’m highly skeptical of that, especially over the course of the next decade. Second, do you actually want to do that work? I don’t. I spent years working as a freelancer and I cleaned up a lot of shitty code from other freelancers. Not really what I want to spend my 50s doing.

Depends on what it pays. Follow the screaming.

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

#586

Post by tired_and_awake » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

Early adopters will early adopt. They will toil,feedback, improve, repeat. Tools will over optimize then dramatically shift based on learnings.

This chaps will continue until something moderately productive and easily adoptable comes out. FOMO will strike all of us from time to time. Some of us will even try out the latest and greatest and see if it sticks.

Some companies will mandate arbitrary code generation standards because "it's the basis of their success", it will polarize their talent pool. Later, it will be impossible to determine if they were (not) successful "inspite of" or "because of" such wild decisions.

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

#587

Post by hruhbuikr » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

yoyohello13 wrote: post #157

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…

Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later. Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.

Yeah Karpathy is engaged here in more hype creation. Software engineers pretending they just smashed some particles together and there is a whole lot of new data to math out.

It's high dose copium. Please keep the good times rolling! Buy my books! Sub to my stack!

Meanwhile, with local models, local RAG, and shell scripts, I am wandering 3D immersive worlds via a GPU accelerated presentation layer I vibe coded with a single 24GB GPU. Natural language driven Unreal engines are viable outputs today given local only code gen.

Karpathy and the SV VC world thought this would be the next big thing to pump for a decade plus; like web pages and SaaS. But the world is smarter, more adept at catching up that it is just state management in a typical machine. The semantics are well known and do not need re-invention.

The hilarity at an entire industry unintentionally training their replacements.

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

#588

Post by zmmmmm » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 1:52 AM UTC

kubb wrote: post #495

zmmmmm wrote: post #365

Definitely don't hang out on Hacker News then. It's absolutely the worst place for imposter syndrome or people with any kind of skill inferiority anxiety or confidence issue. Half the reason I read HN is because the anxiety it induces is moderately constructive in motivating me to ensure I keep learning and stay up to date. But I definitely come away every day with a distinct impression I'm below baseline in skill an…

Really? It’s the opposite for me. The number of people being confident about things they have no clue about just makes me more arrogant.

I guess I get both effects. Every now and then there is a post about something I'm actually expert in and the standard of the comments sometimes shocks me. It's hard to connect the two experiences.

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

#589

Post by yeasku » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 1:54 AM UTC

BhavdeepSethi wrote: post #307

Most of the folks that are talking about this are the ones who work independently and work on greenfield projects (especially tooling related). The cost of making a mistake there is so low. I've used it similarly and it's absolutely amazing. Though I still use a mix of agents and code myself in my regular 9-5 job. I've yet to see examples of folks using this in a team of 4+ folks working together in a production env…

I have seen it. And it is a mess.

Is not only that the.code quality is bad, to be fair in most projects is.

The biggest problem is every single component of the stack uses different conventions and names for everything.

When nobody looks at the code naming things becomes harder until everything is

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

#590

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 2:05 AM UTC

latexr wrote: post #540

kakapo5672 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Atom bombs also fit: They are basically useless

Let's ask your friendly local Ukrainian refugee about that.

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

So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the mentally disturbed. I see.